> We had to write our code and save them to floppy discs for submission since the lab systems had DeepFreeze installed on Win95

Didn't realize DeepFreeze is that old. My lab used Angel Custodius[0], which was a hardware-based solution. It used a PCI-slot and the buffer was an IC on the PCI board.

It worked the same, rebooting the computer would restore the frozen state, because changes were never committed to disk.

It also was OS-agnostic, because it ran before booting anything. If you had a Linux server and got hacked, you just restarted it, though it remained vulnerable until you disabled the protection and actually patched it.

If you wanted to introduce changes you had to press a combination of keys to bypass it, by introducing the password. Mainly to apply pending Windows Updates.

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[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20040210055959/http://www.custod...