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Tiny Apps
box2321 writes: "There's a time and a place for large and feature-filled software. And there's a place for tiny apps - in fact, there's tinyapps.org. This is a mighty-fine resource for free and shared Win/DOS programs that weigh in under 1.44 MB. I learned of TinyApps from a pleasant source."
It is really fascinating what you call small. I remember the VC20/C64 and those things required true small applications. Applications that had more features than most of the "tiny" ones there.
...
You guys might also want to check out the 4KB and 64KB demonstration pieces from parties around the world at Scene. This will show you what can be done in applications as small as 4KB (rendered demos with sound and stuff like that). Enjoy!
I nevertheless appreciate a movement towards essential, small applications
I think this would be a cool site to have for Linux/BSD. Personaly I like being able to have all my major tools on 1 or 2 disketes. Dunno how many floppies emacs will take though.
I remember somebody posting a message about a couple of tiny programs that would print an Estes style fin alignment sheet and a centering ring template for single and cluster engines. These were not big or pretty, but they did the job. Does anybody know where these programs may be hiding? I've looked at Tiny Apps with no luck.
Thanks for any assistance.
This is where software has to go. If there's one lesson we should have learned by now it's that it's nearly impossible to produce enormous but reliable software. Small programs are the only way to produce reliability, at least for now, and that'll be necessary as computers take over more and more tasks.
"Doctor who?" --The Doctor
I am trying to think of an off the top of my head way to find single disk games using a favorite search engine, but am not thinking of any really good queries. This is under the assumption that I don't find aggregation sites such as tiny apps.
I have one, it's a nice newsreader for *nix and --
Oh, I thought there was another 'n' in there. My bad.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
Anyone find the irony in having an app called NotGNU Emacs on a 'Tiny App' page? I wonder if there's any GPL issues, as the source is not free (from what I can tell.)
Tho it is mostly windows software, there's a link to google's directory on floppy disk based linux distro's.
Can I nomiate notepad!?
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
"How about BeOS, *nix, Amiga, QNX, etc?," I am asked. Those who are comfortable using these operating systems need no such guide as this; clean, well-made software is the rule rather than the exception.
These guys have got it right on. Outside of the windows software world, priorities are on well made software, in stark contrast to the windows feature bloat that we're becoming accustomed to. I'm not saying all windows software is ill-designed and bloated - it just seems to be the status quo.
It's nice to see that compact well made programs are still available outside of the "alternative" os's
Tiny applications for Windows, weighing in at mere megabytes ! Surprising news.
What about tiny apps elsewhere ? My BeOs machine has all the functionality of my Win2K machine, with the OS and a hundred or more programmes taking up 400m of hard disk space instead of the about 7 gigs of hard drive space Win2K uses. That includes Photoshop clones, WP packages, and audio/video programmes that you can't get from Windows in packages for less than a truck load of money and occupying a vast amount of hdd.
Windows XP is a 1.7g install, before anything is installed ! The Windows environment encourage bloat, if your OS takes up hundreds of megs of space, people don't notice or object when their programmes take up just as much.
Maybe Gates own secret interests in Seagate, et al.
some of the greatest apps are not complex and weigh under 1.44 mb... :)
check out this addicting puzzle game, youll be hooked, guaranteed
It was only last year that Opera got too large to fit on a floppy and that's a program that has never felt tiny.
Perhaps the word you're searching for is "reasonable".
Although the free open-source tiny AI app at http://mind.sourceforge.net is only about 50K in MSIE JavaScript, you may have a tiny AI on your PC or Web site only for a few months or scant years, because from a tiny acorn grows a might oak (robur in Latin), a robust AI capable of taking over the noosphere if not the World. For corroboration of this claim, see Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge.
Therefore do not think of tiny apps as being only puny little programs such as screensavers or Windows XP. A seed AI could start out life as a tiny little application flitting across the 'Net and snowballing into a behemoth AI, a Wintermute as in Neuromancer by William Gibson.
On SourceForge, whole languages are being devised to go from tiny app AI into Big Time AI. For instance, the liaison page at http://mind.sourceforge.net/flare.html leads to the XML-esque Flare language project, where you may start out writing tiny apps but where you will one day come face to face with Singularity AI.
They shouldn't be using TinyHTTPD on TinyServer. Then they could handle more than a Tiny amount of hits.
Interesting concept. Linux's standard utilities are unnecessarily bloated, replacing them with smallutils allows a respectable distribution to fit on a 1.44MB floppy. According to the documentation, these utilities are included:
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Its nice to see a page like that, but it only shows windows and dos apps. Thats fine cause almost every windows app becomes bloated and contains too many features unlike linux apps which are mostly small and basic i find. Mac apps would be nice to see though.
Does anyone else see the irony (and perhaps the futility) in creating a site devoted to tiny apps that run on the most buggy and bloated OS known to man?
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
Anyone remember GEOS for the Commie64? Windowing system, word processor, paint program, etc. On two disks. If you flipped the first one, you got QuantumLink, an online service.
Strangly enough, I found my GEOS disks about a year ago and dialed their customer service number and got AOL... coincidence or not?
What you can look for is explicit modularity that avoids ridiculous reinvention of common functionality - KDE and GNOME are approaching this with their object models.
Are you really claiming that X+GNOME or X+KDE and a plethora of widget sets in order to get a decent number of programs running is less-bloated and better-designed than Windows desktop?
On a Linux box, you've got choice. You don't need Gnome. You don't even really need X. Obviously some programs will require all sorts of widgets etc etc, to run, but aren't there other alternatives that will do the same thing? Linux is great in that it's customizable. Try seperating win2k from the GUI. You can't even boot to a command prompt anymore (unless you use the install CD to enter rescue mode.)
It's a sad, sad thing when you need 128mb+ ram and 2gb+ hard drive space to install the newest Microsoft OS, just to read e-mail and surf the web.
We have Tiny Apps ... OpenBeOS ... and the iPod. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Heh heh ...
~LoudMusic
-- and I was doing so good with my karma too --
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
This web browser is pretty nifty... I'm even using it to make this post.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
PicoBSD's applications are really small. Fitting a whole OS onto a single floppy diskette is quite beneficial, and often means that the expensive hard disk can be eliminated. There are also several other small Unix clones, including Minix and Alfalinux (Slackware on 2 floppies). BBIAgent Router is simply amazing: it's a single-floppy Linux-based router and firewall.
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Tiny apps in the computer
Make me happy, make me feel fine,
Tiny apps make my CPU run cooler
With a feeling that I'm gonna Love you 'til the end of time.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
i bet its tiny too...1.44 inches?
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
http://www.consume.org/~jshare/mirrors/www.tinya pp s.org/index.html (no spaces in URL, obviously)
Or, click here.
Jordan
Any time you talk about tiny applications, you have to mention the 1.44MB QNX demo disk. It is several years old now, but can still be found here.
Incidentally, this is an older version of the OS than the free version at get.qnx.com
If you want standard unix commands goto busybox.lineo.com
There are about 130 general functions all compilable into a single binary unpto a few hundred kB.
A well-written tutorial about writing BSD assembly application is FreeBSD Assembly Language Programming. There is also a Linux Assembly Programming Resource Site. I suggest if you hate bloated software to contribute to solving the problem by writing small utilities in assembly. Of course, C remains the choice for large projects, but assembly has it's place.
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to help contribute to the tiny app community
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello, World!\n";
Nice to know i've made a difference in the Free Software / OSS
Photos.
How much of app bloat today is due to static linking? I've seen a huge difference in app size when using dynamic linking.
My Weblog
Some interesting java applet demos were entered in this contest: http://www.cfxweb.net/javapage.php?page=contest.sh tml .
In the days of huge software programs it always amazes me to see what can be done in such small packages (each 4k jar file includes the source code too).
When you pay $3 a month for webhosting, you can't reasonably expect it to withstand the /. effect, but... here's the FAQ...
.ini and other data files stored in the
TinyApps.Org provides links to software available on the Internet. The listing format is generally:
App Name (linked to its website) [file size]
Codes Description
Codes: $ = shareware {S} = source available + =
no install necessary
What is a tiny app?
As defined by this website, a tiny app
(application) is software weighing 1.44mb or
less. This ranges from the tiny WipeCMOS (a
mere 2.4kb!), to the awe-inspiring QNX demo
disk which pretty much fills a floppy.
What qualifies an app for this site?
1. Not more than 1.44mb in size (but generally
*far* less).
2. Not adware.
3. Preference is given to apps which are 100%
self-contained, requiring no runtime files,
installation, DLLs, registry changes, etc
(though
same directory are fine).
4. Though not strictly a requirement, most of
these programs happen to be free; that is,
they require no payment to be enjoyed. (See
this article for why "free" is not really an
appropriate modifier.)
Why tiny apps?
I have never been a big fan of bulky programs
that spawn conflicts, malfunctions, crashes,
etc. Windows has enough of its own problems
to contend with - why add fuel to the fire?
But more importantly, I simply prefer
simplicity.
Why DOS/Windows?
Let's face it - Windows is currently the most
widely used desktop OS. I recently (Sep 2001)
saw on Google Zeitgeist that 90% of their
visitors are running Windows. Not only are
there more people running Windows than any
other OS, there is simply more software for
Windows than for any other platform. Plus, it
is the OS I use most. If you are a *nix, Mac,
BeOS, Amiga, OS/2, QNX, etc user who would
like to contribute to these pages, you are
more than welcome to do so. Please drop me a
line.
I wrote/know of a cool tiny app.
Please let me know about it.
I wrote one of the apps listed here.
Thank you for stopping by! If you would like to
change the comment associated with your app,
have it removed or updated, please let me
know.
One of your links is not working/An app is no
longer available.
Please let me know. We can probably dig up a copy
of any apps that have disappeared from the
Net.
Who is behind TinyApps.Org?
That would be me, Miles Wolbe. I am a freelance
consultant, Japanese translator, web
designer, and teacher. You are welcome to
check out my brief but revealing resumé if
you feel so moved.
Do you have a disclaimer statement?
Yes. You are 100% responsible for your own
actions. Using this site, visiting a link,
downloading a program, in short, living, is
done entirely at your own risk (and joy).
Special thanks to:
DigitalSpace - web hosting ($3/month)
FreeLists.Org - mailing list (free)
Atomz - search engine (free with small banner)
Ushikai - groovy icons (free and commercial)
BNBform - form processor (free)
~z
A while back /. did a story on the Menuet OS. It "is a new, 32-bit OS under the GPL and it fits to a single floppy (along with 10 or so more applications that come as standard with the OS). It features protection for the memory and code, it has a GUI running at 16.7 million colors (except with 3Dfx Voodoo cards), sound at 44.1 khz stereo etc. And the most important and notable feature? The whole OS was written in 100%, pure 32-bit x86 assembly code!"
5 2&mode=thread
The page is at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/05/22482
I'm sorry, 1.44 MB is not tiny :)
:)
I co-wrote a fine piece of fractal generating software, that came with its own windowing system, mouse driver and midi-like music synthesiser (it played a tune of your choice when it had finished rendering the fractal - this was in the days of 386s being power machines), it could do mandelbrot (+ several variations), julia, sierpinski and logistic fractals (plus a few chaotic dynamics plots done in phase space), save and load BMP files of the images and a whole heap of other cool stuff - and it was written in Borland Pascal which had a limit if 64 kB for the compiled program! Those were the days... taught me good programming discipline.
Still remember the excitement of discovering the limits of machine precision by rendering magnified Mandelbrot sets on my 386
- Daniel
Or do you mean an older Macintosh OS?
Realtime micro-kernel operating system
Full GUI with browser and other assorted apps
TCP/IP networking, with a web browser and web server
Dialup/ppp support
And more!
You'd be surprised at how many programs are released after being compiled in Visual Studio's "Debug" mode (the default for MFC projects). A large portion of the new releases that show up on download.com each week suffer from this problem. Their authors either don't know or don't care to set their build config for Release before uploading the "shipping" version.
Luckily they're real easy to spot. When you find the traceroute program that takes up 4MB, you've got a winner...
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
fine my code is now Proprietary protected, now any works that use Hello, World! or similar phrases are obviously h4x0r3d derivitaves. I'll punish you hackers for all your worth under the DMCA/ATA. Hello, World! is a valuable component of my companies infrastructure, you GPL hippies have been ripping my work off for too long...
Photos.
Who the hell is the chick from Alias? I went to google and I found this monstrosity.
Speaking of small games, does anyone remember the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy adventure by Infocom. A shareware version was due apparently but never released. A java applet version is available at douglasadams.com
:)
So all ye HHGG fans, enjoy.
Arpit.
That was mostly for the code. There was a text buffer that went up to a couple hundred bytes.
And since the program normally stayed running in the background all the time, I thought users might want to have their 8k back sometimes, at the expense of not getting the program's benefit, so there is a control panel option that not only pauses the program, but removes the program code from memory (handy during development, as I could update it this way without rebooting the machine).
When LR was paused, only a little stub of a trap patch remained in memory, about a dozen bytes or so.
Kids these days...
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I'm sure lots of people have their own tiny project to show off.
I'll start the ball rolling with my Buskpledge Windows program, for collecting and managing donation pledges. It lets you make 2-click pledges from web-pages, view and edit the pledges individually or en masse, and can redirect you to direct donation pages such as Amazon Honor System or PayPal. Full install and uninstall in under 35k.
Source is available at the project page. It's a little wierd, using a custom semi-literate programming tool, and a half-assed gzip clone for internal compression.
Does anyone have a smaller one?
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
the source is here
You might need to take a look to RiscOS which makes it quite easy for the hosted apps to be *tiny* (a complete DTP package supporting plugins weights several hundreds kB)...
RiscOS is around as old as Windows3 but has always been well designed, quick, compact and responsive.
But I understand such tinyness might seem mythical for PC users.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Above someone posted about the C64/vic 20 and with that I agree. There were some truely AMAZING things a C64 game could do with the 170kb on a 5.25 floppy. back then it took some skill to create a computer program of any non-trivial size or function. You had to try and not make it run over the size that could fit on a single floppy side, so you didn't have to produce a nasty message that said "turn over the disk and press enter".
Now - *sigh* now because truely mind-bogglingly big storage is so undeniably cheap and computers are so mind-bogglingly FAST programmers have gotten sloppy. Instead of tweaking their code for size and speed, they expect Intel/AMD and Western Digital to take care of those problems for them. There are some notable exceptions - like John Carmack - but he's doing things that just plain shouldn't be possible on a computer.
Consider for example the massive, CPU choking monstrosity (that I am forced to use - at least once - because of my stupid thesis review board) known as "WORD" -it's the only word processor I've ever seen with a FRAMERATE! How in the HELL can I out-type an AMD 1.6GHz athlon CPU? How can I type faster than it can show the letters on the screen? Well, it's not AMDs fault, it's Word's fault. It's big, it's clunky, and it's wasteful.
Sometimes I wish software still came on cartridges, like the old Atari 2600 games. Plug it in, hit power and BAMMO! there was Demon Attack! I guess linux-on-bios is close, but it's still an uber-geek only kind of thing.
This loser hasn't got an "AI" program to do anything remotely interesting, and he's been at it for years, insisting that his fuzzy-headed "theory of mind," respected by nobody and supported with nothing but his own rantings, is the key to humanlike machine intelligence.
Move over Alex Chiu, you've got competition for goofiest internet crackpot, and right here on slashdot!
OK, but why objects and not actual programs? IANAP (I Am Not A Programmer), but an idea I've recently subscribed to is using several small, fast programs that work together in concert be roughly the equivelent of a bigger app. It would work like so (apply NaCl liberally):
:-] )
A stand alone, plain, small generic text editor knows when there's a spellchecker, font manager etc. available, and would spin them up as separate processes and let them modify the data as needed. These too would be stand alone apps - you could use
"[user@machine MyDir]spellchk Mydoc.txt -lang USEnglish"
and it would open the doc and spell check it outside the Text Editor, if you wish. Inserting a spreadsheet into a document would cause the program to context switch to a generic spreadsheet, which would do the calculations and then spin up the layout/font manager, which would tag the spreadsheet data with appropriate formatting info and then pass it back to the Text editor/Word Processor program.
Registering one of these mini apps with the application broker (not an object broker!) means that any other mini app can call on it to do a task - this would make things totally pluggable, and allow for infinite customisation options. You like the KDE interface best, but wish you could use the GNOME spreadsheet? Yank KDEs spreadsheet app and plug in GNOMEs. Need a funtion that you don't have? Go download it and plug it in. Have a function that you don't ever want to see again? Un-plug it and toss it. Want bloat? Use 100s of plugins. Want Speed? Use 10. Get the idea?
Sounds a lot like the development today from KDE, GNOME et. al, but the difference is in the object libraries - those huge, incompatible obfuscated buckets of code snippets (on both Windows and *nix) that always seem to cause problems for each other. Why can't we single purpose them all, and tie them to a mini app? Instead of a library of widgets to edit text that any program can use, why not limit the use of text editing widgets to a single program - the registered text editor. Program then calls test editor program already running. IMHO, development teams would then be able to concentrate on a single function, not 20, and would likely be able to produce small, fast quality code by throwing everything out of thier libraries not pertaining to the function of thier mini app. And if a mini-app is un-installed, the library goes with it, period full stop.
Perhaps then we would end up with code of reasonable size and quaility?
P.S. - Please don't flame me for careless suggestions of shared memory amongst other transgressions, but I'm interested in why the object model is better than programs that communicate actions on data, not just data. Like I said, I don't really know the nitty gritty technicalities of what I'm talking about, but I'm interested. (I'm wearing my asbestos jammies, too.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
to some excellent comments and feedback, I'd like to offer the following:
1. Yes, 1.44mb can hardly be called "tiny". To be honest, the reason it was chosen is that I just *had* to include the QNX Demo Disk and the OffByOne Web Browser. But much of the site is dedicated to apps in the 2 to 200kb range, which I think can fairly be called "tiny". One example is EVE, a very cool vector graphics editor whose executable is a mere 39k. There are many more listed along these lines.
2. Yes, Windows is very bloated, but by customizing the shell, removing IE, and performing a host of other surgeries, it can actually be quite a nice little OS. I just received an email reply from the author of Optimizing Windows (published by O'Reilly). His book explains (among many other things) how to get Windows 95 down to 17 mb.
3. I realize that Slashdot is generally geared towards *nix users and want to thank you for being kind enough to list a site mainly covering DOS/Windows apps. As I mention on the home page, folks (from any OS) interested in contributing to the site or having a link posted are more than welcome to contact me.
Also, many thanks to those responsible for the mirror mentioned in one of the posts.
Much aloha,
Miles Wolbe
miles@tinyapps.org
http://www.TinyApps.org/
One good reason is because the overhead in sending data between these two processes is too much. You lose all performance this way.
Silly Rabbit...Sig's are for kids.
Probably the coolest really tiny application I have ever seen is .the .product. It is a demo in 64k. For a while, a bunch of friends and I were having a debate about how it works. It's simply amazing all the 3d work that can be done in 64k. True, it is Windows only (DX8 required), but the results are amazing. You can find it at http://www.theproduct.de
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
But in case they don't, I'll tell you what the Atari programmers had to deal with. I'm hazy about the model, but I think it was the 2600.
The unit had 128 BYTES of RAM, which included both the heap and the stack. It had a one byte framebuffer, and you effected the drawing of objects and animation by carefully timed changes of its value during the horizontal or vertical blanking intervals.
One big help is that collision detection was implemented in hardware.
You had a choice of a 2k or a 4k cartridge to store the executable code and graphics. You could do a lot more with 4k, and potentially make a game with greater appeal and thereby greater sales, but it came at the cost of the 4k cartridge yielding the programmer half the rolyalties per unit, because the ROM chips were more expensive.
Dave told me of the long hours the programmers would put in trying to get the last few bytes out of a program, to make the transition from 4k to 2k. Suppose you had a program that absolutely required 2050 bytes - wouldn't that be heartbreaking? Sometimes the programmer would think he had a way to shrink the code enough, but it had the effect of screwing up the timing on the graphics.
The royalties could be considerable on those little cartridges. I understand the 19-year-old who wrote Pac Man for Atari received $1 million in royalties.
Again I say: Kids These Days.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
BSD UNIX for PDP-11 managed to pack a lot of functionality into 64k of data space and 64k of instruction space (with overlays available on some machines, but often statically linked).
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what makes many programs are so much bigger these days. There are reasons, some good, some bad.
Emacs is like this. It's a barebones editor with lisp extensions that talk to each other efficiently and seemlessly. Yeah, there are a lot of extenstions, so it takes up like 70M of disk. But still.... :-)
My other car is first.
700KB for an HTML tag stripper? Come on.
Even Tinyapps' apps are somewhat bloated. Pong in 52 bytes -- Thats tiny. Not to mention, I wrote a full-featured image viewer for X11 that fades in any image from black, holds it according to a user-specified number of seconds, and fades it out. Its fast, flexible, well documented, and bug free. It has support for images as small as 1x1 to 32767x32767 in any depth, supports nearly a dozen different image formats, has wildcard support, scaling support, a controllable fader speed, and a verbose mode tossed in for the hell of it. Total weight of the binary?
Here's a tarball with the source and a precompiled binary, if you want it. Slideshow 1.1.
Cheers, and yes, PROPAGANDA is still running,
Bowie J. Poag
Refreshing to see you all bragging about "Who has the smallest"
Help fight continental drift.
But pertinent to tonights topic is a thread called "The Bloatware debate" that ran for some issues on Risks:
- The Bloatware Debate
- Response
- Response
- Response
- Response
and also:- Bloat Dissections II
- Response
- Response
- Response
- Response
- Response
One culprit that I think is mentioned in there somewhere is the use of virtual functions in C++. Even if a virtual function never gets called because of the way it is possible to run a program, it must be included to satisfy the linker. Virtual functions are necessary to enable polymorphism, though, so I don't see a way around it. However, I suspect they are overused; many C++ programmers do not know when it is appropriate to make a member function non-virtual vs. virtual.-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Her name is Jennifer Garner, more info here.
buh-bye...
Our company runs the site SlowSoftware.com. Come by - we're always looking for leading-edge programs in lack of speed.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
hmmm, a $5 crypt program by Joe amateur or PGP for free...? Tough choice.
Why... you guys have it easy these days with windows and icons and stuff.
Why, when I was your age, we had to program in 1's and 0's, and sometimes we didn't even have 0's!
(Credit: Scott Adams)
Inconceivable!
Rather, This one
A lot of games can be found that are enjoyable yet small.
I have 3656.9 Bogomips. How many Bogomips do you have?
It's both Funny and very, very true!
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in th recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD hs steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is dying
Take a look at http://c64.cc65.org/. It is a good old C64 working as a web server. It runs the uIP TCP/IP stack, which is written in C and is really tiny; the code is around 4k large and it uses some 200 bytes of RAM.
If you think that 64k is small, check out the amazing Omnicent demo. This is a (non-playable) clone of the good old 3D game Descent, but coded in 4096 bytes, including wall textures and music! Furthermore, it doesn't require any extra hardware or software; it runs under MS-DOS and draws directly to the VGA card.
Writing code for these devices is a complete art form in itself - every processor cycle and every byte of ROM and RAM count. Your can get C (and even Basic) compilers for these devices, but you have to use assembly to squeeze out the last drop, and do some very dodgy tricks to use all those spare bits hanging around. We don't use OOP for obvious reasons ;-)
I spend most of my time writing embedded code, every once in the while I code for PC end (64Mb RAM, 1GHz clock wow!), and it is so relaxing not having to think about every byte and the most efficient way to code loops etc, but it makes you think that there must be a hell of a lot of wasted clock cycles in most applications because there is no pressure to tighten the code.
Check out The Ganssle Group for some great articles on embedded development.
Hrm, instead of a stripped-down 1.44 MB bootable system, how about a full-featured 650 MB bootable CD-ROM solution? SuperRescue CD.
Another great site for tiny apps(although not exactly free) is www.radsoft.net
.02 worth
These guys have replaced Windows Explorer with an app called X-File thats less than 14kb. ElPlayo-X(an mp3 jukebox) runs under 10kb.
Check it out. It's worth the visit, even if just for thier "charming" articles assessing(sp?) current trends in Windows and Linux.(Despite the fact that they develope on Windows, thier not exactly fond of the platform, to say the least.)
My
McDoobie
Ok, Anti-Microsoft hat off for a minute:)
Check also the Analog-X site. There are lots of small and useful programs for Windows.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
His stuff is always small (www.grc.com). Trouble in Paradise is a complete Iomega drive diagnosis package self-running at 52KB under Windows.
Sounds like OLE...
So I guess we finally have found a place for our favourite application GNU Emacs. Yes!
$ find /usr/sbin /bin /sbin /usr/bin -size +1440k -type f | wc -l /usr/sbin /bin /sbin /usr/bin -size -1440k -type f | wc -l
10
$ find
2667
It's worth noting that both emacs and vim are in the 10 that would not fit on a floppy.
I know I'm ignoring libraries. I said it was just for fun. :-)
There has been a long discussion on Macintouch about Macintosh "vintage" apps, often now released as freeware, that are still running on recent systems (even too fast, sometimes). Sw includes word processors, slide presenters, etc.
A couple of old mac emulators running on new macs are also suggested for running outdated apps.
At the end of the discussion there is a list of links; furthermore, there is at least one games site (http://homepage.mac.com/giantmike/old.html) (tenths-hundreds of kylobites per game...).
I know you are a troll, but in case anyone doesn't:
FreeBSD is used by the majority of ISPs, as it is extremely stable and reliable, and offers high performance. Its also free, unlike M$ products. NetBSD is widely used, by (a) hobbyists, because it runs on most anything from a PDA to elderly big iron like Vax 11/750, and (b) people who want a gateway/firewall on a small machine.
OpenBSD is secure, but usage is pretty marginal, partly because Theo De Raat makes enemies faster than he writes code (and thats fast!)
Sure ownership of FreeBSD changes minute by minute - that is at least in part because its not very relevant to anyone who owns it. Its source is more open than Linux. Not only its not dying, its not actually possible to kill it. So long as I or anyone else has the source on a hard disk, it lives. FreeBSD probably supports more hardware than Linux, and has almost always supported new hardware sooner than Linux.
The poster obviously believes the myth that there will soon be only one OS in the world, and that will probably be WinXP. Ask a Mac user (OSX IS FreeBSD with a new UI) will he be switching to WinXP? No chance. Its far more likely that the world will switch to OSX just as soon as its ported to Intel architecture.
That's how OLE/COM/DCOM/COM+/.NET (whatever MS is calling it today) is supposed to work, and if the extensions are DLLs, they run in-process.
And this was supposed to reduce the size of apps: you didn't have to include a graphics/GUI/spellchecker/etc in every program. Make them seperate modules, and all apps can use them as needed.
That was the idea anyway. But I notice that with VC++, as soon as you actually use one of the libraries, it loads a huge amount of code into your app to talk to that library. Now some compilers are better at stripping unused code, but the MFC GUI stuff so intertwined, everything gets pulled in! (And the size of those MFC DLLs!)
Borland does it a bit better -- the apps are large by default, but that's because the equivilent of MFC is included in each app for portability. You can group all the common functions needed by each app into a single library if you want to. (And use outside COM objects with no problems.)
I only use text with Linux, so haven't noticed any bloat yet, but I'm sure as soon as I start using large extension APIs the bloat will start.
Somehow we've got to stop the bloat caused by using extensions.
Mmm... Turbo Pascal 2: editor, compiler, run-time in 36k.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I remember running DOS 2.11 on my first Intel PC. As 5-10 MegaByte Hard Drives were fairly expensive, most of us ran everything off of 180/360 K floppies!
when you consider Unreal Tournament is 600 megs, windows is 200 megs, winamp is 6 megs, internet explorer is 8 megs... yeah I would say >1.44 is tiny
on a side note, tinyserver is the BOMB! I currently run it on my machine and not once has it had any problems....
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The sort of thing you're asking about has been available for a decade -- with NEXTSTEP. I believe OS/X inherited this, but I could be incorrect.
Read this and this for a start.
1.44Mb is f***ing huge compared to what it was like in the good old days.
I used to write commercial apps for the BBC Microcomputer. You probably didn't have that in the US, but it was a neat bit of kit in its day (about 1984?) and very popular in the UK.
As I remember it had 32Kbytes of memory, most of which was taken up as screen memory. I think you were left with about 8K to program in. And you had to get everything in there because there was no hard disc or other storage.
I remember I wrote an educational program for schools which included an image drawing system that worked in a similar way to Macromedia Flash. Literally every bit of memory was used. In fact, there was 'spare' to store upto 32 images drawn in the format.
Tell that to programmers today, they don't believe you.
time and a place for large[microsoft] and feature-filled[netscape] software
I guess we all agree that Microsoft software is large in everything from lines of code to its greedy use of memory. But in my mind, I don't see Netscape as feature-filled. MS Word seems to have many more features than the Netscape browser.
On the other hand, as far as features per line of code, Netscape would win hands down over MS. Just a conjecture on my part.
"You like Chinese food." -Fortune Cookie
You might not believe this, but...
6 .h tm
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jchap/tvpro25
My real reason for posting this is not so much the linux ref, but rather the sense of satisfaction one can get from using so called obsolete hardware and software to accomplish real work.
ELKS and DOS 5.0 both run on my old Toshiba T1100 plus. Why bother? This machine originally retailed for $2500 U.S., I picked it up for $10 CAN. At some point in time when the buck was worth more, people paid a considerable amount for this hardware. Has that value disappeared? I don't think so. I can still run word processing software (WP5) and play games (Ancient Art of War, ZZT, and Rogue). The machine still does what it was designed for. Do you really need a massive OS and hardware to write a letter or bash a few bats? No.
Some will question this thinking. Why play Rogue or use WP5 when you can play Quake (or whatever the trendy fps is right now) or use MS office / Star Office. Even though we have Civilization and Free Civ some people still sit down around a Risk or Diplomacy board. Even though we can send email across the world in a few seconds, there is still something satifying about getting a real letter.
Finally, New may have more features, more functionality and in fact be "better" than Old, that does not make Old bad.
This has got to be the smallest and coolest app ever. It's called Tube and it's 256 BYTES (yes, I said BYTES!). It can be found here:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3397
It doesn't use any external libraries, DirectX or any cheating stuff like that. It also comes with full x86 sourcecode for you to enjoy.
Have fun now.
Being a windows user, I have to watch my applications to make sure they don't eat up memory, i.e. memory leaks. So I downloaded a tinyapp called "MemLoad" which should help me do this... but here's the kicker: From the Readme file: Current issues >
There is a small memory leak present in Memload
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Optimizing Windows sounds like a very usefull book, however, a batch file that makes the necessary deletions and changes would be alot handier than manually pruning out hundreds of files and registry entries. I've wanted to make a streamlined version of Windows to run my games for a long time, if only I knew exactly which files I could get away with pruning. I think that it's unfortunate that David L. Farquhar has chosen to profit from his work rather than share his discoveries in an open forum, the synergy of his work and the highly active tweaking community would be astounding; but I suppose it's his perogative to do with his work as he wishes. When I buy this book I may just write a batch file to automate the task of deleting the files and look for a similar way of automating editing the registry.
GEOS got licensed (sold?) to New Deal, who are promoting it as a software suite, New Deal Office, for old computers. Their primary customers seem to be schools.
You can download an evaluation version for free. They used to have (non-expiring) beta versions up for testing, but they no longer do. They also seem to have dumped Motif for something called "NewUI". I remember running NDO with OpenDOS, because the GEOS kernel could supposedly utilize OpenDOS's multitasking ability.
Bear in mind, that GEOS (now "NewDOS") is no longer promoted as a seperate product, rather as a means to an end (the office suite/web browser).
Ok, so how many hits did slashdot get today with
"User-Agent: Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; OffByOne; Win****) Webster Pro V3.2"?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I am using it right now and it puts everything else I have ever used to shame speed wise. Every page I have been to renders pefectly!!!!
You all really need to try it.
My few grips are Control-W for opening a url does not work, and there is no Control-N or whaterver for opening a new windows, and lastly there is no mouse wheel support. But then again its free.
Besides that though I am impressed, which is no easy task, since I have used every browser available on Sparc, ALpha, X86, and PPC since the mid 90's.
Make the applications do what I want. Make them bug free. If an application ends up being 4 MB instead of 200 KB, but is more stable and/or more featureful, I could care less about the size.
Unless your target platform has a limited amount of storage. For instance, how are you going to fit a 2 MB game into a 256 KB NES cartridge, an 8 MB game into a 4 MB GBA cartridge, or a 2 MB bootloader and kernel for a 486 firewall into a 1.44 MB bootdisk?
Will I retire or break 10K?
>A stand alone, plain, small generic text editor knows when there's a spellchecker, font manager etc. available, and would spin them up as separate processes and let them modify the data as needed.
Believe it or not, this was (some say still is) the UNIX philosophy. That's why you have grep, sed, etc, and can pipe all of them together to create an incredible little "program" that does some amazing stuff.
Why this probably won't work on a large scale now (unfortunately):
* In the open source world, developers like to do their own thing. They figure they're doing it for free, so they can do it however they want. "If you don't like it, don't use it!" is their reasoning.
* In the closed source world, Microsoft has proven that the way to increase market share is to make your program incompatible with others. You don't want your user to be able to painlessly swap your product out for your comptetitors.
Frankly, I don't see much in the way of a solution. You can't tell open source developers what to do unless you pay them to do it, which is not a proven business model right now* (see below before you flame me). Small companies may be willing to do this with their closed source products so that they can break into the market, but established "leaders" will add their own custom extensions that require you to use their matching [insert plug-in here] to take full advantage of it.
* Before you flame me, find a company that:
1) Hires developers to work on their core software product, which is released under an open source license
2) Has been doing so profitably for at least 2 years (and I'm really giving you a break here, because 2 years doesn't come close to proving a business model).
You just reinvented out of process OLE servers -- instance tracking, registry and all. Strip away the main() function and you now have objects instead of programs.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The TI-99 was a SUH-WEET machine! I remember the blue and white book you're talking about, coding away in the basement and learning to draw the little man on the screen. ;) BASIC was damned sweet.
The TI-99 was really neat because I also had a tape recorder that came along with it, so my programs were transformed into sounds and stuff. haha
Not on Windows XP. Or on Windows 2000. Or on Windows ME.
Microsoft REALLY don't like command lines any more.
Not just a troll, a redundant troll!
I think I still have the blue book...somewhere...My dad brought us home a TI-994a when he worked for TI, and we gave it to a neighbor. I missed it so much, I had to buy another one on eBay. Parsec rocked, and Hunt the Wumpus
Christina! Bring me an axe!
back in my day:
we had to program in the snow
on a 45% grade !
and we liked it that way !!
32k of shadow RAM helped a lot.
<i>Or did it?</i> Maybe it was just encouraging me to code sloppily...
Hmm, I expected the "large" and "feature filled" links in the posted blurb to both point at an emacs site, but neither of them do.
The poster believes nothing. They accomplished their purpose just fine, though (made you look like an idiot).
He who argues with a fool proves that there are two.
I STLL use 2.04g today, when I get mainframe files from our vendors. They have all these specs and formats and whatnot, and invariably send them in several pieces. I've written batch files and VBA code to unzip, format for the data records, concat, and import, all in one or two steps. Most of these vendors included "installers" that were more trouble than they were worth and usually put crap where I didn't want it.
A couple of jobs ago (1997), I used it with a comms program to do remote updates of hospital software. It was so much better than personally visiting over 150 workstations.
RIP, PK.
GTRacer
- It's not the size of the package, it's the compression ratio
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
I found this tiny HTTP 1.0 complian web server while researching a project. Very interesting. .. using a mere 512 words of program ROM."
"It is based on the world's smallest implementation of a TCP/IP stack -- which is implmented on a small 8-pin low-power microcontroller
There are many such resources out there (both software and hardware). And during my research I had the most luck when I included "embeded" in the search.
Eye, says I.
While he has larger apps there is a ample collection of small stuff at Son of Spy http://www.sover.net/~whoi/Sofffffffware.html
Amazing!!! 256 Bytes!!! Humbling, to say the LEAST!!!
.com file, for DOS - but it runs _fine_ under NT!!!
People - download this and try it, and be amazed!!! It is
My head is spinning!!!
I can't use enough exclamation points!!!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
My HP C200 digital camera has a driver that takes up 100MB of disk space. 100MB! I think that includes some camera interface software, but that's pathetic. More small software, please!
I recently wrote an app that is basically a simple database, in 7300 bytes. Is this a tiny app, or not?
The source is 7300 bytes.
The compiler (Perl) is over 1/2 MB.
The runtime is over 1 MB (but is not actually stored on disk).
The memory footprint of the running app is probably a few MB.
The libraries supporting the app are many MB.
What's the app, and how small does it have to be, to be tiny? Is my script a tightly-coded app that does a lot, or a piece of a large system that does surprisingly little?
This is not tiny. Tiny is Radsoft. These tiny apps are several hundred KB. Which is bloat. Radsoft's text editors for Windows are all under 10KB, their Explorer replacement is only 14.5KB. You want tiny, go where tiny really is. This tiny apps stuff is huge.
These days 1.44 MB is nothing, it's smaller than an MP3 file.
Zipslack is one of my favorite Linux distro's because at about 30MB zipped you can download it even on a flakey dialup in hours rather than days. Add a few more
200 MB would have been HUGE back in the old XT days, but these days it's a tiny fraction of the average HD.
-- Welcome to nowhere fast / nothing here ever lasts.
You still have those old games - how often are you playing them?
I remember somebody posting this message on Usenet, then Spootnik copied it here.
Dude. Parsec was the be-all end all of games.
Remember how hard it was to get into that damned cave in later levels? Or how sweaty your hands got b/c you were nervous you'd hit the walls of the cave?
;)