The Version of Windows NT That Fits in 10 MiB (Embedded Edition)

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Published on July 23, 2021 4:00:23 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIlJQ_HC6EQ

Duration: 12:13

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Today, we're diving into Windows NT Embedded, which is an almost unknown and forgotten variant of Windows. Designed to complement Windows CE, NT Embedded was designed for embedded systems that weren't as constrained, or for appliance like devices where one still wanted or needed the full Windows experience. It's rather impressive that a minimum image size of 10 megabytes is entirely viable!

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If this sounds familiar, it's because I did a six hour live-stream on the topic. The topic ending up being interesting enough that I wanted to revisit it in a standalone video, with the stream edited down to size, with new voice over, and edited down into a free-standing video.

In this exciting installment of NCommander In Realtime, we're going to dive into NT 4 Embedded, setup a build environment, explore what the minimal OS image is, and then set out to make some custom OS images. This lead down a windy road to explore various deployment configurations, determine what, if any changes were made for embedded edition were, and just seeing how minimal the minimal operating system image.

Afterwords, I decided to make two appliance like devices. The first is an embedded web server accessible over SMB filesharing. This was pretty easy to do with the premade targets available in Target Designer, followed by creating a true abomination in web design. The next image was a minimal image involving NetHack 3.4.3, which required some fiddling, but only came to about 15 MiB when all was said and done.

NT Embedded would eventually lead to XP Embedded, and a full replacement of the Windows CE line, so it's interesting to see its origins from the early 2000s, and the rough edges. We might dive in later with Windows XP Embedded, or perhaps Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs

#windowsnt #embedded #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing