Small Operating Systems? (publ. 2023-10-19)

I was wondering if folks in Geminispace had any stories or thoughts to share about tiny operating systems, past or present.

This last week I have been doing a project at work that required booting up into MS-DOS 6.22. I'm no lover of Microsoft or their software. But it was interesting to see an entire operating system plus quite a few useful programs all stored on a single 1.44 MB floppy. This included a text editor; a programming environment (qbasic); a debugger; disk partitition tools; system information reporting tools; memory viewers; and some other things. It is a rather start contrast compared to now where a useful OS and basic software suite usually requires at least a few GBs. In the past, I played around with Tiny Core Linux, but that was around a decade or so ago.