The last (technically retro, but wasnt really then, just obsolete) machine I bothered giving a name to was apltly named 'Lazarus.'
It was a pentium 90, with 512mb of RAM, a floppy drive, and a network card.
My sister *needed* a computer, (any computer), and I was unemployed after the tech bubble burst of the early 2000s. So, I had 0$ budget.
I had a computer of my own in the same house (I was living with my immediate family, due to being unemployed and broke), and was able to store a 256mb Drivespace3 compressed volume file on the storage it had.
Lazarus booted the following way:
From the diskette, Win98se minimal envirionment, with 'harddisk correct' msdos.sys, was started, along with drvspace.bin and drvspace.sys.
Himem.sys, emm386.exe, xmsdsk.exe, and network stacks were started.
The 256mb compressed volume file as copied from the SMB share to the xmsdsk supplied ramdisk.
Once this was done, the network stack was unloaded.
A copy of scandisk was present on the floppy. It was used to mount the compressed volume file after being copied using the undocumented /mount argument.
This left a ramdisk based, compressed 'drive C' that was appropriate for that system.
Windows was started by running win.com
This gave a 'functional' copy of windows on the machine, that on startup, automatically connected to the SMB share. This was the only persistent storage.
It literally was raised from the dead as a zombie this way on every bootup, and was made from old, obsolete discarded parts, on a budget of 0$, and only operated this way because I had no other choice: no money to buy hrd disks with, and no spare hard disks to throw in it.
It was very painful to use, but barely met its user's needs.
I was very happy to let it finally die.
