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."

Small Unix utilities written in assembly

[Black Acid]

Andrew Main wrote several standard utilities in assembly and packaged them as smallutils [linux4u.jinr.ru]. The description [unc.edu] 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

Tiny operating systems

[Black Acid]

The folks who develop FreeBSD released PicoBSD [freebsd.org], 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 [freshmeat.net] and Alfalinux [freshmeat.net] (Slackware on 2 floppies). BBIAgent Router [freshmeat.net] is simply amazing: it's a single-floppy Linux-based router and firewall.

slashdotted -- here's a mirror

[jshare]

http://www.consume.org/~jshare/mirrors/www.tinya pp s.org/index.html (no spaces in URL, obviously)

Or, click here. [consume.org]

Jordan

Re:Irony

[M. Silver]

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?

Contrariwise. When your OS is big, all you got left is room for tiny apps.

(I [heart] Boxer for DOS, myself. I'm pretty sure it's floppy-sized or less, at least in minimal version. If I could find my stupid interface cable, I'd put it on my HP200LX.)

Re:Small Unix utilities written in assembly

[BlowCat]

Another poster already mentioned Busybox [lineo.com] (site seems to be broken now, but I'm including the link anyway). Together with Tinylogin [lineo.com], it provides everything you need for setting up an embedded OS, including init, shell and login.

On the other side, those utilities only work on GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd.

Again with this shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

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 [qnx.com] and the OffByOne Web Browser [offbyone.com]. 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 [myeve.org], 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 [editthispage.com] (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 [consume.org] mentioned in one of the posts.

Much aloha,

Miles Wolbe
[e-mail] [mailto]
http://www.TinyApps.org/ [tinyapps.org]

Re:...and what about old games...

[ehikory]

Also, Home of the Underdogs [theunderdogs.com] has a wide variety of abandoned games.

Steve Gibson

[Quila]

His stuff is always small (www.grc.com). Trouble in Paradise is a complete Iomega drive diagnosis package self-running at 52KB under Windows.

Small? F***ing huge more like...

[pubjames]

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.