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Comment by throw0101a

4 years ago

Back in the day QNX used to have advertisements about having the entire OS and a GUI on a 1.44 MB disk:

* https://crackberry.com/heres-how-qnx-looked-1999-running-144...

* http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

With a friend and stimulated by the QNX demo we ported a Squeak Smalltalk graphical environment to one 1.44mb disk: http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/

Basically we use a base Linux and modified Squeak to use SVGAlib instead of X-Windows.

Later on some friends created a whole OS in Squeak (e.g. you could browse the TCP/IP protocol as a class in Smalltalk): https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1762

I used to have such a floppy. It was mindblowing, even though at the time 2 floppies would be enough to bootstrap a Debian install (if you had a common network card, the drivers of which were included).

Debian would just show the old curses-like installer, and pull the rest of the system from the repo, while QNX had a full GUI, network card/modem drivers, and a friggin web browser in 1.44 MB.

QNX, Floppix (2 diskettes)[0], MenuetOS[1], and Kolibri[2] were all very exciting to me in the early '00s. Eventually I got a USB drive (128MB!) and more or less gave up on the floppy life, but I do still appreciate the idea of running froim a floppy.

[0] https://www.floppix.com/ [1] http://menuetos.net/ [2] http://www.kolibrios.org/en/

QNX had a Photon microGUI that is probably superior to X windows (Wayland). It's a shame it never got fully open sourced.

  • Wayland is not related to the X Window System, it is a ground up redesign.

    And while Microgui is nice it purposely isn’t directly comparable to a compositing window manager.

  • What is QNX's business model nowadays?

    I understand Ford Sync3 is based on it, but are there other consumer-visible products based on it?

In the mid-2000s I was using a nice single-floppy router distribution called freesco. I thought it worked pretty well, but I didn't put it under any stress.

I don't know if the project still has the same soul as it did then, but here it is:

https://www.freesco.org/

  • I found a small Pentium 100MHz desktop in the trash back then, stuck a spare pair of 3com NICs in it, and loaded up Turbolinux that I got with a Linux magazine.

    Followed the Linux IP Masquerade HOWTO (http://www.e-infomax.com/ipmasq/howto/m-html/ipmasq-HOWTO-m....), and I soon had it running the network in my apartment building with a cable modem and 100mb SMC hub (also from a dumpster)

    A couple weeks later I came home to find the internet "not working", it got hacked (I never applied updates), and I replaced it with Freesco and never looked back.

  • I had to click the link to find out it's not FreeSCO (i.e. Not a free version of SCO Unix), which would have been quite... surprising.

    Buried deep into SCO's FTP server there still is a bootable single-floppy demo of SCO OpenServer intended for POS devices or so, but it's lacking any kind of GUI and most command line utilities...

    • Yeah, I seem to remember there being a steady amount of confusion over that at all times. I think it was supposed to be "free Cisco."

The original Macintosh was 64KB of ROM plus a 400KB floppy. Snug.

  • Yeah, even if you include the stuff in ROM, Macs and Amigas had full GUI environments using much less space back in the 80's.

    With that in mind, having an antique version of X running from a floppy isn't that impressive. It's still really cool though. :D