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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)

#131

Post by badsectoracula »

marcodiego wrote: post #64
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…

Would you mind if I break it in parts? > Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Strong evidence it was not that good. > 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 terms of UI, yes, very clean UI by default. You can reach…

> Current tool-tips in clickable items removes the need of such feature.

The described feature isn't really about tooltips, but about showing context-specific help. Tooltips are generally a sentence whereas context help can be a paragraph or two. In addition tooltips are generally placed in toolbars or other "static looking" items whereas context help can be used with any widget on screen, including entry/edit widgets (it isn't that it is technically impossible to use tooltips there - some applications do that - but it is abusing the tooltips and can be unwieldy).

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

#132

Post by Maakuth »

telendram wrote: post #96
Maakuth wrote: post #52

This could be a nice OS for archive.org's browser embedded PC emulator environment: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox . Not so fun to download 45 megabytes of Windows installation to try out some piece of shareware :)

I think the pb is that it's so barebone that pretty much nothing works out of the box. One has to add a few more components, depending on which application needs to run (as an OS alone is, well, not an end in itself). However, that's where it stings : adding "components", yet but which ones ? in which order ? how ? Componentization was not a topic, so there's no tool, almost no doc, just tribal knowledge on the topic…

That does make sense. I suppose one could gather a record by hooking the kernel to log which files were accessed and which were not. But that would be a lot of trouble and the end result would just kill the cacheability of the base OS layer of those emulation images.

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

#133

Post by tinus_hn »

megablast wrote: post #124
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.

It’s the successor of Windows 95 which you could get on floppies.

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

#134

Post by yyyk »

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; most programs came with a built-in, GUI instruction manual. Nobody else does this! (The best help UI ever made, and Microsoft just dropped it…)

KDE has had it on some apps, it still does in System Settings, though it doesn't work anymore on most settings.

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

#135

Post by yyyk »

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.

2000 and original XP are almost identical (IIRC one is NT 5.0 and the other is NT 5.1). IMHO, The reason hackers loved 2000 and not XP is because of the toy-like XP theme - which shows hackers can be shallow too.

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

#136

Post by yyyk »

cjdell wrote: post #9

Love this. Now someone show me how to make a nano Windows 10 installation without all the telemetry BS. Essentially the kernel only with custom explorer.exe. Experimented with modding Hyper-V Server (the free one) with some success, but too many DLLs missing and multimedia functions don't work.

Tiny 10 took this to extremes - the latest version can fit on a CD-R. It probably contains less than you want, but it's an interesting exercise on how to reduce Win 10 size:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jp67cmrbKw

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

#137

Post by exikyut »

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…

It's honestly cool when "origin story" just doesn't do it justice and you have to pull out "bootstrap story" instead :)

I got into a few situations like this myself, but none exactly this crazy :)

How'd you fit 96MB RAM into a 386, btw?? My 486DX2s (2005 represent) only had room for a few MB of RAM. O.o

How'd programming GUIs go without a mouse? Typing in x/y/w/h into the properties box? I'm guessing you have a slightly higher baseline awareness of accessibility (focus order, etc) than most, huh.

Also, out of curiosity, what sort of programmable calculator was it?

Wow, programming environments have always been headscratchingly big. (For a one-pass compiler and IDE, 70MB is kind of... surely the (converted) Win95 API headers didn't require that much space...)

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

#138

Post by npteljes »

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 don't think this argument holds much substance. FOSS developers are absolutely not lost without the source - they just share the fruit of their labor under FOSS licenses. In fact there's a good chunk of work being done black-box style: WINE, many of the drivers, game modding, hell here's a random FOSS binary patcher[0]. So FOSS developers don't seem to be lost without the source.

[0] https://github.com/secretsquirrel/the-backdoor-factory

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

#139

Post by npteljes »

ohazi wrote: post #126
userbinator wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I like your argument about sustainability. With proper free software, the code itself is part of the product. When you're left to work on a binary, it's not even not guaranteed that your patch won't work with the next version or whatever - often the authors specifically make the life of the modders harder. It's part of the product that you don't get to modify it. It's signed, obfuscated, there's checks for integrity, uglified, ABI modifications for the sake of breaking compatibility. So much of the effort is just fighthing against that, and that's a directly opposing sustainability.

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

#140

Post by kimixa »

a1369209993 wrote: post #107
kimixa wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the parent is saying that the jpeg will need to be stored uncompressed in ram - likely in exactly the same format as the bmp is stored in memory - for the graphics system to actually render it out to screen. Not that any "extra" cost of a BMP would be trivial. So, after they're loaded and (possibly) scaled to fit the screen, I'd expect every background image to use exactly the same memory amount.

> So, after they're loaded and (possibly) scaled to fit the screen, I'd expect every background image to use exactly the same memory amount. Well, not centered or tiled backgrounds, which I recall Windows did support, and upscaling could be done on a per-pixel basis (although I don't know if that was supported), but yes, the image format shouldn't matter.

I don't know the implementation details - but I wouldn't be surprised if it kept a full-screen-size already-scaled/tiled/centered image somewhere in memory

Back when win95 and co were being made, decoding an image was a lot of work for the hardware, I suspect they'll try to make restoring the background (e.g. dragging a window around and changing what's occluded) to be the simplest bitblt they can.

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