Windows made even smaller: NT4 and IE in 32MB

YESTERDAY'S STORY OF A MAN who managed to reduce the footprint of Windows 98SE down to 40MB fascinated many readers. It also prompted a couple of interesting pointers to arrive in the form of email. The quart into a pint pot award must go to a company called APCT for squeezing NT4 and IE onto a 32MB compact flash card.

APCT has a software solution designed to create a minimal system that you can boot from. There is a version for NT4 and a version for Windows 2000 - no size is mentioned for the latter. But there's a catch. You can't use the resulting trimmed down operating system like you normally would. It runs in memory only. Any changes you make, such as installing software, are gone the next time you boot.

Still, there are plenty of uses we can think of that make it worth checking out but we have no idea if it's any good or not. APCT is here and the product is called AbsoluteBoot.

Far more amazing size wise is a little product that we've known about for some time though, again, it's something we've never played with. Imagine an operating system that fits on a 1.44MB floppy disk. No problem, DOS did that, right? But this has a GUI. And a web browser too. And a TCP/IP stack. And a web server. And a text editor, file browser and some other bits and pieces. All on one floppy.

That ridiculous shoe-horning is achieved in QNX's Web Challenge, a promotion for its Neutrino realtime operating system. We wish we had time to try it.

There are even demo versions of Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament available for Neutrino for download off the QNX site, though don't go expecting those to fit on a floppy. µ

a floppy. µ

Update
A very bouncy regular reader has written in to point out three other tiny operating systems that are available. They are:
The INQUIRER friendly named µnOS
The Real Time MenuetOS
And the quite Funky SkyOS