On 17 February 2014 17:50, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
I'm not following. I have self-extracting boot
floppies made in 1997 still
on my system.
I used to be a field engineer. I needed tools with me, on-site.
In 1997 I could not rely on having an Internet connection, let alone
broadband, at the client's site or in my office. I could not rely on
having a working computer to download and make an image, or having
tools to write an image. So I took ready-made disks with me, and if I
was in an office with multiple PCs and caught without my boot disks,
all I needed was a Win98 PC and a blank disk to have a ready-to-go
boot disk with CHKDSK, FDISK, FORMAT, SYS etc. all ready to run
courtesy of the system-disk-creation tool right there in Windows
Setup.
*Now* I can just download one and write it. If I don't have an
image-writing tool, I can download one of them, too.
In practice, I tended to tweak the MS disk a little, adding things
like SMARTDRV, mouse support, a UK keyboard, DOSKEY and I think XCOPY
and removing some README and help files.
Sure, I could have built my own and in the pre-Win9x days, I did, but
after the OS will obligingly make you one, why bother?
--
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