Baby SEAL: The miniature fetish continues with a beautiful windowing GUI desktop that boots from a single 1.44MB floppy

Overview:

My interest in wasting time with retro and mini OS stuff led me to the challenge:

Can you fit a 32-bit windowing OS on a floppy?

Well, after tinkering with the innovative bootdisk compression strategies of the ingenius Netherlander Bart Lagerweij, and then gutting as much of the standard DOS SEAL installation that I could, I finally packed a very lean version of the 32-bit desktop into a CAB file that would fit into Bart's MODBOOT system.

• The disk boots the computer into MS-DOS (sorry, you have to have a license to use this WIN-98 version of DOS)
  
  
• It then creates an 8mb virtual disk dirive in hard RAM (Drive Q:\)
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• Seal is decompressed onto this drive, where it resides and runs very quickly.
  
  
• Space remains on the floppy to save files when you are done with the machine!

Playing Up to BABY SEAL

I remember stumbling upon SEAL, the open source GUI project for Freedos, when I was looking around for a low-resource OS for an old machine to RUN DOS games. I marvelled at how compact it was once installed. I thought that it would be great if such a modern desktop could fit on a single 1.44. Unfortunately, the SEAL installation files include tons of drivers, source, code, documents, and other crap that weigh in over 10mb. So, I started gutting SEAL files through trial and error, trying to slim it down as much as possible, while still preserving the basic desk top, file manager, and text editor (sorry, all the cool games were removed). I soon found that I could fit it on a floppy with a basic dos boot sector and COMMAND.COM.

I put the disk in my older PC, and flipped the switch. Well, unfortunately, it simply ran waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay slow from A:\ drive. There had to be a better way.

Enter BARTBOOT

Surfing around for a bootdisk that could launch a terminal one day led me to the website of Bart Lagerweij. Bart had come up with a very creative way combining heavy-duty compression with ramdrives to pack a whole lotta data onto a single floppy. His network bootdisk could do what was considered impossible: boot a machine, setup a TCP/IP stack, and run a terminal, ftp clinet, and network drive sharing. With this one boot disk, you could well, I'll let you ponder the possibilites.

CONTIKI: the Inspiration

Almost a year later, I read about the CONTIKI OS on Slashdot. Some guy named Adam creates an Operating System that will surf the web on a fucking 8-bit ATARI-800. Were talking TCP/IP "running comfortably in 64K of ram" [[GULP]]. I mean, he turned old gameboys into PDAs overnight! Now I realized that I wan't the only one... That others shared this fetish for raising those old familar circuits from the dead!

Inspired by these magnificient breakthrough, I realized that Bart's system might enable me run SEAL from a lighting fast RAMDISK. Even though Bart's basic architecture takes up a lot of the normal space on disk, I managed to compress SEAL enough into a CAB file to fit!

Now, of I can just get a TCP/IP stack and a web browser!