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My first PC I ever owned was scrap gathered from my friends. My only HDD was 120MB Conner Peripherals HDD that fell on asphalt out of jacket pocket of my frien

My first PC I ever owned was scrap gathered from my friends. My only HDD was 120MB Conner Peripherals HDD that fell on asphalt out of jacket pocket of my friend while he was riding a bike (no kidding!) and was crisscrossed with bad sectors. I put up an ambitious (back then) plan to map out all broken sectors and then try to fit Windows 95 and Delphi2 onto the rest. I remember I was left with something like 70MB of usable disk space and most of it was devoted to Delphi 2. I have spent a number of days iterating moving some Windows files, restarting to see if it still boots and does the job, restoring the files if it did not. I was left with something like 20MB (? I assume, I don't remember exactly). There was not a single file that I could remove without breaking it, I have edited a lot of registry and INI files to disable features to let me remove as much as possible. There was no sound support, no plug&play, no unnecessary tools, nothing. Hats off if you can do the same to Windows98 and shrink it to 5MB. It also reminds me the well known Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html)

exikyut 5y ago
This is honestly awesome. You would've learned more about the system by accident/happenstance than most people learn in years. You don't have the HDD anymore by any chance, do you? :) it would be cool to image it... So basically you had 70MB total to work with, you squished Win95 into 50MB, then had 20MB for Delphi? What were the rest of the system's specs, and what era was this in?
- lmilcin 5y ago
  It was circa 1998. It was 386DX, 96MB of memory, had monochromatic monitor, no enclosure (it rested on a towel) and no mouse (yes, I programmed graphical UIs without a mouse). Obviously no networking of any kind. Yes, it had more memory than HDD! It was my first development machine (after programmable calculator which was stolen) so I have fond memories of it. I believe minimum Delphi 2 install was over 70MB so I also had to cut it up to fit the drive.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    Smallest Delphi 2 installation is ~39MB, though that can still be cut a lot. For example the installer says it requires Borland Database Engine (~5MB) but it doesn't unless you use the database functionality. However the CD contains the uncompressed full installation files anyway so you can copy the files manually and check what it works by trial and error. You can get it around 4MB by doing so and shrink it even further by rebuilding the component palette to remove all the database stuff and deleting the database-related units (assuming you do not care about DB stuff of course). I remember back in the day i made an "install" set of 7 floppies (more than necessary but i wanted some extra stuff) to use with my 386 (which had no working CD ROM) for when my parents used the main PC. BTW that 96MB of memory most likely made a ton of difference, mine had 4MB and was horribly slow with Delphi 2 :-P
  - exikyut 5y ago
    It's honestly cool when "origin story" just doesn't do it justice and you have to pull out "bootstrap story" instead :) I got into a few situations like this myself, but none exactly this crazy :) How'd you fit 96MB RAM into a 386, btw?? My 486DX2s (2005 represent) only had room for a few MB of RAM. O.o How'd programming GUIs go without a mouse? Typing in x/y/w/h into the properties box? I'm guessing you have a slightly higher baseline awareness of accessibility (focus order, etc) than most, huh. Also, out of curiosity, what sort of programmable calculator was it? Wow, programming environments have always been headscratchingly big. (For a one-pass compiler and IDE, 70MB is kind of... surely the (converted) Win95 API headers didn't require that much space...)
a1369209993 5y ago
> Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html) > The Wikipedia page for C++ (214,251 bytes). $ wget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal $ wc Turbo_Pascal 668 10672 164349 Turbo_Pascal Never mind C++, rather: The Wikipedia page for Turbo Pascal (164,349 bytes).
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  This was written 10 years ago so it makes sense for the size to change.

exikyut 5y ago

This is honestly awesome. You would've learned more about the system by accident/happenstance than most people learn in years. You don't have the HDD anymore by any chance, do you? :) it would be cool to image it... So basically you had 70MB total to work with, you squished Win95 into 50MB, then had 20MB for Delphi? What were the rest of the system's specs, and what era was this in?

lmilcin 5y ago
It was circa 1998. It was 386DX, 96MB of memory, had monochromatic monitor, no enclosure (it rested on a towel) and no mouse (yes, I programmed graphical UIs without a mouse). Obviously no networking of any kind. Yes, it had more memory than HDD! It was my first development machine (after programmable calculator which was stolen) so I have fond memories of it. I believe minimum Delphi 2 install was over 70MB so I also had to cut it up to fit the drive.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Smallest Delphi 2 installation is ~39MB, though that can still be cut a lot. For example the installer says it requires Borland Database Engine (~5MB) but it doesn't unless you use the database functionality. However the CD contains the uncompressed full installation files anyway so you can copy the files manually and check what it works by trial and error. You can get it around 4MB by doing so and shrink it even further by rebuilding the component palette to remove all the database stuff and deleting the database-related units (assuming you do not care about DB stuff of course). I remember back in the day i made an "install" set of 7 floppies (more than necessary but i wanted some extra stuff) to use with my 386 (which had no working CD ROM) for when my parents used the main PC. BTW that 96MB of memory most likely made a ton of difference, mine had 4MB and was horribly slow with Delphi 2 :-P
- exikyut 5y ago
  It's honestly cool when "origin story" just doesn't do it justice and you have to pull out "bootstrap story" instead :) I got into a few situations like this myself, but none exactly this crazy :) How'd you fit 96MB RAM into a 386, btw?? My 486DX2s (2005 represent) only had room for a few MB of RAM. O.o How'd programming GUIs go without a mouse? Typing in x/y/w/h into the properties box? I'm guessing you have a slightly higher baseline awareness of accessibility (focus order, etc) than most, huh. Also, out of curiosity, what sort of programmable calculator was it? Wow, programming environments have always been headscratchingly big. (For a one-pass compiler and IDE, 70MB is kind of... surely the (converted) Win95 API headers didn't require that much space...)

a1369209993 5y ago

> Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html) > The Wikipedia page for C++ (214,251 bytes). $ wget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal $ wc Turbo_Pascal 668 10672 164349 Turbo_Pascal Never mind C++, rather: The Wikipedia page for Turbo Pascal (164,349 bytes).

badsectoracula 5y ago
This was written 10 years ago so it makes sense for the size to change.