Because any system larger than 1.44MB is just bloat

Come on people let’s face it, software is getting more and more obese. Older software that works fine used to take up one thousandth of what their counterparts eat up today. I blame lazy corporate programmers and fancy frameworks.

Anyways, a couple of months back I stumbled on a group of Russians that -apparently- haven’t been spoiled by the extra “geebies” of storage. These guys managed to cram an operating stytem; a graphical user interface; a couple of servers including https, ftps, and smtp; a few network clients including yahoo messenger, irc, and an html+http viewer; over 25 decent games; a ms-paint-like program; and many other programs in space less that 1.44MB, KolibriOS.

now reflect on the fact that all that takes up less than 1440kB

For an operating system that takes up less than one tenth the space of one of your photographs, it surprisingly usable. I used it as my work system for a couple of hours, and did run into a few minor issues but the overall experiance was fantastic. even better then some full fledged linux distributions.

Unfortunately, Kolibri OS is only a “hobby operating system” despite having the potential to become much more (especially that it still has over 69kB worth of space left. see bellow). Regardless, If you have virtualbox set up, you have to take this one for a spin yourself.

Because this operating system is so tiny, I had an unexplainable urge to view it as an image. What you’re looking at above is the entire system. I took the liberty of adding a header (PPM) to the disk image so that it can be displayed as a normal image. If you remove the header, it’ll turn back into a valid bootable image. Unfortunately, ppm is not widely supported anymore so I converted it to a png for your viewing pleasure. To download the original image click here. and yes, that is empty space at the bottom. it seems that 1.44MB is too large that even a GUI-based operating system couldn’t fill.

And if you thought “looking” at an operating system was weird, then what would you think about hearing it (warning: it’s a bit extreme).