Comment by marcodiego
10 days ago
That was for show purposes. It was certainly intended to display OS capabilities while impressing people at the same time. Linux eventually came to dominate the live-cd scene in the early 2000's but, to this day, people still cute this demo as specially incredible. Actually, there was Linux with X11 and a functional browser that run from a floppy. And that is something that is really impressive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025
I worked on one of the Linux live CDs (Linuxcare bootable business card / LNX-BBC), which we designed to fit in 50 megabytes. I remember being kind of jealous of the QNX floppy, because I felt that it had about 25% as much software functionality as we did, but in about 3% of the storage space!
I mean, basically we could interact with a lot more hardware, support more file formats, filesystems, and network protocols, and had more high-level scripting languages. But there still seemed to be a huge disproportion where the QNX floppy was just so much more space-efficient for what it did.