Comment by basementcat

3 years ago

Reminds me of tomsrtbt

http://www.toms.net/rb/

I used that back when it was current. It was an impressive bit of kit, but TBH, what QNX did on a single floppy made -- and more than ever still makes -- Linux look very very bloated.

Tom's Root-and-Boot just about got you a working command line on one floppy.

For comparison, using FOSS equivalents, QNX got that, plus all of X.org, plus Firefox, onto one floppy.

And if you used the status bar to find your IP address, and went to another machine and put that in a browser's URL box, you found that as well as all that, it was also a live webserver, serving live performance stats to the Internet.

So, kernel, busybox, X server, desktop, web browser AND WEB SERVER on one (very heavily compressed) floppy.

Sadly, the genius who built it died young. Cancer. Fsck cancer.

https://openqnx.com/node/298