alt Hacker NewsA web server on a single floppy disk
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Seems to be timing out for me (not necessarily surprising, given that it is a floppy disk and HN has a history of hugging sites to death)
Archive link incase people want to see the page but can't load it: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129015513/http://floppy.ddn...
All the way up to 2004 or 2005, my home router was an old 486dx box running FREESCO (https://freesco.info/) - and it was, indeed, booting from a single floppy. Linux 2.0.something.
To my surprise I discovered today that FREESCO was still releasing updates all the way until 2014.
Perhaps no floppy drive has ever had so many patiently waiting for it to complete its work.
Hope the hn post doesn't result in a bad sector on this floppy.
I also remember this amazing tiny thing, tomsrtbt. It was packed full of tools, and also had an http server in it.
In my teens I ran a combination ipmasq(NAT, this was back when we called it ip masquerading) firewall and dial-up POP for my girlfriend at the time off a scrap 386 motherboard some ISA NICs and a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive. It was packed full of SIMMs, I don't remember how much probably 8MB RAM.
The userspace was all in the initramfs, linux booted directly without any LILO or GRUB (this was back in the days the kernel included its own boot loader), and the floppy drive was totally out of the picture once the system was up and running from RAM.
Prior to adding the dial-up aspect for my gf to share my internet from her home, the init was deliberately exited which technically panicked the kernel. Basically it was a /linuxrc shell script setting up the networking then deliberately breaking userspace - not even PID1 existed while it was just my firewall. The kernel keeps doing networking stuff even if panicked.
Fun times.
In case the single floppy disk running everything fails: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129015513/http://floppy.ddn...