4 ms·

Diskette 1 of 1... The good old days of operating systems

by gushie 10y ago

posguy 10y ago
Yeah, a full OS with a GUI, drivers and a userland on a floppy. That is pretty darn small!
- agumonkey 10y ago
  1MBOS
- rzzzt 10y ago
  A demo of QNX has been circulated in tech magazines on a single floppy disk: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
- prodmerc 10y ago
  I remember this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS Still impressive today :)
- icedchai 10y ago
  You should check out the Amiga. It had exactly that.
derpadelt 10y ago
The whole installation was more like 20 floppies back then, though. Source: copied and installed dozens of internal use only betas of 2.0 up to Warp.
- chj 10y ago
  That's about the size of win3.1. Does this single disk include GUI or not?
  - danieldk 10y ago
    I remember Windows 3.1 to use far fewer disks. A cursory search on eBay says six.
DanBC 10y ago
OS/2 2.0 came on 21 3.5~ floppies. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/ > IBM was selling OS/2 2.0 versions on 3½” and 5¼” HD floppies as well as CD-ROM versions, although CD-ROM drives were far from common in 1992 and OS/2 2.0 only supported a few SCSI CD-ROMs. The tested version was delivered on 3½” floppies, 21 disks total.
magoon 10y ago
That's just a misleading label on the 1 bootable disk to start the installer itself. You really do need many of the other 20+ disks to install the OS. I had this exact set of floppies.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Plus an extra for TCP/IP and a bunch more for Communications Manager. God, I spent a lot of time installing those.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    I had forgotten the existence of OS/2 Warp Connect. Now I may have nightmares of staring at an installer. We have it pretty easy these days, when even the worst Chinese piece of junk can be assumed to get onto a WLAN and connect to a singular global network. No protocols to configure, no add-on software to install.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  Do you remember pressing ALT-F1 when the blob appeared to get a (TUI, but no session manager) OS/2 environment running from removable disc? (-:

Diskette 1 of 1... The good old days of operating systems

by gushie 10y ago

Diskette 1 of 1... The good old days of operating systems

posguy 10y ago

Yeah, a full OS with a GUI, drivers and a userland on a floppy. That is pretty darn small!

agumonkey 10y ago
1MBOS
rzzzt 10y ago
A demo of QNX has been circulated in tech magazines on a single floppy disk: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
prodmerc 10y ago
I remember this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS Still impressive today :)
icedchai 10y ago
You should check out the Amiga. It had exactly that.

derpadelt 10y ago

The whole installation was more like 20 floppies back then, though. Source: copied and installed dozens of internal use only betas of 2.0 up to Warp.

chj 10y ago
That's about the size of win3.1. Does this single disk include GUI or not?
- danieldk 10y ago
  I remember Windows 3.1 to use far fewer disks. A cursory search on eBay says six.

DanBC 10y ago

OS/2 2.0 came on 21 3.5~ floppies. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/ http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-2-0/ > IBM was selling OS/2 2.0 versions on 3½” and 5¼” HD floppies as well as CD-ROM versions, although CD-ROM drives were far from common in 1992 and OS/2 2.0 only supported a few SCSI CD-ROMs. The tested version was delivered on 3½” floppies, 21 disks total.

magoon 10y ago

That's just a misleading label on the 1 bootable disk to start the installer itself. You really do need many of the other 20+ disks to install the OS. I had this exact set of floppies.

mcguire 10y ago
Plus an extra for TCP/IP and a bunch more for Communications Manager. God, I spent a lot of time installing those.
- pavlov 10y ago
  I had forgotten the existence of OS/2 Warp Connect. Now I may have nightmares of staring at an installer. We have it pretty easy these days, when even the worst Chinese piece of junk can be assumed to get onto a WLAN and connect to a singular global network. No protocols to configure, no add-on software to install.
JdeBP 10y ago
Do you remember pressing ALT-F1 when the blob appeared to get a (TUI, but no session manager) OS/2 environment running from removable disc? (-: