In about 2000 we had a "bootable business card" which was a CD-ROM on which we loaded a bootable ISO image that we made with various tools that might be useful to a system administrator. The original version was made to promote Linuxcare.
Most CD-ROM drives in PCs had a small inner ring that could hold "mini CDs" with a smaller diameter than a full CD, and a truncated version of this could be a business card CD (which we did not invent; it was commercially available from CD duplicating companies). So, if you had a machine that was broken in some way or you just wanted an ephemeral Linux system, you could take our live CD out of your wallet and boot it in the machine's CD-ROM drive. (Since optical drives are no longer common, nowadays people would use a "live USB" instead of "live CD" for this.)
It's so cool that about 20 years of technological progress has taken us from "your business card can be a tiny optical storage medium containing a usable OS image" to "your business card can be a tiny computer containing a usable OS image" (giving a totally new meaning to "bootable business card").
I remember these! And they weren't exactly circle CD-ROMs either, they had round sides but then straight top and bottom, so you could fit them in a business card holder / wallet. I always thought these were pretty cool.
Any drive that wasn't one where you insert the CD could read those, including portable music players of the time. You could buy mini CD'R's and burn all kinds of mini distros to it.
They came in all sorts of shapes. I distinctly recall jars of peanut butter having shirt-shaped ones in the lid for a while. Something like this[0]. As I understand it since CDs are written from the inside-out, you can make them roughly any shape you like as long as it's more or less balanced. You'll just lose capacity.
this is amazing! the one sin you've committed is not running neofetch / fetch lol. I want to learn a lot more about booting in this aspect. It seems pretty neat that all it really does is load a couple of addresses that then look for an ELF binary vmlinux that is parsed and ran. Seems fairly simple all things considered.
If you didn't read anything but the title, then it's not very remarkable today.
Read any random single paragraph from the story and you can no longer say that. Especially the v2 with Ultrix.
I never wrote a coff parser & loader from scratch. Or a reimplimentation of scsi itself just to then write some virtual scsi hardware good enough to satisfy a kernel that was hard coded for exactly that hardware down to practically cycle counting and who knows what mystery quirks. (He does, he knows what mystery quirks, now.)
Most CD-ROM drives in PCs had a small inner ring that could hold "mini CDs" with a smaller diameter than a full CD, and a truncated version of this could be a business card CD (which we did not invent; it was commercially available from CD duplicating companies). So, if you had a machine that was broken in some way or you just wanted an ephemeral Linux system, you could take our live CD out of your wallet and boot it in the machine's CD-ROM drive. (Since optical drives are no longer common, nowadays people would use a "live USB" instead of "live CD" for this.)
It's so cool that about 20 years of technological progress has taken us from "your business card can be a tiny optical storage medium containing a usable OS image" to "your business card can be a tiny computer containing a usable OS image" (giving a totally new meaning to "bootable business card").