A Complete OS on 1.44MB Floppy Disk

KolibriOS is a tiny yet incredibly powerful and fast operating system. This power requires only a few megabyte disk space and 8MB of RAM to run. Kolibri features a rich set of applications that include word processor, image viewer, graphical editor, web browser and well over 30 exciting games.

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Don Hui
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DISCLAIMER: This video and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission.

[dom]

I used something similar 20 years ago called menuet. The challenge today is to find floppy and floppy drive hahahaha

[MegaManNeo]

I used to boot into MenuetOS - the system this is based on - for fun back in the day.
To young 13-14 years old me back then, it was mind blowing to start into something other than DOS or Windows from a 3.5" floppy diskette.
At the same time I did my first steps into Linux using my Knoppix 3.7 LiveCD. Crazy times.

[davidrandall]

Don, I have a few old laptops that this might just be the ticket for. Thanks for putting this out there most of us would have never heard about it. My many thanks.

[saultube]

Assembly! King of Languages! 😁
But seriously: *The Efficiency* of it, how many things, 3D even; this is Assembly, at its Efficient Point; Oh How Glorious it is. Not even 1.44 MB, it has like 0.35MB, so it's like 1.1MB only

[michaelwong]

Great video. I remember when linux fit on a floppy. It would be nice if the operating systems were programmed to optimize efficiency and space, sadly they seem to emphasize bloat and telemetry on the user.

[SchoolforHackers]

Imagine deploying 200-300 of these as VMs for Remote Desktop. On a server with, like, a spacious gig of ram.

[gedgicat]

Reminds me of picore or tinycore os which started off as x86 and now runs on a raspberry pi

[mattelder]

That's impressive. Back in the early 90s, before Windows 95 came out, I managed to do something similar with Windows 3.1, but nowhere near as functional as this.

[tetttettamilli]

@NST - I'm currently playing with an old Gateway 7200X Win XP box (getting it to see the ext HDMI VC is Mission: Impossible). Thus, with limited resources now a reality, I'll definitely will have to check it out. Thanks.

[deanbaker]

Hey Don, could you make a video on actually installing Kolibri to a hard drive? Thanks for the video

[TheNinjaMarmot]

I think windows 3.11 used more floppies. I think even IBM DOS used more floppies and that didn't even have a gui!

[chef]

Amazing right?
A whole operating system, with a desktop and other programs in 1.44MB.
Think about how bloated current OS'es are.
I mean, they look better, sure. But why do they consume more than 1GB of ram at idle?
And do they really need 400 processes running at idle for desktop in 2024?
Its just a clownshow these days.

[paranoidgenius]

Is the floppy disk super compressed to build a matrix in the memory, or hard drive to unpack into the size that is many times bigger than 1.44mb?
Its crazy to think, you can make programs that are single digit kilobytes big whixh could knack up the system through command prompts.

[PihkalTheTihkal]

Flappy-bird, imagine if they would have called it FLOPPY-Bird, missed opportunity.

[frankgregory-xsnw]

Operating Systems should always strive to be as light as possible. This just shows how bloated most OS's are.

[mysticmarble]

Do you shift your voice audio to the right channel to match the overlay ? If so, it's kind of irritating 😬

[sneekylinux]

I remember taking a look at this many years ago getting old!!)

[ms-exem]

okay i have a question for you ?? are ALL floppy drives exactly the same ?? the floppy drives themselves ?? 1.44 mb 1.76 mb amiga 1.6 mb 800k 400k mac 360k 720k pc atari are they all the same or maybe not so ??

[anon_y_mousse]

Don, I'm surprised that with all the equipment you've got laying around you don't have a USB floppy drive handy. Menuet, and this fork of it called Kolibri, they really prove that modern computing is just far too bloated. Sure, not everyone wants to program in assembly, but even FASM can use macros and you can easily develop your own code libraries that over time developing things in a given language gets faster and easier. As an example of bloat, I downloaded a program written in Rust that was just under a thousand lines of code, and it generated a 12mb binary and half a gig of extra junk that isn't even needed to run the program.

[maxmuster]

I have no floppy drive, but a DosBox emulator app installed and there is a special mount command to mount an image file. But i am not sure if it starts the OS from the image file. DosBox emulates an intel 80386/80387 32 bit CPU with svga-S3 graphic.