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?…
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@erikjan btw there's a good chance that @SURF is already working on something like this (and if not, they would be the first I would think of) @wlaatje
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@Linkshaender paesaggio e colori autunnali molto belli. Bravi, godetevi tutto...anche le calorie 😘😘😘
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@weylandyutanicorp concordo @thegib
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@Linkshaender grazie! Buona domenica anche a te.
Ah, che bella Vienna. Per me la città della Sacher Torte e della Secession!
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“Aggredito a Roma per una felpa antifascista”. La denuncia del giornalista Alessandro Sahebi
@giornalismo
articolo21.org/2025/10/aggredi…
“Sono stato aggredito a Roma perché indossavo una felpa antifascista”. La denuncia è del giornalista
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@Gina voted for GitLab mostly because I have direct experience with it and I have none with Forgejo. Also I could be wrong but it seems to be more mature.
It’s really a hard question though. One is backed by a company which could always turn. But it’s also a lot more likely to be around and actively developed in 15 years (IMO).
I’ve self hosted GitLab CE (and more recently upgraded to EE for one feature which I don’t remember) for over 10 years and have no complaints.
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@Gina ok, then nl.code.eu & science.code.eu 🤓
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@jascha Italian area here. I'm on the negative side. My former boyfriend is HIV positive with undetectable viral load. Undetectable Untransmittable, with people still not believing I remained neg after 10 years relationship. We must talk about it, only showing real life allows to stop stigma. There are too many prejudices and media don't help, they talk about HIV poz criminals. Turning exceptions into normal. #hiv #UEqualsU
