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Comment by splitbrain | Hacker News Reader

I remember a time when stuff like this fit on a single 3.5 floppy.

Remember the QNX 4.25 demo disk that fit on a single 3.5 floppy and included a GUI, networking, a web browser (with basic javascript), clustering, and various other applications?

What a great little OS.

I really wish that there was still a free version of QNX around. I enjoyed playing with it.

I am sorely tempted to push my own little OS for another round but just porting the whole thing from 32 bit to 64 bit has me depressed. It should be a lot easier than the first time around though, now that we have VMs to test with, that is a lot faster turnaround wise than to have to reboot a physical machine every time you mess up in kernel code or some critical device process.

I had tried it out too. It was really fast, a lot more than the Linuxes I was using then - Red Hat and Mandrake. (Not comparable, I know.) I think they had a UI / desktop environment called Photon.

That 'really fast' bit that you perceived was your processor slicing 200K+ times / second versus maybe 2000 times/second under Linux or Windows.

QNX is crazy fast in that respect simply because it has almost no context to switch. The soft-realtime aspect of the kernel also helps tremendously in keeping things moving, everything that is interactive runs at a high priority so you'll never see frozen mousepointers or stuff like that.

Interesting and makes sense, thanks.

That's exactly what I thought of when I saw this post.

Still astounding they managed to fit so much into 1.44mb!

Yes! That was amazing, specially compared with the basic KDE/Gnome Linux distro at the time that would take a whooping 100mb. Now I install OS X apps that are > 150mb on a regular basis. It's ridiculous.

Still have it somewhere!

I boot it up in virtualbox periodically and play with it. Setting up the clustering and dragging Photon windows between two VMs is really satisfying.

I wish RIM/Blackberry hadn't bought it, closed the source¹, and killed off Photon. QNX was a really solid and fast OS.

1. For those who don't follow QNX development closely, the source was available for a few years but was not open in the usual sense. It was still under a proprietary license. RIM bought QNX and closed it off completely.

If they had I would have never left QNX. Quantum had a great thing going, then first the sale to Harman and after that RIM buying it may have been a good business decision for RIM but it was terrible for the mass adoption of QNX.

Even so, there probably are still untold millions (or even 10's of millions) of embedded QNX installations out there besides the Blackberries that are still in use.

That little os is about as elegant as they come this side of plan9/inferno.

Stallman was right.

FreeBSD, where that one floppy was enough to set up a modem and dial up to establish a PPP session and then download the rest of the installation. All while allowing you to open another terminal to telnet to a shell somewhere else and pass the time with e-mail and irc while FreeBSD downloads and installs.

Is there a Tiny Core Version for FreeBSD?

Yes, it's called NanoBSD but you have to build it on a working FreeBSD system. No desktop though.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/nanobsd/index.html

I think they missed an opportunity by not naming it WeeBSD. That's the hostname I gave my pi running FreeBSD.

Has no one mentioned Tom's Root Boot yet? :-)

> tomsrtbt (pronounced: Tom's Root Boot) is a very small Linux distribution. It is short for "Tom's floppy which has a root filesystem and is also bootable."[1] Its author, Tom Oehser, touts it as "The most GNU/Linux on one floppy disk", containing many common Linux command-line tools useful for system recovery (Linux and other operating systems.) It also features drivers for many types of hardware, and network connectivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt

Also, Oberon fits on a 1.44M floppy. http://www.projectoberon.com/

I remember my excitement using the QNX boot floppy. It was a full OS with a GUI, all from one 1.44MB disk. It had no PPP support, but fortunately it worked with Ethernet.

But back on the subject of the post, I'm happy to see this project. I went searching a small Linux distribution a few months ago, and most of the projects I'd relied on the in the past seemed to have stopped development, like DSL, or Puppy.

Tiny Core is the result of a DSL schism, if I remember right. Robert Shingledecker had been on the DSL team before starting Tiny Core.

I sometimes like to boot up my old 386 into MS-DOS from a 3.5" floppy... I haven't done much research into it but I used to have a disk with linux on it that would boot fine.

Can't seem to find anything today that would fit on one, but then again I haven't done much more than a cursory dig.

The Linux Router Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project) did that kind of thing in the late 90's and early 2000's. It's long-since dead, however. I doubt there's much of anything today, given the size of the kernel alone.

I built a Linux floppy-based bootable disk imaging environment to roll out masses of Windows 95/98 machines back in 1997-1999. You'd compile a minimal kernel down to 600 - 800 KB then pack-up your userland in an itty-bitty gzipped filesystem archive and concatenate it with the kernel at an even sector boundary, dd the whole thing to a disk, and set some bits to tell the kernel where to load the initrd. I've never gone back to see how much of that functionality still exits in modern kernels. (Very little, I'd assume...)

I used to run Coyote Linux[1] (then BrazilFW) from a floppy on a 133MHz Pentium with a couple of MBs of RAM.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_Linux

I ran one of these for quite awhile, it was fantastic

I used to have one 1.44MB with MS-DOS 3.3 trimmed to the minimum and Turbo Pascal.

It still does.

http://kparc.com - OS, GUI, database, boots on 64-but bare metal, still fit on a 3.5in floppy last time I looked.

These days, finding a machine with a floppy drive, let alone an actual floppy disk, might be harder than shrinking a system down enough to fit on a floppy disk.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, it is really cool people can build such tiny systems. But the smallest storage device in my household it a 2GB SD card. Outside of embedded devices and low-end routers, I do not see the point other than for hack value.

Few months ago at work we used a 25 years old spectrometer. It got 5 inch floppy. Initially we considered to get a drive for it to get data from the spectrometer, but after few quick searches on eBay we realized that to get one that can be connected via USB was not so trivial or cheap or fast. Fortunately it turned out that spectrometer can send everything over serial port as long as the serial link has proper 12 volts voltage. So we got our data using true usb-to-serial dongle costing like 120$.

Was the drive in the spectrometer in a bay?

If so you maybe have been able to get a drive emulator that can take modern storage devices in the front.

What serial adapter did you end up using?

I've worked with connecting equipment that we super finicky on what was on the serial port, and after 2-3 tries, we gave up and just sourced an old machine with hardware serial. We only have a few old machines left!

A little more time, and Arduino-class devices will run a full GNU/Linux.

IoT ain't seen nothin' yet.

Done. [0] At least, it's an AVR chip.

[0] http://dmitry.gr/index.php?proj=07.+Linux+on+8bit&r=05.Proje...

Indeed, think about the increase in attack surface.

Such a simple website and yet still crushed by the hackernews rush.

Are there any bootable releases anywhere?

You have to talk to Arthur Whitney to get one - so far AFAIK he has made it available only to people who plan to contribute.

What counts as contribution?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTrOg19gzP4 seriously, seriously did my head in. I was certainly fascinated by this, but I fear that I'd contribute one character, accidentally put it in the wrong place, break the build for two days because nobody can figure out what broke, and then feel really bad for weeks afterwards.

(Okay, okay, diffing... but still. I'd break my own build, at least.)

I _am_ genuinely interested, and I'd LOVE to play with this, but I'm really, really conservative, and would far prefer to be a fly on the wall for a bit for a while first.

I remember when TCL was a scripting language.

It still is, there are hundreds of contributors and a new release (Tcl v8.6.8) came out 22-DEC-2017. There are plans for a new major release, Tcl 9, as well.

Tcl still has many unique features that other languages lack. One new highly experimental feature is TclQuadCode, which can compile Tcl to machine code using LLVM. It's been in progress for over 5 years and it is amazing work. Compiling a dynamic language is a difficult task.

I believe it was a joke on the initials for "Tiny Core Linux". Look through the other comments and you'll see people using "TCL" to refer to this project, and not Tcl.

Xwoaf is still floating around out there. It was almost unusably minimal, though.

I once created a windows floppy with winsock ini settings, irc, netscape, eudora and an ntp client, all pre-configured for an ISP I was working at. Users just had to put in their username and password, oh dialup isp days...

The other floppy OS I tinkered around with was QNX, but it was just a demo of what QNX could do.

It would still fit on an LS-120 3.5″ floppy, although I suspect they’re even harder to get hold of these days.

An actual Linux distribution that fits on a floppy is still available here: http://asm.sourceforge.net/asmutils.html

muLinux can boot from a single floppy without X11. With X11 need 2 or 3 disks.

Openwrt's pretty tiny imo

I've regularly fit OpenWrt into 3 MiB, including an HTTP server and web UI.

Yup.

I remember Blender boasting for years about how it fit on a floppy.

I remember 2 floppies. Never 1 for Linux+XWindows.

Trinux was pretty slick back in the day.

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