The Windows 10 ecosystem expands with a new device

Nov 21, 2019 12:23 GMT  ·  By

The Windows 10 ecosystem is a very vast world, and while Microsoft is fully committed to just a few form factors, partners and skilled developers out there push the company’s operating system to lots of unexplored areas.

This is the case of a project started by Twitter user @imbushuo, who managed to bring Windows 10 to a calculator.

While it might sound awkward at first, it’s worth mentioning this isn’t really the most basic calculator, but a HP Prime Graphing Calculator that comes with a small display and is powered by a 396 MHz processor paired with 256 MB RAM.

Of course, this isn’t full Windows 10, but Windows 10 IoT, which is designed from the very beginning for embedded devices and comes with a more limited feature lineup as compared to its desktop sibling.

Usable or not?

This doesn’t mean it’s not a notable achievement, especially because Windows 10 running on a calculator isn’t something that you see every day. And it’s not an easy thing to do, that’s for sure, as @imbushuo struggled to get the operating system booting on this device.

Given its hardware configuration, the experience with Windows 10 isn’t necessarily the best you’re going to get, and the developer says the operating system needs no less than 3 minutes and a half to boot completely.

It goes without saying that running Windows 10 on such a calculator is nothing more than an experiment, and you shouldn’t expect anything else from this other than getting a confirmation the whole thing is indeed possible.

At the end of the day, running Calculator on a calculator is something that sounds really cool, especially for tech-savvy users, and the project truly shows just how far you can go in the Windows world with the right skills.