from Hacker News

Why didn't Win 95 setup use a miniature version of Win 95 as its fallback GUI?

by soheilpro on 3/18/25, 4:34 PM with 6 comments

• by jmkni on 3/18/25, 6:57 PM

  Another article where my first thought before even clicking the link was "I bet this was written by Raymond Chen" :)

• by Sophira on 3/19/25, 1:33 PM

  I wanted to expand a little on footnote #4, regarding how CD-ROM drives weren't really standardised.

  At the time, because of the lack of standardisation, there were a lot of different device drivers for different CD-ROM drives, and those would take up space. Even the boot disk that Windows 95 lets you create doesn't contain any CD-ROM drivers!

  It wasn't until Windows 98 that they included CD-ROM drivers into the boot disks that you could create, and even then it had to load multiple drivers, just to make sure that the drive you were using was actually supported.

• by theandrewbailey on 3/18/25, 10:03 PM

  > A technical reason is that the miniature version of Windows 3.1 compressed to only 441,906 bytes, or just under a third of the capacity of a single floppy disk.

  Microsoft used DMF, a custom format, for Windows 95 install floppies that held 1680 KB, so 441 KB would be about a quarter of one.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

• by cake-rusk on 3/19/25, 10:40 AM

  I wish I did not waste my time with windows in my youth and just got a head start with unix/linux.