[userbinator]

AFAIK the "Windows Recovery Environment" is actually a stripped-down minimal version of Windows missing most of the normal userland and parts of the kernel, which people have extended and customised in various ways.

[_ol1s]

The overall design was inspired by the simple text based ui of clockworkmod recovery for android. There are zero dependencies as well.

[robotnikman]

>clockworkmod recovery

Now there's something I haven't heard of in a while. I remember using it on the original Droid phone when messing with roms