Slashdot Mirror
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."
PicoBSD made EVIL!
"Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the screenshots :) Oh, and don't hot-link to them, my host will kill me. Thanks!"
Yes. Yes, he will.
If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
Already /.ed and not yet 5 comments?
Oh wait, it's Windows95.
Great! Now I can crash my PDA with 8mb of storage space! Thanks!
Because we can... why else?
:)
I think this is pretty cool. Next challenge for them, WinXP under 1 gig
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Does it have a full-featured blue screen of death?
Are you an open source warrior?
Here's a mirror:
0x0D 0x0A
#126 - Slashdotter - Aug 8, 2003 02:58
/. - Aug 8, 2003 03:04
Slashdotting, coming your way....
#127 -
Here comes the flood of Slashdotters....Prepare for server meltdown
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
ou can discuss this at our official community, over at NeoNerds.net.
:)
;)
:) Oh, and don't hot-link to them, my host will kill me. Thanks!
Update: Chat with me in real-time at irc://irc.xbetas.com/Micro95
A FULL set of configuration files; Win.ini, system.ini, Registry, is available in our IRC channel. If you're thinking of building your own version of Micro95, be sure to head over there to find out more information about the project.
Okay, over the past couple of days you will have heard plenty of news about the latest Windows 95 in 10mb, created by Richard L. James from over at Wimborne.org. And then, there was redruM69, who managed to get 95 down to 5.35mb.
However, what you are about to hear is a world first.
Tonight, I created the world's first sub-5mb bootable, registry editable, command- promptable, usable version of Windows 95. And what's more, you can build the system yourself, if you know how.
But if I simply made this claim, you might laugh, you might mock. You might even go "hahaha you lamer". So I'm not just going to make this claim. I'm going to prove it. Here's the screenshots (taken with the camera):
Lemme guess. They're fakes, right? No they're not, but you don't believe me anyway, so here's the directory listing.
Windows 95 4.47mb Directory Listing
Well, I'm afraid that's all I can give you. I'm currently working on loading this into RAM, and also an installer for those of you with a legit copy of Windows 95. Aaaand I think that's all I can do
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
My 16mb Office project will continue, as well as myself and Richard's collaboration on the micro 95 with TCP/IP Stack project, for those of you who wish to use this as a small browsing OS, etc. I'll also see if I can restore sound support to this, as I'm aware quite a few of you are interested in using this project as a basis for car MP3 players.
I'd also like to make it quite clear that none of this would have been possible without the help of Richard L James and his Shrinking Windows project. Also worthy of a big mention is redruM69, who sucessfully brought Windows 95 down to 5.35mb.
You can discuss this at our official community, over at NeoNerds.net.
Update: Chat with me in real-time at irc://irc.xbetas.com/Micro95
A FULL set of configuration files; Win.ini, system.ini, Registry, is available in our IRC channel. If you're thinking of building your own version of Micro95, be sure to head over there to find out more information about the project.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the screenshots
BOFH
It's 3:00 on the East coast. I wonder if the site is based on that Windows 95 thingy he's made...
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Heh, the Contiki server was up for a longer time ;)
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
I'm still waiting for Windows 95 on a floppy.
Tierce
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
In other breaking news, the crew at DOSBeta.org have created a fully bootable DOS 5 system on a single 3.5 inch floppy.
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 HAS to be a hoax. Windows95 ain't usable by any reasonable definition of the word.
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?
Complete list of uses for this:
[end list]
John Kerry is a Joke!
Yes you could do that. You could also jump up and down like a monkey, but that, like your comment, is completely and totally unrelated to the project.
Do you really think he shrunk Windows 95 because he didn't have a big enough hard drive? Come on now.
Maybe it's just that these "Hard drives are cheap" posts are getting to be the replacement for the "In Soviet Russia" posts.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
- Because it's there. While Linux is fairly easy to get a useful Linux distro under 2 MB, you can do things like strip the kernel to the bare essentials. Needless to say, you can't do that under Windows; there's a lot more challenge in getting Win 95 under 5 MB.
- Also, making Win95 fit in small spaces may be of interest to people who want to run legacy Windows apps on embedded devices. I could see this put on an old Pentium with an all-in-one motherboard and a 16 MB solid state drive, with room for a small program or two. The only issue would be swap space. This might be useful in places looking for a small, simple pseudo-embedded PC that needs to run Windows apps. Linux might be better for 95% of these kinds of tasks, but if Windows is necessary to run legacy apps, then it would be best to run, well, Windows.
While it might not be eminently practical, neither is, say, running Linux or NetBSD on some obscure piece of hardware. Nifty hacks like this aren't always done for practical reasons; they're just as often done for fun.That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I don't think any company would trust Windows 95 as an embeded solution. WindowsCE already covers that area and works much more efficiently. This is more of a just a fun trick to do with Windows 95 than anything.
Also, considering how many files they removed from the system, I would be suprised if anything could run with all those missing DLL files.
How Small the people with the source code could make it.
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...
From their forum: :: prays :: I hope that b/w limit doesn't kick in
<BLOCKQUOTE>
#7 - BOFH - Aug 7, 2003 00:52<BR>
Eek... I think we're on an OC12, though, so we should be okay...
</BLOCKQUOTE>
Reminds me of that tiny copy of Windows 3.1 that came on the Windows 95 disc. Used only during installation, a certain cab file contained all the necessary files to run 3.1 apps. All one needed to do was decompress the file, copy the Program Manager or any other shell program to the same directory, and add it into the win.ini (or was it the system.ini?) file. The entire thing was so small, it fit comfortably onto a 1.44 meg floppy.
I think the file was user.cab, although I'm not sure. Guess I gotta dig up that old 95 install disc.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
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.
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
Cheaper than an SCO/Linux solution :)
Menuet Homepage
several times I've been able to make Windows fit into 0 MB.
C|N>K
you'll find gigs of crap in the *cache folders. disable automatic system recovery and file auditing (I forget what the actual services are called) and clear out those directories. look at a file listing of your hd from biggest to smallest and you'll notice plenty of redundant .cab and .dll files that are just plain FAT. search the net for a slimmed down registry, or use a recursive reg cleaner on your own reg (recommended if its not a fresh install) and viola a relatively small XP install
bite my glorious golden ass.
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.
Making Windozz 95 useable - now that is an accomplishment!
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
I don't think any company would trust Windows 95 as an embeded solution. WindowsCE already covers that area and works much more efficiently. This is more of a just a fun trick to do with Windows 95 than anything.
if you think any company trusts WinCE for embedded control then you are nuts.
EVERYTHING is either a Realtime OS like RTDOS or another.
when you have lives at stake with heavy machinery or a embedded PC running a process control you dont use crap like Windows CE.
that is purely for the toys we call PDA's where it doesnt matter if it crashes or messes up in any way.
the world of embedded is ALOT larger than all of you think. Rocket control, autopilot, control your drinking water purification, sewage treatment, twinkie manufacturing...
PDA's and consumer items are a tiny corner of enbedded systems.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
(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.
Looks like he tried to use Win95 to run the site maybe?
/.'d
Error: No site configured at this address.
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
4.47 megabytes? Some guy told me I'd never need more than 640K!
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
They have taken the bridge and the firewall.
We have barred the ports, but cannot hold them for long.
The server shakes. Drums, drums in the deep.
We cannot get out. A shadow moves in the dark.
We cannot get out...
They are coming...
Tweet, tweet.