Started doing this when the first USB sticks became available. Even in Windows 95, which didn't support USB at the time.
Interestingly W95 could be trimmed down to about 35mb, and carefully adding Word & Excel from Office97 was about another 65mb, so it ended up fitting if you had one of the huge 128mb USB sticks.
That's about the smallest I can figure you can get a 32-bit Windows office machine which would be "fully compatible" with the latest Windows & Office versions, as long as you were carefully storing your office files on a FAT32 partition and limiting your expectations (like file size and number of XL rows) to those addressed by W95 which was as functional an office machine as millions of people need today.
For those of you who did manage to run W95 at its full 2GHz maximum over 10 years later on much higher speed motherboards than there were in the 1990's, you know what I'm talking about when I say the most noticeable thing is zero latency in almost all human-computer interactions.
You could be doing all kinds of office work, with lots of other things to "boot".
Just got a couple more of the "small" 128GB SATA SSD that are finally cheap enough for bootable OS's to use like "game cartridges" now. Not much different "application", just faster booting and operation than most USB.
Two partitions on each SSD, one for an OS only, one for ALL related storage.
Still have some massive multibooting going on, but with these lttle SSDs the most up-to-date are going to be W11, W10x86, W10x64, Debian, Mint & Fedora.
Fortunately I got a few of the pre-NUC cheap ASUS miniPC that has a simple hatch on top and came with a full size SATA Desktop HDD right there. Gets even better ventilation and has no exposed electronics when the cover is off all the time, remove the HDD (for good now) and just slip in whichever SSD you feel like booting to at the time.
Looks like about 128GB will do what 128mb would do back in the day.
Even in Windows 95, which didn't support USB at the time.
That's because DOS-based Windows could use the BIOS for disk access, and BIOS presented USB drives as hard drives. I believe you can even do the same with an NVMe SSD that has a suitable boot ROM.
Yes, good to emphasize that UEFI or genuine BIOS motherboards will access the USB drives on powerup, then any OS that can boot from that type partition layout can go forward from there. DOS, W9x, NT5 need CSM enabled to boot on a UEFI MB, W7 loves it as well.
W98 would install and run from USB too, as long as USB device drivers did not get installed. That way once booted if you plugged something into a USB socket on the MB, it was "unknown" and remained inaccessible. But if you booted when the second USB device was plugged in beforehand, W9x (or DOS) assigned an alphabetic drive letter and you could access the files.
Sometimes I still use a small FAT32 partition with simple DOS on a Syslinux'ed volume to boot distros from the NT5 bootloader. That way you can edit the Linux multiboot menu in Windows, or even DOS which sure boots a lot faster today.
Now they have USB enclosures for M.2 drives, usually not both NVMe & SATA flexibility though.
Interestingly W95 could be trimmed down to about 35mb, and carefully adding Word & Excel from Office97 was about another 65mb, so it ended up fitting if you had one of the huge 128mb USB sticks.
That's about the smallest I can figure you can get a 32-bit Windows office machine which would be "fully compatible" with the latest Windows & Office versions, as long as you were carefully storing your office files on a FAT32 partition and limiting your expectations (like file size and number of XL rows) to those addressed by W95 which was as functional an office machine as millions of people need today.
For those of you who did manage to run W95 at its full 2GHz maximum over 10 years later on much higher speed motherboards than there were in the 1990's, you know what I'm talking about when I say the most noticeable thing is zero latency in almost all human-computer interactions.
You could be doing all kinds of office work, with lots of other things to "boot".
Just got a couple more of the "small" 128GB SATA SSD that are finally cheap enough for bootable OS's to use like "game cartridges" now. Not much different "application", just faster booting and operation than most USB.
Two partitions on each SSD, one for an OS only, one for ALL related storage.
Still have some massive multibooting going on, but with these lttle SSDs the most up-to-date are going to be W11, W10x86, W10x64, Debian, Mint & Fedora.
Fortunately I got a few of the pre-NUC cheap ASUS miniPC that has a simple hatch on top and came with a full size SATA Desktop HDD right there. Gets even better ventilation and has no exposed electronics when the cover is off all the time, remove the HDD (for good now) and just slip in whichever SSD you feel like booting to at the time.
Looks like about 128GB will do what 128mb would do back in the day.