And yet NT Embedded got a rather long usage on select hardware, including ATMs and kiosks. I remember seeing it bootlooping on a kiosk at Uno's Pizzeria at the Providence Place Mall circa 2015.

having developed for NT and XP embedded, your supposition is largely correct: after figuring out your components and core system on the development environment, you would write the deployment files to either EPROM/EEPROM or on flash media like CF card, or micro drive (pretty new at the time still compared to CF or EPROM). a lot of systems more or less kept CF cards in use well past their prime, and even today. for PC-109 hardware you had some better options like more standard ATA devices or network booting. for many machines, the HMI element would simply be a UI for the machine operator and the signals would only be handled locally if they were real-time dependent (e-stop) and if not, passed to the PLC network and controller via the serial bus. once all the issues were ironed out, the deployment would be made semi-permanent by writing to ROM and some EEPROM or flash memory added for persistent data, allowing machine operators a fast "return to normal", while preserving machine parameters needed for operations (like running speed, calibration of belt tension on an arm, thickness of material, language and date/time, et c). for device drivers, they were integrated in cooperation with the device manufacturer or simply provided for the target hardware (panelmate, johnson controls, schneider electric, siemens, et c). often these were commercial drivers modified with build manifests and packaged explicitly for embedded systems. modern embedded systems in factories still work more or less in this fashion, but almost always offer more advanced communication methods to a central system for management. at the HMI though, it's still a UI with controller and ROM/RAM for the bootable image and persistence with some communication back to the controllers for display of sensor output or handle local functions.

A note on the image build method, that's actually fairly normal and to be expected. A number of embedded devices either had internal CF cards, PCMCIA storage, or other odd storage methods that required specialised software for data transfer. Dumping the files into a folder means that you could either write direct to the CF/PCMCIA card, or you could transfer the files using the manufacturer's software. I remember one device that required the data be placed onto a CF card, with a specific trigger file on it, then perform a device reboot while holding specific keys, all to overwrite data on the internal flash storage.

Finally, enough space for me to plat Microsoft flight simulator

I've watched through the whole stream, one of the finest 6 hours spent on KZfaq up to this date IMO. I have a huge admiration for you knowledge and the diligence with which you create the videos. Please do not stop making this kind of content. BTW. watching you struggling with the Component Designer made me think about "intuitive UX" and then Kahneman's "Fast and slow thinking" came to my mind. There is a theory, and actually there are some studies behind this, that if you've been given a task, and finishing the task includes some friction (i.e. the task is described with a slightly ineligible font), you start to employ some parts of your brain, which you wouldn't if the description was perfectly legible and your effort is not so "brainless" anymore. So, I'm thinking of starting being a fan of "not so intuitive UX + a good user manual" instead of a friction-less and "intuitive" design, which sometimes resembles "magic". Idk, maybe there is something to it.

I once supported a system that ran NT4 Embedded.... it was a building / HVAC control system. Programmed in Microsoft's Java, it ran in its own little Java engine on the machine and talked to the building over a network called LONworks. The Java software is still commonly in use today - the framework is made by a company called Niagara. I was able to turn the install "back" into one with a GUI by doing an offline edit of the registry. I forget what keys it was that disables the GUI, I exported the registry from a fresh NT4 desktop install, and moved big chunks into the NT4 Embedded system. The GUI is disabled some number of days after the install, and you're left with just the blue Windows NT startup screen.

Glad to see the finished product! Another gem from everybody's favorite masochist, NCommander

I also love strange and obscure software and I'm so glad to have found a KZfaqr who focuses on it! The other retro tech KZfaqrs I've found tend to focus on hardware and gaming, but I have a fascination with things like vintages operating systems, desktop environments, networking and productivity software, and I was so excited when I saw your IE for Unix video and discovered you had more videos like that on your channel!

I could see this still being useful for old games which absolutely need an install of older Windows to run. Combining the game with what is essentially a 10 MB "wrapper" Windows around them in a pre-packaged VM sounds very attractive. Thank you for this video!

As part of a hard of hearing family, my brain is pretty good at catching non-autogen CC by now. Thank you for the time and effort you put into this. 💜

This reminds me of my own brief adventure with an embedded system. I bought an IDE disk-on-module some time ago and it ended up arriving with a copy of windows XP embedded on it from a mcdonalds in atlanta. I didn't know that latter part until I managed to get explorer running and found all sorts of weird leftover data, including evidence of a mcdonalds exclusive VPN and weird ronald mcdonald propaganda

Windows CE used a very similar workflow to this to building images. It was unpleasant at best, and the solution I came up with for installing drivers and whatnot was to script setting it up after making an image, then take an image of that.

I think that this format is great. I watched the entire livestream and still enjoyed the video. As for one who watched the livestream, the video can provide research on topics that we were uncertain about. But by only watching the video, you get left out of that live experience, where you can directly communicate with the streamer and know that you can see his unedited, unscripted sequences of suffering. And web page designing. Overall, good job, NCommander!

0:35 dozens of employees at a Fortune 500 company gather to the building lobby, staring in awe and confusion, as a random dude in his bedroom live streams installing Windows NT Embedded (designed to complement Windows CE) on their company's Jumbotron

You can rest assured it hasn't got any easier in newer embedded versions. I've had the pleasure of WES7 (Windows Embedded Standard 7) and it's still a pain in the only now everything is a DISM ultimately

I used a Windows 7 ISO of 50mb. Incredible how much they can remove.

I remember when I was working at Anheuser-Busch brewery in Houston back in the late 90s and early 2000s, their production lines initially had Windows NT 3.51 for line controllers, which was replaced during upgrades to Windows NT 4.0 Embedded. I also remembering over time seeing a Windows XP Embedded and a Windows 7 Embedded.

I can really imagine some minimal install being created back in it's days for industrial machinery computers running solid state storage of the day, say a CNC mill or such, that requires a vibration rugged controller PC, still compatible with Windows NT for connectivity reasons for example. I wonder how much of such situations were indeed the case back then, cause nowadays there are indeed such machines running some form of Windows, often outdated for years (as let's be honest, a CNC has no need at all for looks updates and such).

I setup hundreds of WYSE thin clients on NT4 (standard) with roaming profiles and WRQ Reflection to connect as a VT220 terminal to our Unix and NT servers. I think the image was 16 megs. Good times!

You have a really calming voice. Subbed for the content as well.

It's likely that it shipped with a big manual about how to use everything, or perhaps someone from Microsoft would do a demo (since embedded systems are usually custom orders). UI design for complex apps wasn't quite as refined in the 90s as it is today, so it's likely it'd be a lot different if it were to be built today.

This vaguely reminds me of the PicoXP experiment back when guys like me, Bart, Nuno and the rest of the nu2/911CD crew were still messing with WinPE. I'm not sure about the workflow of using a 2nd HDD and moving it to the target computer for testing but it's probably more along the lines of copying a CompactFlash or SD card. HDDs from that era were still cost prohibitive and slow. Most of the ones I had were still 3800RPM, which is unheard of today.

Ahh that "System" Font was actually replaced with "System", the System font of "normal", non-NT Windows.

NT Embedded sort of lives on as Windows IoT Core. Anyway as someone who has had to program Windows CE / Windows Embedded Compact, I wish they had jumped to NT. Windows CE sucked and it sucked in ways that were non obvious if you were just reading a datasheet. e.g. the C/C++ standard libs were cut to the bone so it was very hard to port libs over to CE when half of STL was missing. And there were stupid little breakages and gotchas all over the place, e.g. processes had no concept of current directory, or of environment variables so if you needed to open a file it had to be an absolute path. Maybe these things made sense in the days of iPaq but fast forward 10 years when CE was on its last legs and it was just an annoying hindrance. So I was very happen when CE was dropped as a platform for our product. We used Windows 10 IoT Enterprise which is basically Windows 10 Professional without all the supplemental drivers and our Windows desktop product more or less just worked straight away.

Would be interesting to see you chat with Dave from 'Dave's Garage' around this

If you run taskmgr from the barebones install, how much memory is it actually using?

How have I not found this channel before :o

Nice video. I'm so glad I don't have to do this anymore :)

What we really need is an embedded version of MS Paint.

very cool subbeddd

I would love to see Windows XP Embedded. I have messed with it awhile back and have seen it used in real world devices.

I've noticed something like this eons ago inside Windows' (XP? 7?) installations. As far as I can remember, it was called DOSX. Basically it was the GUI used to run Windows installer.

Where can you download this? Would it be possible for you to provide some type of image of a working environment, like an exported VirtualBox appliance?

I suppose you can say you created an embedded version of the Live Stream 🤣

I remember having Windows 3.1 on single floppy drive (1.72MB) with calmira as a part of system.

Now if only Microsoft could make a modern OS fit on anything smaller than a DVD... Also, Archaeologist for life!

Does anyone know how to actually get files into an nt4 embedded VM under virtual box.. the guest tools need sp6 but embedded comes with sp5

Integrating drivers indeed looks quite painful. A far cry from even the INFINST utility shipped on the Windows 98 CD, which was quite easy to use and even supported adding OS components that way (I used it to integrate some Win ME stuff onto a Win 98 CD.)

I’m curious how this handles ctrl+alt+del? I ask because at work our Linux based tills actually restarts the till application as opposed to restarting the whole computer, locking, etc. and I’m wondering how an ‘embedded’ version of NT would handle it. On a side note, I’ve decided to try installing OS/2 Warp 4 on an old computer, I’m wondering though whether to give it the radioactive hotdog treatment or not.

Brought active desktop along for the party made me laugh really hard.

I remember installing this on a dual pentium pro years ago.

Good vid.

Waiting with hope for XP Embedded overview...

Long time before xz was available in the Linux kernel, there was Linux distros in the floppy drive, one has even X server

embeded was mainly used by banks and others ATM's not sure where it sat in other industries at the time however most of its use would likely been, ce is generally thought up as a continuation their embedded system platform

Wait..MichaelMJD?! When I clicked on this video I knew you sounded familiar!

Only 10 MB for a web and file server with multithreading, object-based security ACLs and auditing, some drivers, and a GUI. That still seems impressive today. Is there a way to get modern Linux or BSD that small with all the same functionality present?

It seems to be microsoft's own version of N-lite/ Pe creator for windows NT version.

i once checked out Windows longhorn mobile to get similar experience for a laptop... its real thing that we all desire lightweight stack and fast boot

This would have been a fun but painful project. Even dipping my toes in NT4 workstation gave me issues

What I can mention is that the only real-world installations of Windows NT 4 Embedded I've ever seen were on parts of Singapore's MRT system in the late 1990s and throughout 2000s. First was that all the GTMs (General Ticketing Machines) ran Windows NT 4 Embedded, with a small landscape VGA resolution display on the North East Line (NEL) and a portrait unidentified resolution display (probably also VGA resolution) on East West and North South lines (EWL and NSL respectively), and a giant touchable map of the MRT system at the time. I saw those restarting, and they did use the "Minimal OS" base. The Windows NT 4 blue splash screen did show, then the teal background, "Logging On / Logon in progress…", MRT train image (on NEL GTMs, or the standard Windows NT 4 Embedded image on EWL/NSL GTMs), and it immediately launched into the GTM software with its own splash screen showing the initialisation process as it launched support/interface apps, including "LuxLita" or "LuxLite" to run the marquee at the top that indicated status and payment method failures, after which it loaded the menu. I remember there was a photo on Flickr of one of the EWL/NSL GTMs at the time showing a "Diskeeper Disk Defragmenter" window on top of the GTM menu. They had single-board computers with Pentium 2 and what I think was 128 or 256 MB of RAM inside them. The second use was for advertising displays inside the first batch of North East Line trains. Those didn't have the MRT image as a background (the regular teal was used instead), and the digital signage software used some version of Java. Java and "Service Control Manager" errors frequently appearing (there are some photos of that on Flickr if I recall correctly) led SBS Transit to phase those out and permanently turn off the displays. The modern GTMs, as far as I know, run some unknown OS that's probably an RTOS of some kind, since it has its own "GTM Shutting Down" screen with an animated background instead of the regular Windows shutdown screen, and I only saw it once or twice around the time the old NT4e based machines were being replaced.

"It's all reduced to a plymouth theme, a chipset with a mac address and firmware licensed may be after questionable statements?!"

Not so long ago NT 4 and 2000 was used here in my country in ATMs :D

Is there a link to the 6 hour stream?

*sees sparks* Me: *This I gotta see.*

i'm going to guess that the images were built to a CF Card instead of a HDD since they were used a lot in embedded systems (Still are actuallly) where the host hardware is PC-Like

@11:20 - I did some work using WinXP Embedded - the intended use typically wasn't hard drives at all, but storage like Compact Flash, which you could easily eject then plug into your embedded device.

I once did something similar as far as stripping down windows, I once made a boot floppy with dos 6.2 and win 3.1, everything you needed to boot into file manager and execute programs from a 1.4meg floppy.

The smallest Windows 11 version is 40 mb (just boots and does nothing) to 50-100 mb (something similar shown in the video)

Target Designer seems like the kind of thing that Microsoft no longer provides for newer versions.

Where can I find that version of windows ? , to have some fun :)

9:34 Guessing the proper way forwards there, is to make the nethack component dependent on the multimedia-component

I really want a very lightweight version of windows 10

Ngl your videos are like MJD

Where can I download this 10MB version of Windows NT 4.0 Embedded?

"It's all reduced to a plymouth theme, a chipset with a mac address and firmware licensed may be after questionable statements?! It's only the virtual disk you used to export. I really enjoyed eMacs while trying to install Wine. That doesn't exist in the heavy metal industry. NT should mean Native, after all..."

Windows NT 4 Embedded with console ... just like Windows Server Core nowadays ;)... (by the way there is a text-only version of Windows NT recently, with Windows Server Nano :), but of course not historic).

There's a good documentary on the official xbox channel about the history of the console. When making the original xbox to show bill gates a prototype they stripped out everything they didn't need from windows kernel. when it booted in like 3 seconds bill was like "why the $#@! doesn't windows boot that fast!" lol

So it is like MVS system for mainframes, you need a starter system first to set up the actual system, you need a lot of configuration and the process is nowhere near intuitive or straightforward ;-)

can you give me A vhd file for the command prompt only

I'm sure this is what was used for OG XBOX OS, the clever bastards in the DirectX team basically just ripped the kernel out and used a super barebones version. Got it down to about 6 meg I think

Linux: HMB Shows DamnSmallLinux

This runs on my old GPS

Give it a public address and see if it gets hacked ! Pretty fun!

flash it to W25Q128 flash chips

there is minint that acts like a windows pe environment irrc for windows setup :) fits on a floppy disk

My solution to installing drivers would be to boot the target system and install the drivers.

i still find it funny that xp is based on NT technology on the xp splash screen even tho NT stands for new technology making the statement based on NT technology laughably redundant

Windows XP Embedded? Integrating drivers and more support exists, but it is still a nightmare to get the thing deployed. The NTLDR doesn't work out of the box, not even the boot.ini file works properly. The only way I got my images to boot is by dual-booting XP Embedded with XP Pro. Hopefully I will find a way to get Windows XP Embedded working automatically after copying the system files to the target computer without dual-booting or anything.

WHERE IS DOWNLOAD LINK!?

The past will come and haunt you. It's the worst nightmare when you have to deal with this on a historical machine tool. All of this stuff should be collected and thrown into an boiling volcano or hidden below some incredibly heavy stones in a desert like the stargate in the movie. 😁

"I use Microsoft Arch btw"

11:11 From reading old blogs about people who worked on that, that pretty much sums how they worked. Its awkward by modern standards, I guess.

Wow; and i though at 50MB Windows 95 was small.

oh you need a custom driver you just need to code it into the system it self trust me its easy just follow the example file

Is it normal for Megabytes to be called MiB? I've never seen that, I don't think?

Beat the tinycore

The SEGA Dreamcast console ran NT.

You sound like Michael MJD

Wow, amazing. Except ... a full (non-embedded) Linux kernel is smaller than that.

10MB..........does this mean you can run it on the boot partition of a system without being detected?

11:15 netbooting?

I found something even smaller. A version of Windows XP only 4MB in size!

Andrea Borman! There you are! Holy God, I thought Hezbollah blew you up because he was your boyfriend! BUT YOU CAME BACK WITH A BEARD!!!

since when do Windows 10 became a game to loads up explorer and type "dir etc jjj jjj jackpot."。

I have found my people

0:09 WTF was that?

Mmmm what about windows 11 embedded :)

Win10 should fit in 1GiB

Another livestream with the same content as the last one? I thought you will play around with IE on unix today Ok, me like that