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Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

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Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#81

Post by exikyut »

lmilcin wrote: post #70

My first PC I ever owned was scrap gathered from my friends. My only HDD was 120MB Conner Peripherals HDD that fell on asphalt out of jacket pocket of my friend while he was riding a bike (no kidding!) and was crisscrossed with bad sectors. I put up an ambitious (back then) plan to map out all broken sectors and then try to fit Windows 95 and Delphi2 onto the rest. I remember I was left with something like 70MB of us…

This is honestly awesome.

You would've learned more about the system by accident/happenstance than most people learn in years.

You don't have the HDD anymore by any chance, do you? :) it would be cool to image it...

So basically you had 70MB total to work with, you squished Win95 into 50MB, then had 20MB for Delphi?

What were the rest of the system's specs, and what era was this in?

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#82

Post by xattt »

jncraton wrote: post #44
azalemeth wrote: post #24

In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators…

When I was in high school, I had a specialized CD like this. The computers in our labs were configured to prevent us from running arbitrary programs, but they weren't configured to prevent booting from a CD. I created a stripped down Windows 95 live CD that had the default shell replaced by StarCraft. I could sit down at a machine, insert my CD, reboot, and the machine would boot directly into SC.

Tangential, but I installed Longhorn on a high school computer without considering the implications. I saw another student casually using it a few weeks later like it was nothing special. Out of morbid curiosity, I would have loved to see the technician who came to fix it.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#83

Post by squarefoot »

xav_authentique wrote: post #51
cies wrote: post #34

> I have only tested this with Windows 98se. Win98SE the last windows i actually enjoyed using and believed it was an improvement over the its predecessor. Nowadays im afraid to run modern windows without a VM and a firewall.

No love for Windows 2000? NT kernel with the classic Windows interface. It ran pretty well on Windows 98 machines and was extremely stable.

Win2K, good memories. Used it for Delphi and some C++ Builder development between 2000 and 2001; pretty solid, probably more than XP (at least until XPSP2) but needed some more horsepower to use it properly.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#84

Post by nikodunk »

xattt wrote: post #82
jncraton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in high school, I had a specialized CD like this. The computers in our labs were configured to prevent us from running arbitrary programs, but they weren't configured to prevent booting from a CD. I created a stripped down Windows 95 live CD that had the default shell replaced by StarCraft. I could sit down at a machine, insert my CD, reboot, and the machine would boot directly into SC.

Tangential, but I installed Longhorn on a high school computer without considering the implications. I saw another student casually using it a few weeks later like it was nothing special. Out of morbid curiosity, I would have loved to see the technician who came to fix it.

Wonderful to see Longhorn mentioned. This defined my middle school tinkering days, and eventually got me into other OSes like Linux.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#85

Post by com2kid »

dleslie wrote: post #59
xav_authentique wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No love for Windows 2000? NT kernel with the classic Windows interface. It ran pretty well on Windows 98 machines and was extremely stable.

So long as you didn't play games. 2000 meant abandoning the vast majority of your PC game library, early on.

You could hack around that and get DirectX working, I was doing all my gaming on Windows 2000 back in the day.

Though I think I may have had a proper dos boot disk for some games, hard to remember, it was quite awhile back. :)

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#86

Post by _fat_santa »

azalemeth wrote: post #24

In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators…

I wonder why they would repackage a Windows ISO rather than a Linux one. My bet is the software that is in these ISO's only runs on Windows? Otherwise it would seem that a Linux distro would be the perfect candidate for something like this.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#87

Post by dleslie »

com2kid wrote: post #85
dleslie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as you didn't play games. 2000 meant abandoning the vast majority of your PC game library, early on.

You could hack around that and get DirectX working, I was doing all my gaming on Windows 2000 back in the day. Though I think I may have had a proper dos boot disk for some games, hard to remember, it was quite awhile back. :)

You would've needed a DOS boot disk, yes; while Win98SE was fairly great for playing DOS games, 2000 was most certainly not.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#88

Post by stavros »

jordemort wrote: post #55
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Yet it remains my favourite operating system of all time, because everything else (yes, even precious Debian!) is just worse . Worse UI, worse memory use, worse hackability… In Windows 98 SE, there was a button next to “minimise” that would give every widget a tooltip explaining what it did and how to use it; most…

This might be the first time I’ve seen anyone remember Active Desktop fondly. I remember it being pretty much universally hated during its heyday.

I, for one, certainly universally hated it.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#89

Post by lmilcin »

exikyut wrote: post #81
lmilcin wrote: post #70

My first PC I ever owned was scrap gathered from my friends. My only HDD was 120MB Conner Peripherals HDD that fell on asphalt out of jacket pocket of my friend while he was riding a bike (no kidding!) and was crisscrossed with bad sectors. I put up an ambitious (back then) plan to map out all broken sectors and then try to fit Windows 95 and Delphi2 onto the rest. I remember I was left with something like 70MB of us…

This is honestly awesome. You would've learned more about the system by accident/happenstance than most people learn in years. You don't have the HDD anymore by any chance, do you? :) it would be cool to image it... So basically you had 70MB total to work with, you squished Win95 into 50MB, then had 20MB for Delphi? What were the rest of the system's specs, and what era was this in?

It was circa 1998. It was 386DX, 96MB of memory, had monochromatic monitor, no enclosure (it rested on a towel) and no mouse (yes, I programmed graphical UIs without a mouse). Obviously no networking of any kind.

Yes, it had more memory than HDD!

It was my first development machine (after programmable calculator which was stolen) so I have fond memories of it.

I believe minimum Delphi 2 install was over 70MB so I also had to cut it up to fit the drive.

Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)

#90

Post by tomc1985 »

azalemeth wrote: post #24

In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators…

I made one of these for when I was a repair technician at a computer shop. They used WinPE, which is the same sort-of-Windows environment that installers run.

UBCD4Win was the toolkit I used. It had all my virus scanners, data recovery apps, pretty much everything I could ever need on there. Like a Linux live CD but with Windows. Shit was brilliant!

Windows still does WinPE, but I think that is limited to OEMs and other fancy Microsoft-licensed corpos.

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