Learning how to set those legacy deployments up in 'Hard to break' configurations is useful, and can be very helpful to the poor souls who have no choice but to work with OSes that ruled the earth in the age of the dinosaurs.
(vinyl cutters, CNC laser cutters, waterjet systems, metal detectors, even x-ray systems.) The hardware to keep those old systems running is aging and falling apart (IDE disks especially.) Being able to boot reliably and consistently in a guaranteed clean fashion each and every time with modern replacement parts (SDcard to IDE adapters and pals), makes such experimentation useful to at least a handful of people, making the silliness worthwhile. I have done some very silly things with win9x instances, including getting an instance of it to run entirely out of a syslinux memdisk, with drivespace compression turned on.įor the most part however, such silly things had some sliver of a sensible reason d'etre: Quite a few industrial systems run on 9x, even today.
