Comment by ronsor

1 month ago

This is a major throwback to the QNX demo disk, which bundled a browser and desktop environment onto a single floppy disk!

14 comments

ronsor

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sedatk  1 month ago

It was mind blowing at the time because Linux required at least 4-5 floppies to set up a text-only base system while QNX ran live from just a single 1.44MB.

  • fouc  1 month ago

    Photon microGUI was included in that, and it blew my mind that you could literally kill and restart Photon without disturbing any of the GUI apps that were still running.

    They also mailed a manual along with the demo disk, and I was amazed that QNX had built-in network bonding, amongst lots of other neat features. At the the time I was using Slackware & the linux kernel version was still 1.x, I don't think bonding came to linux until 2.x?

  • compsciphd  1 month ago

    that's not really true. In 2001 I built a single disk linux installation (with a handful of popular nics supported) with X (tiny X with vesafb support) and rdesktop + vnc as a thin client on floppy.

    I'd be honest and say that qnx demo disk had more usability overall than my disk, but one could easily have a usable text only linux bootable disk. Busybox and uclibc already existed back then.

    https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~spotter/floppy.bin (won't be that useful today due to the ethernet drivers, but it was a 1.44mb floppy)

    • sedatk  1 month ago

      You’re missing my point. QNX live floppy came out in 1997. My experience with Slackware 3.x at the time was exactly like how I said it was. You needed two floppies just to boot up the kernel (they were called boot disk and root disk), so Linux setup could start.

      I wasn’t claiming Linux couldn’t achieve this, merely stating why QNX was mind blowing: because it was way ahead of what was available, not what was possible.

      Congrats on your live floppy project, I guess.

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