[HN Gopher] Slimming Down Windows 3.1/3.11 (2002)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Slimming Down Windows 3.1/3.11 (2002)
        
       Author : userbinator
       Score  : 131 points
       Date   : 2024-02-24 07:04 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.geocities.ws)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.geocities.ws)
        
       | cable2600 wrote:
       | I remember using Double Space to compress a 1.44M floppy to run
       | Windows 3.1 on it. I forgot how I did it, nice to see this
       | website document it.
       | 
       | Companies still use Windows 3.X because of old software written
       | for it that they don't have the source code for it anymore.
        
         | mschuster91 wrote:
         | > Companies still use Windows 3.X because of old software
         | written for it that they don't have the source code for it
         | anymore.
         | 
         | Yup, a particularly funny case was just recently the German
         | Railways and/or their vendor Siemens...
         | 
         | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39286206
        
         | p0w3n3d wrote:
         | double space was nice unless you had anything that's been
         | already compressed. I hated when it showed me 450MB of disk
         | space (I had 160MB HDD), but then after installing Warcraft 2
         | it took 160 of my free space instead of 50MB (don't remember
         | real figures, however war2 had already compressed files and it
         | was shown in Norton Commander as "size: (let's say) 50MB,
         | occupied: 160MB"
        
           | M95D wrote:
           | Remaining disk space was _estimated_ using a compression
           | ratio of 2.0 by default, but you could change the default, at
           | least in Win9x. I don 't know why it showed you 450MB on a
           | 160MB HDD. You probably already changed it to 3.0 or higher.
           | 
           | I used a drivespace volume for a very very very long time,
           | even when I had 80 GB HDDs, because it made it SO EASY to
           | back up the entire windows installation - just copy the file.
        
             | chungy wrote:
             | DriveSpace was only ever available on FAT12 and FAT16
             | volumes. It seems like it'd be more annoying than anything
             | for drives where FAT32 would be desirable.
        
               | M95D wrote:
               | Not really. I had (and still have and use today) a 2GB
               | FAT16 partition with ~1 GB for DOS utilities, Win98 setup
               | kit from the CD and various windows programs that didn't
               | need to be installed. The remaining ~1 GB was the
               | drivespace volume with 2 GB space inside (maximum) for
               | Windows 98 and the rest of programs that needed to be
               | installed to run. It was enough space for Office 97,
               | Corel Draw 8, Adobe Acrobat 5, and many many small
               | programs. Games are in a different partition.
        
             | cesarb wrote:
             | I vaguely recall that the default was to use the current
             | average compression for the default estimation. I always
             | changed it to 1, which is much saner: instead of being
             | surprised that you didn't have enough disk space to store
             | something, you'd at most get surprised that you had more
             | space left over than you expected after storing something.
             | Even today, things like the transparent compression in
             | btrfs use 1 as the compression ratio for the free space
             | estimate (though its metadata usage can be a bit
             | unpredictable).
        
           | badgersnake wrote:
           | It got renamed to Drivespace in 6.2 didn't it? Presumably
           | because 'double' was a bit optimistic.
        
             | pjmlp wrote:
             | Because of a lawsuit,
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
             | 
             | DriverSpace was the new version after the lawsuit was
             | settled.
        
       | baal80spam wrote:
       | > I don't know if Doublespace will work on a 286 computer
       | 
       | I know for a fact that it WILL work :)
        
         | M95D wrote:
         | Badly. Because (1) CPU and (2) dblspace.bin takes ~70K of
         | conventional memory. IIRC, on a 286 it can't be loaded high, or
         | at least not with EMM386 from back then.
        
           | baal80spam wrote:
           | True, but if you just want that extra space it does its job.
           | It made my 40MB hard drive store ~70MB of data which was a
           | godsend back in the day!
        
           | fsiefken wrote:
           | Appearently QEMM QRAM can do it on 286
           | https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=71533
        
         | Sesse__ wrote:
         | I ran DriveSpace on an 8088. For several years. Was too young
         | to notice the slowness, I guess.
        
       | p0w3n3d wrote:
       | Meanwhile in 2024:                 npm i
        
         | edward28 wrote:
         | Slimming down windows 11. Step 1: you don't.
        
           | accrual wrote:
           | There is Tiny11 for those wanting to try a custom stripped
           | down version of Windows 11. Never tried it myself, though I
           | was a fan of nLite back in the day.
           | 
           | [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tiny11-23h2-windows-
           | releas...
        
             | RedShift1 wrote:
             | Tiny... The installer is 4.5 GB :')
        
       | gpvos wrote:
       | A swap file on a RAM disk seems... not useful.
        
         | M95D wrote:
         | Depends on the system. I still use a ramdisk on my
         | DOS/Win31/Win98 machine. It has lots of memory and Win98
         | crashes with more than ~768 MB RAM. I use the ramdisk to occupy
         | excess memory.
        
           | accrual wrote:
           | What do you use the ramdisk for? That sounds pretty
           | interesting.
        
         | actionfromafar wrote:
         | Back in the dark ages I put swap on most of the graphics memory
         | of an AGP bus graphics card. The read spead was slow compared
         | to system RAM but insanely fast compared to swapping to HDD.
         | Then put the graphics card as the highest priority swap so it
         | swapped there before going to HDD.
        
         | Vogtinator wrote:
         | Can be, if the RAM disk is compressed.
        
         | foresto wrote:
         | You might find these interesting:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zswap
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
        
         | grishka wrote:
         | If your RAM disk has a fixed size but there's some free space
         | on it, and the system is out of RAM, it can effectively reclaim
         | that otherwise unused space on the RAM disk at the cost of
         | having to copy the pages back and forth.
        
         | 123pie123 wrote:
         | from my vague memory, windows had a default minimum swap size.
         | by putting it on to a RAM drive if you had enough memory (+ and
         | as someone else mentioned compressing it as well) made things
         | run much faster
        
         | sim- wrote:
         | Android does this with zram, and I think this is a big part of
         | the reason why it tends to use more battery once you run low on
         | RAM, since paging in and out requires (de)compression, which
         | uses CPU.
        
       | compsciphd wrote:
       | around the same time, I fit linux with many of the common
       | ethernet drivers, X + rdesktop and vnc clients + a little utility
       | to launch them to a list of sites on a single floppy.
        
       | HeckFeck wrote:
       | Seems like the sort of page that should've been linked from
       | oldfiles.org, a long lost directory/webring of DOS, bootdisk
       | stuffing and Windows 3.x sites:
       | 
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20090120233733/http://oldfiles.o...
       | 
       | The site is now gone, but at least it isn't a SEO spamming blog.
        
       | fsiefken wrote:
       | Two floppies? In 1995 I got Windows 3.1 down to 1 floppy in order
       | to boot a library catalogue computer into a Write.exe so I could
       | do wysiwyg word processing. All the Wordperfect 5.1 machines were
       | used and as few used a catalogue computer only for a short while
       | I thought I should just do it - I used the software "2MF 3.0"
       | which formatted the 1.44 to the highest density of 2M, booted
       | into DOS, with autoexec.bat a ramdisk was created and the WIN.UC2
       | self-extracted itself. Decades later I am happy to work at the
       | same university in IT. I made a similar floppy setup to boot into
       | CIV1 and a floppy to read the complete bible, and a floppy to
       | listen to mod's. One floppy for single tasking computing, life
       | was good.
        
         | kungreke wrote:
         | I love this idea. I wish there was some kind of 2024 equivalent
         | to doing this. Maybe a rewritable optical media of some sort.
         | Sony really should have brought the minidisc to the pc as a
         | floppy and cd/dvd rom replacement.
        
           | ville wrote:
           | USB sticks should work for this purpose. Rewritable, smaller
           | and faster than optical media.
        
             | fuzzfactor wrote:
             | Started doing this when the first USB sticks became
             | available. Even in Windows 95, which didn't support USB at
             | the time.
             | 
             | Interestingly W95 could be trimmed down to about 35mb, and
             | carefully adding Word & Excel from Office97 was about
             | another 65mb, so it ended up fitting if you had one of the
             | huge 128mb USB sticks.
             | 
             | That's about the smallest I can figure you can get a 32-bit
             | Windows office machine which would be "fully compatible"
             | with the latest Windows & Office versions, as long as you
             | were carefully storing your office files on a FAT32
             | partition and limiting your expectations (like file size
             | and number of XL rows) to those addressed by W95 which was
             | as functional an office machine as millions of people need
             | today.
             | 
             | For those of you who did manage to run W95 at its full 2GHz
             | maximum over 10 years later on much higher speed
             | motherboards than there were in the 1990's, you know what
             | I'm talking about when I say the most noticeable thing is
             | _zero_ latency in almost all human-computer interactions.
             | 
             | You could be doing all kinds of office work, with lots of
             | other things to "boot".
             | 
             | Just got a couple more of the "small" 128GB SATA SSD that
             | are finally cheap enough for bootable OS's to use like
             | "game cartridges" now. Not much different "application",
             | just faster booting and operation than most USB.
             | 
             | Two partitions on each SSD, one for an OS only, one for ALL
             | related storage.
             | 
             | Still have some massive multibooting going on, but with
             | these lttle SSDs the most up-to-date are going to be W11,
             | W10x86, W10x64, Debian, Mint & Fedora.
             | 
             | Fortunately I got a few of the pre-NUC cheap ASUS miniPC
             | that has a simple hatch on top and came with a full size
             | SATA Desktop HDD right there. Gets even better ventilation
             | and has no exposed electronics when the cover is off all
             | the time, remove the HDD (for good now) and just slip in
             | whichever SSD you feel like booting to at the time.
             | 
             | Looks like about 128GB will do what 128mb would do back in
             | the day.
        
               | userbinator wrote:
               | _Even in Windows 95, which didn 't support USB at the
               | time._
               | 
               | That's because DOS-based Windows could use the BIOS for
               | disk access, and BIOS presented USB drives as hard
               | drives. I believe you can even do the same with an NVMe
               | SSD that has a suitable boot ROM.
        
               | fuzzfactor wrote:
               | Yes, good to emphasize that UEFI or genuine BIOS
               | motherboards will access the USB drives on powerup, then
               | any OS that can boot from that type partition layout can
               | go forward from there. DOS, W9x, NT5 need CSM enabled to
               | boot on a UEFI MB, W7 loves it as well.
               | 
               | W98 would install and run from USB too, as long as USB
               | device drivers did not get installed. That way once
               | booted if you plugged something into a USB socket on the
               | MB, it was "unknown" and remained inaccessible. But if
               | you booted when the second USB device was plugged in
               | beforehand, W9x (or DOS) assigned an alphabetic drive
               | letter and you could access the files.
               | 
               | Sometimes I still use a small FAT32 partition with simple
               | DOS on a Syslinux'ed volume to boot distros from the NT5
               | bootloader. That way you can edit the Linux multiboot
               | menu in Windows, or even DOS which sure boots a lot
               | faster today.
               | 
               | Now they have USB enclosures for M.2 drives, usually not
               | both NVMe & SATA flexibility though.
        
           | ljf wrote:
           | Mike Elgan of therawfeed (a long defunct tech website), used
           | to talk about his minimal travel set up - of a USB with a
           | basic linux distro on it and a very simple word processing
           | set up.
           | 
           | He'd either boot to it to 'hobble' his own laptop and remove
           | all other distractions while writing, or boot to it from
           | other peoples PCs to a set up he was used to and happy to
           | work from when away from home. (Mike was one of the first
           | technomads - or at least one of the first to post about it a
           | lot.)
           | 
           | I had a similar set up for a while which I used with my home
           | laptop or work PC at lunch time, but I never really got into
           | writing as much as I'd hoped I would, so it wasn't that
           | useful for me.
        
           | hnlmorg wrote:
           | > I wish there was some kind of 2024 equivalent to doing this
           | 
           | Lots of OS support live USB images. It's only Windows and
           | macOS that don't (though I'm sure Windows could with a little
           | effort).
           | 
           | > Sony really should have brought the minidisc to the pc as a
           | floppy and cd/dvd rom replacement.
           | 
           | Sony did. But there were already removable writable formats
           | that had larger capacity than a CD back when the minidisk was
           | a thing and they didn't become mainstream either.
           | 
           | Frankly I think MiniDisk is one of those technologies that
           | people remember as being better than they actually were.
        
             | codetrotter wrote:
             | I remember in the WinXP era there existed a tool called
             | BartPE that you could use to make WinXP bootable live CDs.
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BartPE
        
               | godzillabrennus wrote:
               | Who can also forget the venerable "nlite" for
               | slipstreaming updates, drivers, third party software, and
               | minimizing the foot print of Windows XP.
               | 
               | https://www.nliteos.com/index.html
        
               | accrual wrote:
               | I credit nLite for my general NT knowledge today. Taking
               | Windows apart and putting it back together was a fun way
               | to squeeze every MHz/Mb from your hardware.
        
             | fsiefken wrote:
             | I recently found a 90 minute cassette from 40 years ago
             | with some good obscure music I had forgotten. The
             | accessibility and touch of the cassette and a floppy
             | interfacing with the player or controller gives a better
             | tactile feedback then a USB disk or MicroUSB disk. You can
             | more easily loose the USB disks as well as they are smaller
             | and don't really make noise when dropped.
             | 
             | As MiniDisc and Zipdrive are obsolete I'd like to have a
             | minicd or businesscard CD audioplayer based on a
             | RaspberryPi Zero. With using Vocos, EnCodec or Lyra v2 you
             | could fit 200 hours of stereo audio on the small cd at
             | around 3 kbps and select them with some buttons and a LCD
             | screen. Similar to the Imation RipGo or Memorex portable
             | 8cm mini-cd players which could play mp3.
             | https://languagecodec.github.io/
             | 
             | Alternatively I could use cassette or microcassette.
             | https://hackaday.com/2021/10/20/audio-tape-interface-
             | revives... https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/10/17/a-wind-up-
             | cassette-play...
             | 
             | I could run a bootable OS on MicroSD and using external
             | small cd's as data or app storage, perhaps also to boot
             | from. An OS experience [Redox, Haiku, KolibriOS, Dragonfly,
             | Fuchsia, MorphOS, Serenity] booting from a 8 cm business
             | card CD depending on the day, weather or mood.
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_CD
             | 
             | Or perhaps just boot into a Raspberry Pi zero menu to
             | select or boot a random OS from the Zero and use Airtagged
             | encrypted USB-C sticks (making sure each OS can read the
             | encrypted volumes).
        
             | m_eiman wrote:
             | > It's only Windows and macOS that don't
             | 
             | You can run macOS from a USB disk, although it won't be a
             | readonly live disc like the Linux ones.
        
             | miki123211 wrote:
             | Windows does, it's called Winpe. It's what the Windows
             | installer media runs, but you can (could?) create your own
             | images that boot straight to desktop. Winpe images that
             | included a third-party screen reader were somewhat popular
             | among the blind community at one point, before Narrator
             | (the built-in screen reader) got decent and Microsoft
             | started including it and related components in the
             | installer. I think the original rationale behind this
             | feature was the ability to make custom disks with data
             | recovery tools and such.
             | 
             | Mac OS can boot from external volumes too. It's not a
             | traditional live image, the volume is usually writable and
             | it's a real copy of Mac OS. We're probably talking actual
             | HDD or SSD portable hard drives here, not flash drives, Mac
             | OS isn't that small. You need a Mac to run one of these of
             | course. No idea if this works across computers on Apple
             | Silicon. The new Macs store a lot of the encryption and
             | boot policy stuff in the SE, so I have no idea if booting
             | an unrecognized system would actually work.
        
               | bitwize wrote:
               | Mac OS used to boot from an HFS filesystem on a CD. I
               | wouldn't be surprised if it could boot from Goddamn
               | anything that could hold it today.
        
               | fuzzfactor wrote:
               | Not merely the limited functionality of WinPE or WinRE.
               | 
               | It's "Windows-to-Go", introduced in Windows 8.0 which had
               | the full Windows functionality contained on the USB
               | stick, if the bootable stick met the high-performance
               | requirements and had firmware indicating to Windows that
               | the USB stick was not a "Removable Device".
               | 
               | This was gradually deprecated for the most part:
               | 
               | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-
               | versions/windows/...
        
             | miah_ wrote:
             | Hiren's bootcd is a bootable Windows image with lots of
             | utilities bundled in.
             | 
             | https://www.hirensbootcd.org/
             | 
             | "Hiren's BootCD PE (Preinstallation Environment) is a
             | restored edition of Hiren's BootCD based on Windows 11 PE
             | x64. Given the absence of official updates after November
             | 2012, the PE version is currently under development by the
             | fans of Hiren's BootCD. It features a curated selection of
             | the best free tools while being tailored for new-age
             | computers, supporting UEFI booting and requiring a minimum
             | of 4 GB RAM."
        
           | jetbalsa wrote:
           | Alpine in Diskless mode is the closest I can think of as a
           | good way of doing this.
           | 
           | Also the Windows ADK to make a custom Windows PE is how HBCD
           | is made to load a windows desktop with a bunch of tools off a
           | CDROM
        
           | zozbot234 wrote:
           | SD cards are the modern floppy, you can even boot a complete
           | system from them.
        
           | toast0 wrote:
           | CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM all support random access
           | writes of some form, and can be used as live block devices.
           | CD-R, DVD-R, and DVD+R can be used too, with limitations
           | because it's a write once media; you can't really erase
           | anything, so you'll fill up the disc eventually.
           | 
           | Probably similar for BD-RE (recordable, erasable) and BD-R,
           | too.
        
           | SpecialistK wrote:
           | Sony's logic was... missing.
           | 
           | There was a SCSI drive for data storage in 1995, but it
           | required special Data discs instead of standard audio ones:
           | https://www.minidisc.wiki/equipment/sony/misc/mdh-10
           | (disclaimer, I run this site)
           | 
           | They finally did allow mass storage usage with Hi-MD as the
           | format was dying out, but too little too late.
           | 
           | There's now a FUSE driver PoC for standard MD devices that
           | have USB ports (NetMD) thanks to reverse engineering.
        
       | livrem wrote:
       | I have a 1.44 MB floppy here somewhere that boots MS-DOS with
       | Windows 1.01. I do not remember if I even had to do anything
       | special to fit that on a single bootable floppy. Probably not.
       | From the first item I find on archive.org it looks like Windows
       | 1.0 was distributed on four 360 kB floppies.
        
         | drewzero1 wrote:
         | I had Windows 1.01 and 2.03 on boot floppies, they were both
         | small enough to just copy the files into a DOS bootdisk and fit
         | fine. However in my experience most of the programs that I
         | wanted to run in Windows that wouldn't run in DOS required at
         | least Windows 3.x to work.
        
       | kotaKat wrote:
       | There was also the commercial products going into the 9x era -
       | 98lite still surprisingly exists.
       | 
       | https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html
        
         | fsiefken wrote:
         | With 98lite or 98micro and kernelex you could run firefox 52
         | (2017) and java8, but you need more then 1 floppy.
        
       | magicalhippo wrote:
       | Recall a project back in the days where the customer wanted to
       | upgrade their workstations but also save money, so we designed a
       | solution where they'd have a beefy NT4-based Citrix server and
       | reusing their 486 desktop machines by running the RDP client on
       | Windows 3.11.
       | 
       | To make deployment easy and smooth, it was decided to use network
       | booting and running Windows from a RAM disk.
       | 
       | The machines had 8MB of memory and it was found we needed 4MB for
       | Windows to be happy, so we had a 4MB RAM disk to squeeze
       | everything into. A colleague spent a lot of time slimming Windows
       | down, but got stuck on the printer drivers. They had 4-5
       | different HP printers which required different drivers, and
       | including all of them took way too much space.
       | 
       | He came to me and asked if I had some solution, and after some
       | back and forth we found that we could reliably detect which
       | printer was connected by scanning for various strings in the BIOS
       | memory area. While not hired as a programmer, I had several years
       | experience by then, so I whipped up a tiny executable which
       | scanned the BIOS for a given string. He then used that in the
       | autoexec.bat file to selectively copy the correct printer driver.
       | 
       | Project rolled out to thousands of users across several hundred
       | locations (one server per location) without a hitch, and worked
       | quite well from what I recall.
        
         | brnt wrote:
         | And here I am, in a shop of about 3K FTE, where we are squeezed
         | 6 persons onto a single socket Xeon which barely beats an
         | iPhone 15 Pro rendering those 12 screen worth of data slowing
         | down to a crawl, huge latency, crappy disk latency too (feels
         | like were all on the same spinning Rust, but it's Windows and
         | some VMWare middleware so who knows why this is slow).
         | 
         | Somehow snappyness is completely eradicated.
        
           | fuzzfactor wrote:
           | >Somehow snappyness is completely eradicated.
           | 
           | Barely _inadequate_ engineering by design.
           | 
           | Actually that's a difficult target to hit accurately and
           | there's a fine line between it and barely _adequate_
           | engineering leadership.
           | 
           | And even if it's adequate, is barely adequate what you wanted
           | anyway?
        
         | n6h6 wrote:
         | Beautiful work
        
           | magicalhippo wrote:
           | It was quite something to behold.
           | 
           | I also learned some valuable lessons in project planning and
           | execution... they had a few guys who sat for 1.5 years to
           | plan the rollout, working with suppliers to plan deliveries
           | of the hardware etc.
           | 
           | When the time came we rolled out all the several hundred
           | locations in just over 3 months, which included assembling
           | and basic configuration of the servers at base, shipping the
           | servers and then migrating data onsite from the old UNIX
           | server (mailboxes, home directories etc).
           | 
           | We only had two issues, one server had gotten the hard disk
           | cables disconnected during transport, easy fix had the
           | technician on site been Compaq certified (had to get shipped
           | back to base and out again), and another had a weird hardware
           | error which caused the server to freeze when scrolling large
           | log files in Notepad (replaced the server and all was good).
           | Beyond that it went flawless.
        
         | RulerOf wrote:
         | >it was decided to use network booting and running Windows from
         | a RAM disk.
         | 
         | What tech did that use? I imagine a "modern" system doing this
         | would use a small RAM disk for the base Windows installation to
         | boot from with any critical apps inside, and a second disk
         | image mounted via HTTP for any "bulk" data, all via a custom
         | iPXE build.
         | 
         | But NT4 predates the PXE standard by a number of years, and
         | also the concept of mounting disk images via HTTP (or other SAN
         | protocol). Was this some Netware stuff perhaps?
        
           | harikb wrote:
           | Novell netware type LAN, with network book, existed for even
           | DOS, pre Windows 3.1
           | 
           | Edit: yes, wikipedia seems to confirm my recollection
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare
        
           | cduzz wrote:
           | bootp / tftpboot were used to provision diskless systems
           | (diskless workstations / X-terminals) even in the very early
           | 1990s (and likely before, but I didn't interact with them
           | until college computer labs).
           | 
           | On scanning my brain-based archives I can't recall how IP
           | addresses were assigned and a brief asking of google "bootp
           | vs dhcp" leads me to believe that with bootp there was just a
           | static list of IP / MAC mappings for already-known diskless
           | devices.
           | 
           | Old network cards could have a boot rom in them; this
           | https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=86741 discusses the
           | magic and a couple of the non-pxe protocols.
        
             | fuzzfactor wrote:
             | I think you're correct about bootp.
             | 
             | A bootp server app generally listens for a MAC broadcast
             | which appears when another physically connected device
             | sends a "bootp request" into the network, so the bootp
             | server can compare the MAC against its whitelist and assign
             | its corresponding designated fixed IP address on the local
             | network. Which IP address will then be remembered by the
             | requesting device and is used from that point forward, not
             | much differently than an address assigned by DHCP.
             | 
             | Some hardware like early HP ethernet printers did not
             | retain their assigned IP address through a power failure.
             | So there had to be a functional bootp server app up and
             | running before you powered up the printer or the printer's
             | initial bootp request would go unanswered and it was no
             | good to anybody.
        
           | magicalhippo wrote:
           | While it used NT4 this was around y2k, I recall we also had
           | to test all the 486 and BIOS combinations they had if they
           | survived y2k transition (one failed!). Which also means my
           | memory is hazy.
           | 
           | Anyway, what comes to mind is Etherboot[1]. I'm pretty sure
           | he used BOOTP[2] with a TFTP server for the distribution
           | part.
           | 
           | [1]: http://etherboot.org/dokuwiki-2017-02-19b/about
           | 
           | [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrap_Protocol
        
         | magicalhippo wrote:
         | > a beefy NT4-based Citrix server
         | 
         | This was also when I learned about the pitfalls of
         | multithreading...
         | 
         | I had started trying to use multithreading, and had implemented
         | it in my raytracer. It worked like a charm on my machine.
         | 
         | During that project they brought a 4-socket server in the lab
         | for testing, so after hours I fired up my raytracer on it,
         | excited to see the promised 4x speedup... only to be met by an
         | immediate access violation.
         | 
         | I had of course missed a lock, but it worked fine on my
         | computer because it only had a single CPU (core) so even if I
         | spawned multiple threads, the chances of them tripping over
         | each other at that point was very low. Not so when they could
         | actually run simultaneously.
        
       | fleeno wrote:
       | I recently slimmed down Windows 3.0 to run it from a 1MB SRAM
       | card on a MS-DOS 5.0 palmtop. I just did it by trial and error,
       | and I think I can slim it down further from this guide, though
       | they're using Double Space, which I won't have.
       | 
       | I'm always sort of amazed how well Windows 3.x runs on hardware
       | that would have been a bit old even when 3.0 was released.
        
       | narag wrote:
       | Somehow related: I used to run both 3.11 and 95 over the same DOS
       | 5 (?) installation. It's a less known fact that, although Windows
       | 95 ran in protected mode, it was started as a DOS real-mode
       | program before switching modes and, when it was run from a DOS
       | command line, it shut down back to the DOS prompt, so I could run
       | both Windows versions without completely rebooting. It was useful
       | because at the time I was programming versions of the same
       | program for both systems.
       | 
       | That means that Windows 3 was compatible with the newer DOS
       | version that came underneath 95. If someone still has the
       | software and wants to test it, IIRC the only thing needed was to
       | edit autoexec.bat and have different directories for every
       | Windows.
        
       | hapless wrote:
       | Microsoft used to sell Windows as a runtime. Like, you would ship
       | Windows on floppy disks as part of your software product for end-
       | users.
       | 
       | 16 bit Windows was consciously designed, intentionally made
       | modular, to accomplish things like this. Albeit the author was
       | surely not the intended customer!
        
       | Lammy wrote:
       | I love how another page of this site uses HTML tables to simulate
       | the Windows 3.11 Setup screens:
       | http://www.geocities.ws/politalk/win31/multmode.htm
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-02-26 23:02 UTC)