5 ms·

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

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...)

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...)