These two posts have awoken old memories for me, because I used BartPE and I had a "magic" bootable MSDOS diskette.
I remember I also created a custom Windows NT build for a company I worked for around 1999. They had about 6 different models of Compaq workstation, and a dozen different departments. They had a disk imaging solution, rather than implement automated pxe builds. That's fine, except that nobody in the team had any "craft". Because NT isn't plug and play and each department had different software, we had about 20+ NT images, each with its own personality (ie major flaws, like hard-coded WINS servers, being already joined to a domain, old user profiles, broken software installations, old drivers). The day I joined the team, the phone rang constantly from 8am to closing time. If you walked around the building to do a desk visit, 20 people would shout at you, "hey IT guy, take a look at this PC, will you?". Coming from a hardware support background I had installed MS stuff thousands of times and got my MCSE, but Lotus Notes, Sunguard, Bloomberg and their awful VB6 apps (unpackaged collecting of dlls and instructions) had a short learning curve. After I figured that stuff out I created a single NT build with everything working perfectly. I cleaned up, defragged, ran sysprep. It used NT's hardware profiles to make the build work on any model of desktop (which just required imaging a new model, creating a profile for it and installing all the drivers. Rinse and repeat 6 times). Then I burned the highly compressed NT image along with ghost.exe onto a CD, and handed copies to the other 2 helpdesk guys. Anyone who called IT over the few weeks, regardless of their issue, got a rebuild. Result? Immediate reduction in workload. So we proactively worked through the whole company. Things were so tranquil afterwards, we could go around to department heads asking if there was any "real" IT work that needed to be done.
That one disk, man.