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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)

#121

Post by rollcat »

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.

This is so meta! In all that time, SC (1&2) to this day continues to evolve the metagame around efficient build orders: what can I do to throw a punch at my opponent sooner than they can expect. If we could start our matches from the BIOS POST rather than the in-game 0:00, I guess you'd have a pretty strong timing push ;)

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

zandorg wrote: post #115

XP had no modern browser... Until now! http://www.mypal-browser.org 800,000 users can't be wrong (out of 240 million XP users worldwide). This project is important because Firefox stopped working on XP 4 years ago - and you can't do things like captchas without a modern browser.

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by mintplant »

zandorg wrote: post #115

XP had no modern browser... Until now! http://www.mypal-browser.org 800,000 users can't be wrong (out of 240 million XP users worldwide). This project is important because Firefox stopped working on XP 4 years ago - and you can't do things like captchas without a modern browser.

Looks like the Mypal project is currently imploding due to a license dispute:

https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal/issues/3

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

#124

Post by megablast »

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…

A CD is 650mb. You could get them a lot smaller than that. That’s bigger than the full size one f win 98.

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

#125

Post by badsectoracula »

a1369209993 wrote: post #106
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…

> Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than ( https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html ) > The Wikipedia page for C++ (214,251 bytes). $ wget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal $ wc Turbo_Pascal 668 10672 164349 Turbo_Pascal Never mind C++, rather: The Wikipedia page for Turbo Pascal (164,349 bytes).

This was written 10 years ago so it makes sense for the size to change.

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

#126

Post by ohazi »

userbinator wrote: post #113
npteljes wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you mean? Not enough hacker spirit in the FOSS world?

I meant that they seem lost without source[1], while the Windows hackers don't need source. [1] I remember someone being very surprised that I patched the binary of a FOSS application, instead of changing the source and compiling it --- the former took a few minutes, the latter would've taken far more time (to get all the dependencies, build system, etc.) and possibly introduced other unwanted changes.

I think most people just don't want to see their effort lost to time.

Patching a binary is impressive, sure, but it's the polar opposite of sustainable. You don't have a good way to document your fix, it's dependent on one exact source tree and how the compiler was feeling that morning, and even minor changes from upstream can completely change the way a binary patch would need to work.

It's great for a one-off hack, but part of the appeal of open source for many people is how easy it is for your changes to become part of the "permanent record" of that piece of software.

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

#127

Post by lostgame »

Did anyone else here ever use/would recall a Windows XP district called ‘TinyXP’, which would run under some similarly phenomenal specs?

I spent years using that; especially in VM’s!

In the early days of Intel Macs, I used TinyXP almost exclusively in Parallels. :)

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

#128

Post by badsectoracula »

lmilcin wrote: post #89
exikyut wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 als…

Smallest Delphi 2 installation is ~39MB, though that can still be cut a lot. For example the installer says it requires Borland Database Engine (~5MB) but it doesn't unless you use the database functionality. However the CD contains the uncompressed full installation files anyway so you can copy the files manually and check what it works by trial and error. You can get it around 4MB by doing so and shrink it even further by rebuilding the component palette to remove all the database stuff and deleting the database-related units (assuming you do not care about DB stuff of course).

I remember back in the day i made an "install" set of 7 floppies (more than necessary but i wanted some extra stuff) to use with my 386 (which had no working CD ROM) for when my parents used the main PC. BTW that 96MB of memory most likely made a ton of difference, mine had 4MB and was horribly slow with Delphi 2 :-P

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

#129

Post by badsectoracula »

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 liked it as a gimmick, i made it scroll assembly code in green text over a "hacker" background. Lasted for a few days only since it was stealing all the CPU time, but it was neat during that time :-P.

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

#130

Post by badsectoracula »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #54
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.

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…

> 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;

Technically this is still there, it is just that almost no applications use it. However one of the very few things Qt with its Qt Designer (which otherwise is a horrific application) does right is being able to set up context help (as they are called) tips very easily and on the spot (the original method in Win9x was way too cumbersome, though 90% of that was WinHelp itself being too cumbersome). I remember doing that for some tools in a gamedev job a few years ago and the ability to have instant description for any element on the tool dialogs was something the designers liked.

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