The Version of Windows NT That Fits in 10 MiB (Embedded Edition)
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- Опубліковано 22 лип 2021
- Today, we're diving into Windows NT Embedded, which is an almost unknown and forgotten variant of Windows. Designed to complement Windows CE, NT Embedded was designed for embedded systems that weren't as constrained, or for appliance like devices where one still wanted or needed the full Windows experience. It's rather impressive that a minimum image size of 10 megabytes is entirely viable!
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If this sounds familiar, it's because I did a six hour live-stream on the topic. The topic ending up being interesting enough that I wanted to revisit it in a standalone video, with the stream edited down to size, with new voice over, and edited down into a free-standing video.
In this exciting installment of NCommander In Realtime, we're going to dive into NT 4 Embedded, setup a build environment, explore what the minimal OS image is, and then set out to make some custom OS images. This lead down a windy road to explore various deployment configurations, determine what, if any changes were made for embedded edition were, and just seeing how minimal the minimal operating system image.
Afterwords, I decided to make two appliance like devices. The first is an embedded web server accessible over SMB filesharing. This was pretty easy to do with the premade targets available in Target Designer, followed by creating a true abomination in web design. The next image was a minimal image involving NetHack 3.4.3, which required some fiddling, but only came to about 15 MiB when all was said and done.
NT Embedded would eventually lead to XP Embedded, and a full replacement of the Windows CE line, so it's interesting to see its origins from the early 2000s, and the rough edges. We might dive in later with Windows XP Embedded, or perhaps Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs
#windowsnt #embedded #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing - Наука та технологія
And yet NT Embedded got a rather long usage on select hardware, including ATMs and kiosks. I remember seeing it bootlooping on a kiosk at Uno's Pizzeria at the Providence Place Mall circa 2015.
Hu
Well, im german and one time i was going to REWE (a grocery store) when i saw an ATM by Sparkasse (a bank) bootlooping Windows 7 embedded or something. This was a few years ago.
My company is still using NT Embedded on some of our automated saw machines.
Also HMI PCs from Siemens Automation.
OS/2 may have been the better choice for an ATM.
having developed for NT and XP embedded, your supposition is largely correct: after figuring out your components and core system on the development environment, you would write the deployment files to either EPROM/EEPROM or on flash media like CF card, or micro drive (pretty new at the time still compared to CF or EPROM). a lot of systems more or less kept CF cards in use well past their prime, and even today. for PC-109 hardware you had some better options like more standard ATA devices or network booting. for many machines, the HMI element would simply be a UI for the machine operator and the signals would only be handled locally if they were real-time dependent (e-stop) and if not, passed to the PLC network and controller via the serial bus.
once all the issues were ironed out, the deployment would be made semi-permanent by writing to ROM and some EEPROM or flash memory added for persistent data, allowing machine operators a fast "return to normal", while preserving machine parameters needed for operations (like running speed, calibration of belt tension on an arm, thickness of material, language and date/time, et c).
for device drivers, they were integrated in cooperation with the device manufacturer or simply provided for the target hardware (panelmate, johnson controls, schneider electric, siemens, et c). often these were commercial drivers modified with build manifests and packaged explicitly for embedded systems.
modern embedded systems in factories still work more or less in this fashion, but almost always offer more advanced communication methods to a central system for management. at the HMI though, it's still a UI with controller and ROM/RAM for the bootable image and persistence with some communication back to the controllers for display of sensor output or handle local functions.
Yes, it seems Ncommander missed the point of embedded development. The final gadget, with embedded OS and custom-purpose app inside, would be made in a manufacturing process as hands-off as possible, likely including manufacturing a ROM or loading flash memory or a small onboard drive with the files needed for the device's entire lifetime. In the development process, the software image would be transferred to a prototype device for testing until it passed quality contro. That image then became the master image for duplication into as many of the devices as were built.
A note on the image build method, that's actually fairly normal and to be expected. A number of embedded devices either had internal CF cards, PCMCIA storage, or other odd storage methods that required specialised software for data transfer. Dumping the files into a folder means that you could either write direct to the CF/PCMCIA card, or you could transfer the files using the manufacturer's software. I remember one device that required the data be placed onto a CF card, with a specific trigger file on it, then perform a device reboot while holding specific keys, all to overwrite data on the internal flash storage.
0:35 dozens of employees at a Fortune 500 company gather to the building lobby, staring in awe and confusion, as a random dude in his bedroom live streams installing Windows NT Embedded (designed to complement Windows CE) on their company's Jumbotron
I've watched through the whole stream, one of the finest 6 hours spent on UA-cam up to this date IMO. I have a huge admiration for you knowledge and the diligence with which you create the videos. Please do not stop making this kind of content. BTW. watching you struggling with the Component Designer made me think about "intuitive UX" and then Kahneman's "Fast and slow thinking" came to my mind. There is a theory, and actually there are some studies behind this, that if you've been given a task, and finishing the task includes some friction (i.e. the task is described with a slightly ineligible font), you start to employ some parts of your brain, which you wouldn't if the description was perfectly legible and your effort is not so "brainless" anymore. So, I'm thinking of starting being a fan of "not so intuitive UX + a good user manual" instead of a friction-less and "intuitive" design, which sometimes resembles "magic". Idk, maybe there is something to it.
The built tools were for professionally trained engineers, who wouldn't have been mystified by their purpose or baffled by their functionality. The whole product was, as the name shows, to be built into designs as one component, not to be easy for novice everyday users to instantly pick up.
Finally, enough space for me to plat Microsoft flight simulator
plat
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I also love strange and obscure software and I'm so glad to have found a UA-camr who focuses on it! The other retro tech UA-camrs I've found tend to focus on hardware and gaming, but I have a fascination with things like vintages operating systems, desktop environments, networking and productivity software, and I was so excited when I saw your IE for Unix video and discovered you had more videos like that on your channel!
I once supported a system that ran NT4 Embedded.... it was a building / HVAC control system. Programmed in Microsoft's Java, it ran in its own little Java engine on the machine and talked to the building over a network called LONworks. The Java software is still commonly in use today - the framework is made by a company called Niagara.
I was able to turn the install "back" into one with a GUI by doing an offline edit of the registry. I forget what keys it was that disables the GUI, I exported the registry from a fresh NT4 desktop install, and moved big chunks into the NT4 Embedded system. The GUI is disabled some number of days after the install, and you're left with just the blue Windows NT startup screen.
That sounds like magic and hell in a single box. I would think CE would be a better fit for that environment, especially if it was monitoring things in real time. Any reason on why that control stack was used?
@@NCommander It gave nice reporting, and you interacted with it through a (Java of course) web interface. They also had dedicated hardware devices running the Niagara software, but those were much lower processor / memory, so you couldn't have as many graphics and pages. (In that particular install, the pentium based NT4E machine was the "Main JACE", and there were 2 other hardware JASEs, one running the sprinklers and another running the HVAC in an additional wing of the building) I'll have to see if I still have any screen shots from it, it was really interesting to use.
The system was installed in ~2000. Was WinCE up to the task of running multiple services then?
Glad to see the finished product! Another gem from everybody's favorite masochist, NCommander
I used a Windows 7 ISO of 50mb.
Incredible how much they can remove.
Windows CE used a very similar workflow to this to building images. It was unpleasant at best, and the solution I came up with for installing drivers and whatnot was to script setting it up after making an image, then take an image of that.
... I didn't actually consider this since I never did a raw port of CE, but Platform Builder didn't actually ship with a flashing mechanism, did it? It was all vendor provided.
I can imagine this being applicable for CE as it was (or am I completely messing stuff up?) basically ROM embed after all, I imagine prototype machines ran with EEPROM chips or such before shipping with the non-erasable form. Was it this kind of stuff you did with CE or just messing about on VMs and such?
@@Kalvinjj CE was rarely written to ROM. I know there were headless versions for e.g. automotive applications, but I didn't work with that. The devices I worked with had LCD controllers, and you'd write an image to flash. There was a factory image, and you could load it into a tool that worked very nearly like one of the ones NCommander used. Then you could use a different tool to build packages to embed in the image, and use the first tool to add/remove packages and components. You end up with an artifact you flash with a vendor-supplied flash plugin, and then flash that to the flash ROM. This was the "factory reset" image from then on. Anything done on the device and not saved to secondary storage would be stored in RAM (the flash ROM was not writable in the OS), and you could move a slider around to partition the RAM into program memory and storage.
We very rarely did deployments this way because the tools were so awful (they're descendants of these). Instead, we'd flash the factory image, drop some CABs and a script onto a SD/CF card, and then remotely or manually trigger executing that script. There are cases where the factory image leaves so little room in flash that our software doesn't fit, and in those cases, we'd have to fight the tool to generate a smaller image (we'd typically remove IE and Office).
As part of a hard of hearing family, my brain is pretty good at catching non-autogen CC by now. Thank you for the time and effort you put into this. 💜
You can rest assured it hasn't got any easier in newer embedded versions. I've had the pleasure of WES7 (Windows Embedded Standard 7) and it's still a pain in the only now everything is a DISM ultimately
Never really played with NT Embedded stuff prior to this. I do have some CE experience, but that was on an app level, and not on a BSP one. That being said, I got the suckers job of making customized install images for XP and 7 at old jobs.
I have mixed feelings on DISM. On one hand, it's a lot easier to slipstream in components. On the other, I feel like I made a lot more coasters trying to make deployment images with DISM than I ever did with the old school $OEM$ folder or post install scripts.
@@NCommander i never got the image sub 1gb but tbf the app we wanted on the appliance image needed a bunch of stuff to run properly, plus iis and dotnet and we had the GUI on for ease of use - it was destined to run on Xen, well qemu (pronounced kwem-you in my book rather than qume or q e-moo). Weirdly the development kit didn't come with the bootable iso that let you install the build and took a while to track down in the depths of the Microsoft download library.
I think that this format is great. I watched the entire livestream and still enjoyed the video. As for one who watched the livestream, the video can provide research on topics that we were uncertain about. But by only watching the video, you get left out of that live experience, where you can directly communicate with the streamer and know that you can see his unedited, unscripted sequences of suffering. And web page designing.
Overall, good job, NCommander!
The advantage is I can realistically pass off the editing to someone else. I recordd the voiceover, and let my editor take it from there, which let me work on other projects.
I'll probably look at doing this for future streams if its something I feel will benefit from being cut down.
I could see this still being useful for old games which absolutely need an install of older Windows to run. Combining the game with what is essentially a 10 MB "wrapper" Windows around them in a pre-packaged VM sounds very attractive. Thank you for this video!
Too many of the core libraries are missing for it to work in a general case IMHO. It might be possible if you were absolutely determined, but you couldn't easily slipstream in DirectX if you needed.
@@NCommander I see. That's a shame :(. Thank you for your reply!
This reminds me of my own brief adventure with an embedded system. I bought an IDE disk-on-module some time ago and it ended up arriving with a copy of windows XP embedded on it from a mcdonalds in atlanta. I didn't know that latter part until I managed to get explorer running and found all sorts of weird leftover data, including evidence of a mcdonalds exclusive VPN and weird ronald mcdonald propaganda
Was it meant for an advertising display of some sort? That doesn't quite explain the VPN, though, unless it was just an easy way to control the entire fleet of signs from a single location by having them on an isolated network, as well as to prevent employees/hooligans from easily tampering with the images.
@@thetechconspiracy2 Could have been for corporate to push new graphics to the signs.
I can really imagine some minimal install being created back in it's days for industrial machinery computers running solid state storage of the day, say a CNC mill or such, that requires a vibration rugged controller PC, still compatible with Windows NT for connectivity reasons for example.
I wonder how much of such situations were indeed the case back then, cause nowadays there are indeed such machines running some form of Windows, often outdated for years (as let's be honest, a CNC has no need at all for looks updates and such).
don't forget baggers, markems, multiponds, check-weigher-metal-detectors... if it didn't have flash storage, there was always serial/ethernet to access remotely and load>run directly from RAM, if your kit was ballin' enough. still in use today (unfortunately. took 3-5 mins for the CWMD to cold-boot into its linux environment&be ready, and that fecker was brand new in ~2015) since FDRAM is mostly non-volatile and can hold its data for hundreds of years with a high write limit (w.r.t. shit barely changes unless you have a new product, replace machinery, etc.)
Where can you download this? Would it be possible for you to provide some type of image of a working environment, like an exported VirtualBox appliance?
I setup hundreds of WYSE thin clients on NT4 (standard) with roaming profiles and WRQ Reflection to connect as a VT220 terminal to our Unix and NT servers. I think the image was 16 megs.
Good times!
I recently purchased one of those WYSE clients, upgraded the RAM, inserted a mini-IDE to mSATA adapter and installed a full XP SP3 onto a 128 GB SSD drive. Everything works absolutely perfect on that thin client. I believe the original storage IDE card was something like 256MB.
I remember when I was working at Anheuser-Busch brewery in Houston back in the late 90s and early 2000s, their production lines initially had Windows NT 3.51 for line controllers, which was replaced during upgrades to Windows NT 4.0 Embedded.
I also remembering over time seeing a Windows XP Embedded and a Windows 7 Embedded.
If you run taskmgr from the barebones install, how much memory is it actually using?
Well theres a mini winxp that only uses 24mb of ram after booting to desktop so my guess would be about 10-15mb, something like win95 plus the newer base system stuff from nt that wasnt there on dos95
@@laharl2k I think the minimum 95 setup using the standard installer for 4.00.495 was 10-12mb as well. (for the installation, storage) and once booted will do well with 2MB (95 has minimum 4MB of RAM). Swaps like hell, though.
I think standard NT 4 boots on 4MB of RAM used, but I'd love to confirm
It's likely that it shipped with a big manual about how to use everything, or perhaps someone from Microsoft would do a demo (since embedded systems are usually custom orders). UI design for complex apps wasn't quite as refined in the 90s as it is today, so it's likely it'd be a lot different if it were to be built today.
Microsoft also offers consulting services. I worked on software at a bank which had a Microsoft guy onsite to advise on the front end loan paperwork software at branches and the back end databases for finance.
This vaguely reminds me of the PicoXP experiment back when guys like me, Bart, Nuno and the rest of the nu2/911CD crew were still messing with WinPE. I'm not sure about the workflow of using a 2nd HDD and moving it to the target computer for testing but it's probably more along the lines of copying a CompactFlash or SD card. HDDs from that era were still cost prohibitive and slow. Most of the ones I had were still 3800RPM, which is unheard of today.
Embedded development stuff is usually expensive. A second HDD would still been a reasonable cost of business expense; cheap even by the standards of the day (a professional JTAG programmer could have easily been five figures for one).
@@NCommander These days it's unusually expensive depending on the solution and the guy that came up with it. Here's one so stupid you're going to love it. I'm currently doing Nano Server deployments and driver testing with an external SSD over USB. The target server starts with this disk and if I'm being particularly autistic with a piece of software in my build, I'll just shut off the target computer and move everything back to the tech system then spin it up in a local VM. The end media for my demo will still fit on a 2GB MicroSD or eUSB, depending on which arrangement I have in front of me by the end of the project and the SSD will be redone for journaling/caching. Reflecting on my nu2 days, I'm having a similar kind of fun again. Definitely not for everybody.
NT Embedded sort of lives on as Windows IoT Core.
Anyway as someone who has had to program Windows CE / Windows Embedded Compact, I wish they had jumped to NT. Windows CE sucked and it sucked in ways that were non obvious if you were just reading a datasheet. e.g. the C/C++ standard libs were cut to the bone so it was very hard to port libs over to CE when half of STL was missing. And there were stupid little breakages and gotchas all over the place, e.g. processes had no concept of current directory, or of environment variables so if you needed to open a file it had to be an absolute path. Maybe these things made sense in the days of iPaq but fast forward 10 years when CE was on its last legs and it was just an annoying hindrance.
So I was very happen when CE was dropped as a platform for our product. We used Windows 10 IoT Enterprise which is basically Windows 10 Professional without all the supplemental drivers and our Windows desktop product more or less just worked straight away.
Ahh that "System" Font was actually replaced with "System", the System font of "normal", non-NT Windows.
I'm assuming you mean the console font? I was referring to the UI fonts. I'd have to compare them side by side though ...
@@NCommander No I mean the UI fonts. They seem to be the same as on normal Windows 3.1.
Those fonts still seem to be in there. In fact some years ago I've seen an embedded Windows thingy rebooting and for a while it had those crisp bitmap fonts on, instead of the blurry vector fonts more modern systems use now.
@@wrtlpfmpf Not just non-NT. 3.x versions, incl. NT 3.1/3.5/3.51
Would be interesting to see you chat with Dave from 'Dave's Garage' around this
You have a really calming voice. Subbed for the content as well.
My chat has had me do Cave Johnson impressions as well :)
@@NCommander yoo where can i hear that?! :D
What we really need is an embedded version of MS Paint.
The world's not ready for how awesome NCommander's embedded web pages would be if he also had Paint.
I remember having Windows 3.1 on single floppy drive (1.72MB) with calmira as a part of system.
Hi, there is a win 3.1 version floating around the net, i have it in my Pentium 100 and it boots of the floppy and expands to about 1.7 / 2meg - it expands into the 32 meg system ram ( 12 meg is set up as a ram drive )
If any one wants it search for min windows or win 3.1 single floppy boot or win31 and pcdos 7 - my only regreat is it come with ski not solitare but that is a easy fix :)
@@georgemaragos2378 well, i had it stripped down to fit into floppy. literally boot from floppy, without ram drive. Windows 3.1x is really versatile in this and i loved tinkering with it.
Where can I download this 10MB version of Windows NT 4.0 Embedded?
Apparently from the video you can't, only the install tools to generate the collection of files.
How have I not found this channel before :o
I've noticed something like this eons ago inside Windows' (XP? 7?) installations. As far as I can remember, it was called DOSX. Basically it was the GUI used to run Windows installer.
Brought active desktop along for the party made me laugh really hard.
I suppose you can say you created an embedded version of the Live Stream 🤣
I really wish I could post the "no no, he has a point" meme here right now ...
Does anyone know how to actually get files into an nt4 embedded VM under virtual box.. the guest tools need sp6 but embedded comes with sp5
Nice video. I'm so glad I don't have to do this anymore :)
Now if only Microsoft could make a modern OS fit on anything smaller than a DVD...
Also, Archaeologist for life!
@@pikachulovesketchup666 And yet you can get all that in Linux with less than half the disk space requirements and a decent bit of added security through not using the system everyone is making viruses for.
very cool subbeddd
I’m curious how this handles ctrl+alt+del? I ask because at work our Linux based tills actually restarts the till application as opposed to restarting the whole computer, locking, etc. and I’m wondering how an ‘embedded’ version of NT would handle it.
On a side note, I’ve decided to try installing OS/2 Warp 4 on an old computer, I’m wondering though whether to give it the radioactive hotdog treatment or not.
I believe its just disabled in the registry by default. I'd have to load up the VMs to check, but I believe Target Designer has an option for autologin.
(all versions of NT had an automatic login feature, although it was buried in the resource kit documentation on hwot ouse it).
Only 10 MB for a web and file server with multithreading, object-based security ACLs and auditing, some drivers, and a GUI. That still seems impressive today. Is there a way to get modern Linux or BSD that small with all the same functionality present?
I would love to see Windows XP Embedded. I have messed with it awhile back and have seen it used in real world devices.
Integrating drivers indeed looks quite painful. A far cry from even the INFINST utility shipped on the Windows 98 CD, which was quite easy to use and even supported adding OS components that way (I used it to integrate some Win ME stuff onto a Win 98 CD.)
Painful but only once for a custom product that could get shipped out and deliver a lot of value.
The smallest Windows 11 version is 40 mb (just boots and does nothing) to 50-100 mb (something similar shown in the video)
Is there a link to the 6 hour stream?
Waiting with hope for XP Embedded overview...
I remember installing this on a dual pentium pro years ago.
This would be cool for dual booting ELKS embedded Linux with on old 486 handhelds and micro PCs
Target Designer seems like the kind of thing that Microsoft no longer provides for newer versions.
They do, but in a different form. Check out Windows 10 IoT / Dev App Embedded Mode if you are interested :)
embeded was mainly used by banks and others ATM's not sure where it sat in other industries at the time however most of its use would likely been, ce is generally thought up as a continuation their embedded system platform
Long time before xz was available in the Linux kernel, there was Linux distros in the floppy drive, one has even X server
It seems to be microsoft's own version of N-lite/ Pe creator for windows NT version.
Where can I find that version of windows ? , to have some fun :)
i'm going to guess that the images were built to a CF Card instead of a HDD since they were used a lot in embedded systems (Still are actuallly) where the host hardware is PC-Like
This would have been a fun but painful project. Even dipping my toes in NT4 workstation gave me issues
Good vid.
"It's all reduced to a plymouth theme, a chipset with a mac address and firmware licensed may be after questionable statements?!"
Not so long ago NT 4 and 2000 was used here in my country in ATMs :D
Wait..MichaelMJD?! When I clicked on this video I knew you sounded familiar!
What I can mention is that the only real-world installations of Windows NT 4 Embedded I've ever seen were on parts of Singapore's MRT system in the late 1990s and throughout 2000s.
First was that all the GTMs (General Ticketing Machines) ran Windows NT 4 Embedded, with a small landscape VGA resolution display on the North East Line (NEL) and a portrait unidentified resolution display (probably also VGA resolution) on East West and North South lines (EWL and NSL respectively), and a giant touchable map of the MRT system at the time. I saw those restarting, and they did use the "Minimal OS" base. The Windows NT 4 blue splash screen did show, then the teal background, "Logging On / Logon in progress…", MRT train image (on NEL GTMs, or the standard Windows NT 4 Embedded image on EWL/NSL GTMs), and it immediately launched into the GTM software with its own splash screen showing the initialisation process as it launched support/interface apps, including "LuxLita" or "LuxLite" to run the marquee at the top that indicated status and payment method failures, after which it loaded the menu. I remember there was a photo on Flickr of one of the EWL/NSL GTMs at the time showing a "Diskeeper Disk Defragmenter" window on top of the GTM menu. They had single-board computers with Pentium 2 and what I think was 128 or 256 MB of RAM inside them.
The second use was for advertising displays inside the first batch of North East Line trains. Those didn't have the MRT image as a background (the regular teal was used instead), and the digital signage software used some version of Java. Java and "Service Control Manager" errors frequently appearing (there are some photos of that on Flickr if I recall correctly) led SBS Transit to phase those out and permanently turn off the displays.
The modern GTMs, as far as I know, run some unknown OS that's probably an RTOS of some kind, since it has its own "GTM Shutting Down" screen with an animated background instead of the regular Windows shutdown screen, and I only saw it once or twice around the time the old NT4e based machines were being replaced.
EIther this or XP were used for the MetroCard vending machines here in New York City, although that system was backedned by OS/2 of all things.
NT 4/XP Embedded ended up in a lot of weird places, and I always wonder what drove that design decision at the time
@@NCommander Seems like a safe choice for product managers. There are plenty of ready availability programmers familiar with Windows to build your team. With a small footprint on your deployed device, it offers a really rich set of system functionality that would cover many different embdded use cases. And it comes from a huge vendor who will be around for many years.
*sees sparks*
Me: *This I gotta see.*
9:34 Guessing the proper way forwards there, is to make the nethack component dependent on the multimedia-component
You can't import winmm as an individual component (I actually did look into that in the full length stream). It's only part of the Standard OS target which brings the total image up to 100 MiB.
I once did something similar as far as stripping down windows, I once made a boot floppy with dos 6.2 and win 3.1, everything you needed to boot into file manager and execute programs from a 1.4meg floppy.
Is this like the china dos union floppy image on win world that has dos and win 311 on it?
@@GenOner I have no idea, I read that it was possible in a computer mag then set out to try it. never heard of china dos union floppy. start with a dos 6.2 bootable floppy then copy the required widows files. drivers and fonts too. didn't take me long to figure out but that was back in mid to late 90's.
Well you could also push the low level format a bit further and get 1.7-1.8mb out of a 3.5" floppy too. Not very standard but most drives can do it.
@11:20 - I did some work using WinXP Embedded - the intended use typically wasn't hard drives at all, but storage like Compact Flash, which you could easily eject then plug into your embedded device.
Well, a CF card is identical to a HDD as far as software is concerned (they're both ATA devices), but yeah. I was more thinking "Disk on a chip" when we did this.
I really want a very lightweight version of windows 10
Windows NT 4 Embedded with console ... just like Windows Server Core nowadays ;)... (by the way there is a text-only version of Windows NT recently, with Windows Server Nano :), but of course not historic).
except it behaves like a regular windows installation, as it can run graphical software on it :)
@@fabiosarts You can actually run graphical software on many server core and PE installations.
i once checked out Windows longhorn mobile to get similar experience for a laptop...
its real thing that we all desire lightweight stack and fast boot
"It's all reduced to a plymouth theme, a chipset with a mac address and firmware licensed may be after questionable statements?! It's only the virtual disk you used to export. I really enjoyed eMacs while trying to install Wine. That doesn't exist in the heavy metal industry. NT should mean Native, after all..."
I'm sure this is what was used for OG XBOX OS, the clever bastards in the DirectX team basically just ripped the kernel out and used a super barebones version. Got it down to about 6 meg I think
Ngl your videos are like MJD
There's a good documentary on the official xbox channel about the history of the console. When making the original xbox to show bill gates a prototype they stripped out everything they didn't need from windows kernel. when it booted in like 3 seconds bill was like "why the $#@! doesn't windows boot that fast!" lol
Windows XP Embedded? Integrating drivers and more support exists, but it is still a nightmare to get the thing deployed. The NTLDR doesn't work out of the box, not even the boot.ini file works properly. The only way I got my images to boot is by dual-booting XP Embedded with XP Pro. Hopefully I will find a way to get Windows XP Embedded working automatically after copying the system files to the target computer without dual-booting or anything.
can you give me A vhd file for the command prompt only
there is minint that acts like a windows pe environment irrc for windows setup :) fits on a floppy disk
So it is like MVS system for mainframes, you need a starter system first to set up the actual system, you need a lot of configuration and the process is nowhere near intuitive or straightforward ;-)
This runs on my old GPS
i still find it funny that xp is based on NT technology on the xp splash screen even tho NT stands for new technology making the statement based on NT technology laughably redundant
NT's architect previously made VMS. One letter ahead is WNT. I like the theory that they made the initials first, then made up an excuse for the letters.
flash it to W25Q128 flash chips
Linux: HMB
Shows DamnSmallLinux
WHERE IS DOWNLOAD LINK!?
Is it normal for Megabytes to be called MiB? I've never seen that, I don't think?
-iB means a power of 2 bytes - e.g. 1kB is 1000 bytes but 1kiB is 1024 bytes
10MB..........does this mean you can run it on the boot partition of a system without being detected?
Probably, you could probably get it smaller. The manual talks about using a read only boot device.
The past will come and haunt you. It's the worst nightmare when you have to deal with this on a historical machine tool. All of this stuff should be collected and thrown into an boiling volcano or hidden below some incredibly heavy stones in a desert like the stargate in the movie. 😁
A million years later the aliens will dig it up and run it. Then set a quarantine beacon warning everyone about Earth's dangerous digital booby-traps.
Wow; and i though at 50MB Windows 95 was small.
The SEGA Dreamcast console ran NT.
No, it was a custom operating system. It was designed to run CE which is unrelated to NT, but that was still loaded off the disk, and not from firmware.
Give it a public address and see if it gets hacked ! Pretty fun!
11:11 From reading old blogs about people who worked on that, that pretty much sums how they worked. Its awkward by modern standards, I guess.
Users would be engineers doing one-time design of a product that could then be shipped for years.
My solution to installing drivers would be to boot the target system and install the drivers.
Or have a deployment software that would setup drivers and the main software on the first boot. The downside would be the extra space needed for the software itself so no read only images.
The target system may not be a PC, but some kind of weird single board computer that only knows how to start up from its ROM and everything else has to be in that ROM.
"I use Microsoft Arch btw"
You sound like Michael MJD
Beat the tinycore
oh you need a custom driver you just need to code it into the system it self trust me its easy just follow the example file
I found something even smaller. A version of Windows XP only 4MB in size!
I have found my people
Wow, amazing. Except ... a full (non-embedded) Linux kernel is smaller than that.
With X, userland, drivers, full core API and more?
My /boot/vmlinuz-5.18.0-2-amd64 file for Debian Unstable is 7.5MB.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Does that include ACL based multiuser object security and auditing, a file server, a web server, and a GUI?
@@editingsecrets Multiuser, ACLs, virtualization and containerized namespaces are built-in. The rest is optional, you can add it if you want it.
Oh, and support for a wide range of filesystems, as well.
And no drive letters.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 There's a way to build Linux with file and web serving, using only 10 MB of ROM for the code? Debian Linux shows Samba alone as a 25 MB package.
11:15 netbooting?
Support for netbooting on Windows has always been kinda iffy. I couldn't find any menthon of it in the documentation. I'm not certain that PXE booting was supported until the XP era (NT4 can start Windows Installation Services via RPL, but it can't run diskless)
Diskless doesnt mean ramdisk-less :P
since when do Windows 10 became a game to loads up explorer and type "dir etc jjj jjj jackpot."。
0:09 WTF was that?
Mmmm what about windows 11 embedded :)
Embedded operating systems have been replaced with Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT 2022.
@@dragogos Hey thank you for that info i would have gone many years without knowing lol :)
Win10 should fit in 1GiB
MiB?? You mean MB (Megabytes)???
MiB is the correct term for things measured in powers of 2 (i.e 1024 KiB = 1 MiB).
MB is commonly used, but is technically 1000 kb = 1MB, which is why the HDD industry likes it. In my old job, there were times I had to make the distinction, so I got in the habbit of writing MiB (its short for megibyte, but no one actually *says* that).