Nearly 20 years ago when I was in IT, I had something like this using a tool called BartPE which allowed you to make a custom WinPE environment that could be booted from a USB drive. As someone who went on to make one of these "web desktops", maybe things like BartPE were a partial inspiration.
About 30 years ago when I was a programmer and support guy all in one, I had an MS-DOS boot disk and a 300 Megabyte Backpack portable hard drive. It was awesome. I had all of the source code, backups of the customer sites data and my programming environment with me no matter where I went.
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.
I randomly watched a scene from it on YouTube based on this comment, and in the background was a poster I never saw before that said "Trust Your Technolust", and just like that, I have my new life motto LOL
It's an Austrian LiveCD based on Debian; version 2024.02 was just released. It's not as slick as Knoppix, but it does come with lots of utilities and can start an X Windows desktop.
