15 Year Anniversary of Workstation LiveCDs coming soon - anybody interested in a limited "good ole times Release" ?

[continuum]

In october 2004 my Workstation-on-a-LiveCD construction kit called MOA was mentioned in public for the first time - earlier discussions in Bart Lagerwijs old nu2nu-forum not counted.
Before that I spend almost a  year fighting against a major roadblock:
Workstation requires "pseudo-accounts" to be establised in registry and    PE-liveCDs operate using the SYSTEM-accout only.
Running Workstation on that platform was considered to be impossible  - but I did not wanted to listen ....
As so often the solutin was closer than I thought ...

... and I had a good reason to celebrate.

A few weeks after that I published my fiirst MOA release for Workstation 4.5.2
Several exciting years later one of the last builds I released looked like:

With a footprint of about 250 - 300 Mb for the Win 2003 system plus Workstation 6.5.3 it could load completely into RAM.
This build even came with a buildin ESXi - VM and a FreeBSD-firewall and it was a lot of fun ...

2006 - 2010 I used a similar build to get rid of my old fashioned "Windows-on-a-harddisk" style of computer usage
and thought that could be the next big thing ....
15 years later folks stil use computers with a harddisk based operating system  .... go figure ....
Anyway - is anybody still using Workstation on top of a RAM-loading mini-system these days ?
If not - why not ?
If I get enough feedback I consider a limited "good ole times MOA WSi anniversary" release.

Ulli

[RDPetruska]

Ulli,

I might still have copies of those old releases buried somewhere, LOL.

I'm personally using VMware now to run old DOS machines, since I work with embedded systems - Intel multibus board computers.  So we use old 16-bit Intel compilers, etc, for Fortran, PL/M and Assembly.  I'm working on migrating to a Win7 32bit platform (since that's the latest OS that can run 16-bit apps) - since our old PROM burner is dying, and the new one uses a USB interface, which needs a Windows system.  Plus I'm trying to migrate our Sparc Solaris 2 system to an Intel Solaris 10 system - which houses our software repository - so that I can have the entire system virtualized, and no longer need this antique hardware.

[wila]

Ulli,

Also have some MOA iso's laying around here. Even have a hard disk laying around with MOA on it.

As for LiveCDs, I don't use them much. Most of the time it is for troubleshooting or fixing something (eg. extending a partition is probably my mostly used feature of a LiveCD)

Your "running from a minimal OS" approach did kind of take off, but in a slightly different way.

With a company that has the marketing budget to make it work and it is called a "chromebook".

Yes it still runs from a hard disk, but most of the apps running on it are running in the cloud or at least cloud oriented.

MOA was and is an interesting concept. The question is what it would need for it to work in a commercial outset.

I think it still has promise, but i tprobably would need a premade VM for users in which they could do most of the commonly needed things already.

The old MOA is mostly interesting for VMware aficiniados, not for normal computer users.

--

Wil