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."

Comments

Re:These guys have got the right idea.

[Trepidity]

Tell me that after installing a GUI desktop on your Linux box. 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?

Small Unix utilities written in assembly

[Black Acid]

Andrew Main wrote several standard utilities in assembly and packaged them as smallutils. The description says this:

Description: A few very small standard utilities. Assembler versions of some of them are included for i386/Linux (both a.out and ELF), Sparc/Solaris2 and Sparc/SunOS4. Portable C versions of all the utilities are are also included. You need these utilities, and there is no excuse for not having the hyper-efficient (and small!) binaries that result from use of assembler.

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:

• false
• link
• pwd
• sln
• sync
• true
• uname
• unlink

Re:Small Unix utilities written in assembly

[dbarclay10]

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:

No offense or anything, but I bet you've never played with making single-diskette Linux images.

Quite frankly, an app like busybox(which is written, for the most part, in C) does a *hell* of a lot more to conserve space by including a bunch of apps in one binary than by writing less than a dozen (extremely trivial) tools in ASM. Hell, almost all of those tools are basically wrappers for single kernel syscalls. The approach that fellow has taken may work for extraordinarily simple stuff like that, but as soon as you try to get into anything more complex(like, say, a #!/bin/sh implementation), you're pretty much out of luck.

I suggest you take a look at busybox(search Freshmeat) if you're interested in single-floppy Linux installs.

Tiny operating systems

[Black Acid]

The folks who develop FreeBSD released PicoBSD, which according to their homepage can be used as follows:

• diskless workstation
• portable dial-up access solution
• custom demo-disk
• embedded controller (flash or EEPROM)
• firewall
• communication server
• replacement for commercial router
• diskless home-automation system

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.

Tiny ? Risc !

[mirko]

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.

In response...

[milesw]

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/

Atari

[goingware]

I invited a couple friends who were old time Atari programmers to post here. I hope they do.

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.