You Can Fit an Entire OS and Web Server on a Floppy Disk

I don’t think many people will argue with me when I say that modern software is laughably bloated. On my system, the Windows Software Development Kit alone takes up 2.23GB of space on my hard disk. Microsoft Edge is gobbling up more than 200MB of RAM — and I don’t even use Edge and don’t have it open. So, it seems like it shouldn’t be possible to fit an entire operating system and functional web server on a regular old 1.44MB floppy disk.

This video from Action Retro is interesting for many reasons, but what stands out most is how incredibly efficient software can be if developers prioritize working within tight constraints.

In this case, those constraints are: 1.44MB of storage on the floppy disk (there isn’t a hard disk), an Intel Pentium processor with matching motherboard, minimal RAM (exact amount unstated), an Ethernet card, and a video card. And yet that is enough to not only run an operating system, but also a functional web server on top of that.

That’s possible thanks to the ELKS (Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset) project, which is an open-source effort to push optimization to its limits.

As Action Retro demonstrates, that works perfectly fine. And it isn’t even some situation where it takes hours to boot or serve a web page. The performance is acceptable and it can serve web pages that include .jpg photos (loaded from a floppy disk, of course). That isn’t just on a local network, either. Action Retro put it online and let others visit the webpage — though that traffic did really slow things down, of course.

If I had my way, every software developer working today would be forced to watch this video. Instead of taking vast computing resources for granted, they could put some effort into optimization and efficiency. No, I will not follow my own advice, because I’m lucky if my code works at all.