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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."
soo.. . why exactly DID they leave all the cabs, secondary software, unused images, back pad programs never intended for public use on a public cd commercial release (150 av megs for those who never tried)? Bigger is better.. lots of extra stuff for control, included room to grow. That means lots will be pruned, so anyone who is suprised by this, go to asm 04 after taking a few machine level programming classes. What I'm really interested in is seeing how small we can get a bootable linux with an independantly and fully function hack *W*ine type program so i can load all my needs onto the newer 128 meg hardrive keychains.. along with my *ORIGINAL* mp3's, artwork, photos, scripts / resumes, etc.. so i might have a bootable navicable computing environment that might be used anywhere near a modern computer.. regardless of resources.. think about it.
p
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
This leads to obvious comparisons of the size of Win95 compared to WinXP, and the changes in just 8 years.
What I find telling as well is that the Mac OSX calculator.app is SIX times the size of the total RAM in the first Mac, and over twice the size of a complete OS install.
Actually, this is interesting, if not particularly important.
It shows just exactly how much JUNK that a Windows install puts on your system. Crap you don't need... in most cases, crap you don't know about, can't get rid of, or don't want. I'm pissed because my Windows partition is 6 gigs and WinXP takes up nearly 2 gigs of that, while still running slower than my 7 year old computer did back in 1996. Windows is actually a pretty fast operating system, once you take away all the junk. This just shows how much junk there is.
Although, if someone had come out with this 6 years ago, I'd be clamoring for the code - I would have loved this instead of having to clear out the advertizing junk and IE and Outlook Express manually...
how soon till someone gets around to doing the same to XP. also, is this not a violation of the EULA?
From the page:
;)
;) ) as the executables/libraries get uncompressed to memory when they get loaded by the Windows PE loader.
:)
The system uses UPX compression on the main EXEs and DLLs, btw, in case you were wondering how I got it down past redruM69's 5.35mb. I also removed some extra files, and restored functionality which the other micro 95 builds don't have. I'll try UPXing the entire system and windows folders later, see if I can get it down past 4 or 3mb
UPX compresses most executables to 30% of their normal size. But it also makes the system slower (well its Win95 so thats not a big issue
I'd like to see how small you can get the smallest floppy Linux using UPX, `strip` and some size squeezing GCC and linker flags
If you check the UPX examples you'll see that you can even get Emacs to less than 1 MB 8)
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
Back in the win 3.1 days, there was a guy that made a Win3.1 floppy. He made an installer so you could make one of your own without getting a warez copy. Back then the joke was "Double your hard drive space! Deltree windows!" I'd like to see a micro sized NT install or a live CD-ROM distro of windows.
The first Mac, the original "Macintosh", had 128 KB of RAM and a single internal 400 KB 3.5" floppy drive. Several months later, a 512 KB version was available. The "512K Mac" was sometimes called a "Fat Mac".
I don't recall how large the first few versions of the OS were, but I do recall that the OS (including the desktop "Finder", several utilities, control panels, and a printer driver or two), MacWrite, and MacPaint could fit on one 400 KB disk with room to spare. Such a disk shipped with the original Macs.
Of course the attorney ran DOS and Windows 95 for years without problems (Or so he assumes. Better shops at least used Netware). He doesn't really see much difference in running it now and will pay through the nose to do so because his last network admin said that he couldn't import the data to his new software since he never upgraded his initial install of Abacus. The attorney doesn't have to fork out money for WinCE since he's still got a shelf full of old Win95 media (and the licenses to go with them). A clever freelance tech could make a killing.
He did forget to mention that embedded devices would make for some portability. Imagine that same attorney having his typing secretaries pass around the device to enter the data into new software. It would make it way more appealing to a small firm to only have to buy one (and the support for one ;) )
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
You could run it easily on a DOS emulator on an old machine, for example, when I only had a 210MB HD on my RiscPC, I was glad to compress win95 to around 8-10MB in order to run a JDK, so that my DOS disc image would remain below 70MB...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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He used a better method, though: He deleted everything but win.exe, then tried to run it. When it failed, he monitored what file it was trying to process, and added that from a full installation. Repeat until it boots, and you can do this for any OS.
(BTW, geeks used to call Windows 95 "MS-DOS 7.0 with illegally tied UI". Furthermore, geeks used to brag about their Norton Commander customizations, which is probably why The Borg decided...) Anyway, to make a short story long, this very topic is what got my fists to clench vis-a-vis Microsoft. I got mad while I was debugging my programs. If you're programming something in C and then have to fsck around in assembly language to use long file names with a modicum of portability, it's not a good-mood environment to begin with half the time. Then along comes this weird runtime error message something like, "For this (kernel call) to work, you must be using the full graphical Windows 95."
Hello? What on gawd$ green earth doe$ a graphical u$er interface have to do with file $y$tem kernel call$? It'$ a fuggen enigma, no? ;-)
If my memory serves me right, there were about 3 different ways to access the long filename services in MS-DOS 7.0, and for each detail in each way, you had to use either undocumented features or tiptoe around a gauntlet in code. Everything worked if you decided to stick with Microsoft's crammed-down-throat GUI, but if not ___. The D.O.J. slapped a wrist about it, but whatever.
Anyway, if I felt sorry for having wasted your time on this, I would announce that regret here. As it turns out, the whole MS-DOS 7.0 compatability stuff of my programs was/should_have_been inside of sections that were #ifdef'ed out of the compiler's view for target environments not in Windows 95 anyway.
Used this method (usually combined with stacker and 2m format) lots when I was at university, we didn't have access to hard disk storage so we'd squash things onto disk to use; I got the following working off single disks :
:) Although for doom a friend of mine wrote a program that hacked the .wad file and ripped out all the sound files 'cos those didn't compress with stacker.
Win3.11
Win3.11 booting into netscape
Win3.11 booting into Mirc/Pirch
X-wing (without cutscenes/movies)
Lemmings 2
Borland C (dos ver)
Turbo pascal 7 (dos ver)
A few others, including shareware doom off a single disk so that we could play it across the (novell) network without having to log in and be traced