DOS360: Forty years 527

I've heard that it is possible to squeeze a useable Linux or FreeBSD install onto a single HD floppy which can be booted, but I don't know how to do it. Nowadays when you can boot from a CD on so many systems, I suppose it is less a concern, but for decades, being able to boot some form of x86 DOS from a floppy has been incredibly useful to me -- not to mention that I can get working installs of QPRO for DOS, MS Fortran 5.1 and WordPerfect 5.1 each on a single HD floppy -- four floppies and I can boot, wordprocess, number crunch and compile all without needing to "install" anything on a HD -- there were several years when I was consulting where I found that incredibly useful.

Just as work expands to fill the time available to it, computer programs seem to expand to fill the resources (RAM, processor bandwidth &c) available to them. Whether we talk of DOS-360 or PC-DOS, those days of lean, mean programming are (unfortunately, to my mind) pretty much long gone. Yeah, a few embedded systems things are still resource parsimonious, but that's the exception not the rule. It can be nice at times to have fancy, resource rich (and resource hogging) systems -- but I don't want to never have the choice ... and, dang, if it don't feel like that's the way we's agoin'

And having just turned 54, it is nearly 40 years I've been programming. At least I still get to do some embedded systems stuff as well as bloatware coding. These days much of the time you can't even justify coding one-of number crunches in Fortran much of the time, incstead use IDL or a spreadsheet or Octave or somesuch.

Too many newbies who never experienced the feeling of unlimited freedom that coding into 64k (of 60 bit words) on a CDC-6400 or 512k on a 360-65 or even the relative spaciousness of 16k (12 bit words) on a PDP-8 (it has been too long, I've forgotten the RIM loader, I nearly lost my green card (and, yes, I have one of the old *green* ones))

(and it was uphill both ways to and from school, in the snow, and we had no zeroes and had to use "O"s and we cut our paper tapes and unit records with pocket knives, ...)