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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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