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Windows 95 in 4.47MB
Silvorgold writes "BOFH of MSBetas.net has been able to compress Windows 95 into 4.47 megabytes, making it the world's first sub-5mb bootable, registry editable, command-promptable, usable version of Windows 95.
He has written a small description about what he did, and also included screenshots (with his digital camera), and don't worry, these aren't fake screenshots."
Can someone please explain why we would want to boot a 5MB version of an operating system that came out over 8 years ago?
I think you could do a lot more useful things with a Linux distro at 5MB.
Work on Linux is ongoing, and there's a whole community on offer if you have problems. Windows 95, OTOH, is at least a generation old, and has already been EOL-ed by Microsoft.
More than mere navel gazing.
Ummm, you mean deleting selected files from your windows installation is now considered an EULA violation?
What's next, a clause that says you can't ever remove Windows?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How Small the people with the source code could make it.
From this page, it appears that the previous 'record holder', 5.35 MB, did not use an executable packer or other compression.
;). Just what is the purpose of this, and at what point do your modifications, whether extreme, or just running binaries through an executable packer, defeat the purpose of doing this in the first place?
"Apparently only 5.35Mb in size (at the moment.... I'm told this might go down!) - without using UPX / any compression"
So, is what this fellow has done a superior acheivement, or did he mostly just run an executable packer on a few binaries?
Certainly if the idea here is to just shrink the physical disk space usage we can do better than either of these entries by compressing all files and hacking the Windows I/O subsystem calls to handle our compression.
I think all of this raises an interesting question. (ok, so it's not interesting at all, but I've had similar issues come up in a lot of other unofficial sort of 'competitions' like this, and we all just kind of use interest at that point
Is the idea to have the smallest possible OS capable of doing x or y?
Is the idea to have the smallest possible OS that looks like Windows 95?
Is the idea to have the smallest possible 'distribution' of Windows 95 attainable by just removing unecessary features?
Do we want smallest in terms of RAM usage, or smallest in terms of disk space? What do we then if we run it on a RAM disk? Which space counts?
Surely depending up just what is the goal here, we can do a lot better than 4.47 MB.
I guess I don't 'get it', what they're doing =)
That's Windows users for you!
There is a micro Linux distribution floating around somewhere that provides an X server in under 2 MB of physical disk space (but 4 or 8 MB of RAM), but I can't recall the name of it just now.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
"I took redruM69's 5.35Mb version and upx'd it. W00t! 1 4r 1337!!!!!! f33r m33!!!!"
Hmm. Not exactly ground breaking stuff.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Incidently Mungkie used win95 at one point for a number of epos projects. Using win95 we managed to create an uncompressed OS image of ~3.9Mb which meant we could normally fit our entire system and application on a 32Mbit ROM (we can half that size with compression but more system RAM is then required). Now using linux we can get the system in the same ROM but we get far far better features, security and a more stable system. We have now switched to linux only development on all work (unless a customer insists on a MS platform).
Now just to reiterate the exact reasons for reducing system size!!!. SMALLER SYSTEMS ARE CHEAPER AND SIMPLER TO DEVELOP, PRODUCE, AND MAINTAIN.
The savings made in development time mean we have more time to eat bananas.
The savings made on hardware costs make our systems (that we sell!) more competetive and increase our profit margins.
The savings made in maintenance mean our products are reliable and our customers want to buy from us again, and saves us time and money in supporting customers and paying for call centers.
Win95 was OK in its time but things have changed.
embedded linux
Meanwhile at the university, your PHB was getting drunk and laid on a constant basis, having the time of his life, and is now getting paid more than you.
Berto
It just shows what Microsoft could have done if they weren't Microsoft!
Could you imagine if MS had originally released Win95 with such a small footprint?
I imagine I would have liked the OS a lot more. When it first came out, I stuck with 3.11 (until I found out about Diablo) because it ran much faster and had a smaller footprint. I remember being thoroughly disappointed at the performance hit when I first booted into Win95...
Now I know that a smaller footprint doesn't automatically mean more better performance. However, there seems to be an unofficial connection between the two, because the programmer who strives for a small footprint is probably a better programmer, and is looking for ways to best optimize his/her code. Also, with such a small footprint there is quite likely less bugs. Cutting down that much bloat probably means that identical pieces of code could be cut down to one instance, and if that one instance has a bug, it will not only be more noticeable (since it gets executed more often) but also easier to fix.
But I think I know why MS didn't take this approach - money. Sloppier code = less development costs, and bigger bloat means more hardware upgrades, which means more Windows licenses (and Office licenses, etc.). Not to mention the general public would be more impressed with a gigantic OS than a tiny one. So I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
I wonder how much bloat could be removed from XP while still maintaining 90% of the features.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Keep in mind that stability is relative. Even the most "stable" Win9x OS isn't going to run for very long without crashing (I'm talking days or weeks here.) So if you reboot it daily, and don't push it too hard, it might seem stable to you. It is impossible to get > 49.7 day uptime on 9x without an appropriate patch anyway, because of a bug in one of the VXDs. (I may have the number wrong, could be 47.9). I prefer running PCs 24/7, and having loads of programs open all the time, so I tend to discount 9x OSes as merely OS-wannabe's. (I use Win2k, btw... and a little Linux on the side.)
Has anyone not heard of QNX demo disks, ZipSlack, or the many pre-made Car MP3 linux distros?
People, it's not that hard! Why suffer with a non-pre-emptive, not protected-mode OS to do these common things?
Backwards compatibiltiy, and games, I can understand. A cool Win95 tiny system would be a great way to bootstrap an old DOS or DirectX game on a CD.
But for car MP3 players? I hope you like the music to crap out every so often, if you change tracks too quickly. You'd best be running CubePlayer with some kinda custom input controller if you want it to work predictably.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Every other comment bitches about how there are no uses for this. I can think of one interesting application straight away.
USB pendrives are becomming cheaper and more popular. Most of them support booting. Copying a mini distro of windows 95 would be quite a useful feature - you pop your stick into any PC, and have your own customised GUI with a few programs you use regularly, programs you need to open documents stored on your pendrive preinstalled, etc.