I love this idea. I wish there was some kind of 2024 equivalent to doing this. Maybe a rewritable optical media of some sort. Sony really should have brought the minidisc to the pc as a floppy and cd/dvd rom replacement.
He'd either boot to it to 'hobble' his own laptop and remove all other distractions while writing, or boot to it from other peoples PCs to a set up he was used to and happy to work from when away from home. (Mike was one of the first technomads - or at least one of the first to post about it a lot.)
I had a similar set up for a while which I used with my home laptop or work PC at lunch time, but I never really got into writing as much as I'd hoped I would, so it wasn't that useful for me.
Interestingly W95 could be trimmed down to about 35mb, and carefully adding Word & Excel from Office97 was about another 65mb, so it ended up fitting if you had one of the huge 128mb USB sticks.
That's about the smallest I can figure you can get a 32-bit Windows office machine which would be "fully compatible" with the latest Windows & Office versions, as long as you were carefully storing your office files on a FAT32 partition and limiting your expectations (like file size and number of XL rows) to those addressed by W95 which was as functional an office machine as millions of people need today.
For those of you who did manage to run W95 at its full 2GHz maximum over 10 years later on much higher speed motherboards than there were in the 1990's, you know what I'm talking about when I say the most noticeable thing is zero latency in almost all human-computer interactions.
You could be doing all kinds of office work, with lots of other things to "boot".
Just got a couple more of the "small" 128GB SATA SSD that are finally cheap enough for bootable OS's to use like "game cartridges" now. Not much different "application", just faster booting and operation than most USB.
Two partitions on each SSD, one for an OS only, one for ALL related storage.
Still have some massive multibooting going on, but with these lttle SSDs the most up-to-date are going to be W11, W10x86, W10x64, Debian, Mint & Fedora.
Fortunately I got a few of the pre-NUC cheap ASUS miniPC that has a simple hatch on top and came with a full size SATA Desktop HDD right there. Gets even better ventilation and has no exposed electronics when the cover is off all the time, remove the HDD (for good now) and just slip in whichever SSD you feel like booting to at the time.
Looks like about 128GB will do what 128mb would do back in the day.
That's because DOS-based Windows could use the BIOS for disk access, and BIOS presented USB drives as hard drives. I believe you can even do the same with an NVMe SSD that has a suitable boot ROM.
W98 would install and run from USB too, as long as USB device drivers did not get installed. That way once booted if you plugged something into a USB socket on the MB, it was "unknown" and remained inaccessible. But if you booted when the second USB device was plugged in beforehand, W9x (or DOS) assigned an alphabetic drive letter and you could access the files.
Sometimes I still use a small FAT32 partition with simple DOS on a Syslinux'ed volume to boot distros from the NT5 bootloader. That way you can edit the Linux multiboot menu in Windows, or even DOS which sure boots a lot faster today.
Now they have USB enclosures for M.2 drives, usually not both NVMe & SATA flexibility though.
There was a SCSI drive for data storage in 1995, but it required special Data discs instead of standard audio ones: https://www.minidisc.wiki/equipment/sony/misc/mdh-10 (disclaimer, I run this site)
They finally did allow mass storage usage with Hi-MD as the format was dying out, but too little too late.
There's now a FUSE driver PoC for standard MD devices that have USB ports (NetMD) thanks to reverse engineering.
Lots of OS support live USB images. It’s only Windows and macOS that don’t (though I’m sure Windows could with a little effort).
> Sony really should have brought the minidisc to the pc as a floppy and cd/dvd rom replacement.
Sony did. But there were already removable writable formats that had larger capacity than a CD back when the minidisk was a thing and they didn’t become mainstream either.
Frankly I think MiniDisk is one of those technologies that people remember as being better than they actually were.
As MiniDisc and Zipdrive are obsolete I'd like to have a minicd or businesscard CD audioplayer based on a RaspberryPi Zero. With using Vocos, EnCodec or Lyra v2 you could fit 200 hours of stereo audio on the small cd at around 3 kbps and select them with some buttons and a LCD screen. Similar to the Imation RipGo or Memorex portable 8cm mini-cd players which could play mp3. https://languagecodec.github.io/
Alternatively I could use cassette or microcassette. https://hackaday.com/2021/10/20/audio-tape-interface-revives... https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/10/17/a-wind-up-cassette-play...
I could run a bootable OS on MicroSD and using external small cd's as data or app storage, perhaps also to boot from. An OS experience [Redox, Haiku, KolibriOS, Dragonfly, Fuchsia, MorphOS, Serenity] booting from a 8 cm business card CD depending on the day, weather or mood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_CD
Or perhaps just boot into a Raspberry Pi zero menu to select or boot a random OS from the Zero and use Airtagged encrypted USB-C sticks (making sure each OS can read the encrypted volumes).
CD based: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card
PCB based: https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/now-even-your-business-card-...
There’s also NFC based digital business cards, which are now really common. But they’re obviously it bootable / running Linux.
You can run macOS from a USB disk, although it won't be a readonly live disc like the Linux ones.
Mac OS can boot from external volumes too. It's not a traditional live image, the volume is usually writable and it's a real copy of Mac OS. We're probably talking actual HDD or SSD portable hard drives here, not flash drives, Mac OS isn't that small. You need a Mac to run one of these of course. No idea if this works across computers on Apple Silicon. The new Macs store a lot of the encryption and boot policy stuff in the SE, so I have no idea if booting an unrecognized system would actually work.
It's "Windows-to-Go", introduced in Windows 8.0 which had the full Windows functionality contained on the USB stick, if the bootable stick met the high-performance requirements and had firmware indicating to Windows that the USB stick was not a "Removable Device".
This was gradually deprecated for the most part:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
"Hiren’s BootCD PE (Preinstallation Environment) is a restored edition of Hiren’s BootCD based on Windows 11 PE x64. Given the absence of official updates after November 2012, the PE version is currently under development by the fans of Hiren’s BootCD. It features a curated selection of the best free tools while being tailored for new-age computers, supporting UEFI booting and requiring a minimum of 4 GB RAM."
>Sony did. But...
If it was from Sony, it was probably ridiculously expensive. Everything they sold had (and still has I think) the "Sony tax", making it uncompetitive with other standards, especially for something like removable media where the per-unit cost adds up quickly.
Probably similar for BD-RE (recordable, erasable) and BD-R, too.
Also the Windows ADK to make a custom Windows PE is how HBCD is made to load a windows desktop with a bunch of tools off a CDROM