- OpenBSD still maintains a floppy disk installer: https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.8/amd64/ (floppy78.img)
It’s a healthy constraint but requires careful judgment. Making the installer fit on the floppy is easy if you just leave out a bunch of drivers that exist on the CD and USB installers. It takes discipline to make things fit by trimming bloated code in the kernel and removing vestigial features.
- For the complete opposite of this, go into the Storage settings on iOS and get a load of the bloated-ass apps there. Not counting the caches or data, mind you:
709MB (!): Gmail
319MB: YouTube
526MB: Instagram
381MB: Reddit
408MB: LinkedIn
529MB: the companion app for my car
463MB: PayPal
The list goes on and on. Most of these are either web content viewers, or they serve a single simple purpose.
- Some time ago I helped Jeff Olson open source his wonderful 1990s roguelike Alphaman:
https://github.com/superjamie/alphaman-src
It's full of optimisations to keep the code small, such as QBasic calling into C routines, as Jeff also wanted the source to all fit on one floppy disk.
- I was holding an external USB floppy drive the other day and the form factor, the tactile experience and the satisfying ejection mechanism got me fantasizing about a floppy jukebox with one song per disk. I’m sure it would be dope, but even for a regular 3 minute track you would have to seriously destroy your audio quality to fit into 1.44 MB. Those things are tiny! The best you could do would probably be some metadata that plays the song from elsewhere, but that’s lame and now you’re moving from being storage-constrained to leaving it 99% empty…
by invalidOrTaken
0 subcomment
- If you're a Clojurist like me, Janet (https://github.com/janet-lang/janet) seems to be aimed at this.
- AI written/edited front page.
A passion project and you can't even trust yourself to write the front page.
Made me lose interest.
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