Windows 95, With Just a Floppy Drive
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Windows 95, With Just a Floppy Drive
It’s something of a shock to be reminded that Microsoft’s Windows 95 is now 30 years old — but the PC operating system that brought 32-bit computing to the masses and left behind a graphical interface legacy which persists to this day, is now old enough that many in the community have never actually seen it. The original requirements were a 386 or better, 4 megabytes of memory, and a hard drive. [Robert’s Retro] is exploding one of those requirements, creating a full Windows 95 install using only a floppy drive.
As you might imagine, even if you had one of the super-rare 2.88 megabyte drives, such a feat would require a few tricks. In this case the biggest trick is the FlashPath, a curious 1990s peripheral that allows a SmartMedia card to be used in a floppy drive. With a special DOS driver it allows what is in effect a 32 megabyte floppy disk, but even that’s not enough for ’95. In come a couple of further tricks, installing Windows 95 to a compressed DriveSpace volume which is copied to the FlashPath, and copying the Drivespace volume to a RAM drive and mounting it, on boot. It needs a conventional floppy to boot before swapping to the FlashPath and it seems the copying process is extremely slow, but we’d expect Windows 95 from RAM to be very quick indeed.
There have been other minimalist Windows 95s over the years, but what makes this one unusual is that it’s a full install. Five years ago at the OS’s quarter century we took a look at it with 2020 eyes, and tried gauge its effect on modern desktops.
youtube.com/embed/EtVliZx1Q8o?…
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@jspijker exactly, in which case Forgejo would be a great option. For anything more complicated an org can always set up their own GitLab (or whatever they like).
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@Gina Does it matter? At our gov institute we have an internal/private Gitlab instance, doing all the CI/CD for our (very specific) pipelines. For our public/open projects we use Github, with some limited CI/CD (mostly generating Github pages). Both Gitlab and Forgejo can do that. From a user perspective, I would be very happy with a gov owned codeplatform with basic features. For more complex stuff you can roll out an internal instance with all the needed features.
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@Gina same. It's mostly a timing issue in many cases. If you need the functionality now you may have to pay for it. If you can contract with someone to implement it for you, say over 6-12 months then everyone profits.
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@Gina it is... a lot! I've been part of a few implementations and it's never easy. Both on functional and technical demand. Best of luck figuring this thing out! I look forward to working on a govt-wide git forge someday! 😁 it might be worth checking in with ODC-Noord. I think they already allow government agencies to sign up to their git environment. How they came to certain design decisions and such ☺️
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@owlcode absolutely, and finance (think of what GitLab EE licenses cost)
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Conraid (Blank) (@conraid.bsky.social)
https://bsky.app/profile/conraid.bsky.social/post/3m43kw6nr2c2e
"Oggi", nel 1973, usciva Quadrophenia degli Who. Un concept album diventato anche film qualche anno dopo, con Sting come attore.
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@Gina a big institution,like a nation, as a user could push the development and fixing of the platform at an important level
