I'm old enough to have played the embedded engineer using floppyfw on a spare 486 board screwed on a piece of wood along with a 1.44 fdd and a power supply cannibalized from somewhere. That was my embedded development system nearly 20 years back:)
A bit later I ditched the floppy in favor of a spanking new 4 or 8 MB (megs, not gigs) flash parallel ATA "diskonmodule".
Just checked, I'm surprised that the floppyfw page is still there.
https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
Speaking of small distros, I gave a try at both DietPI and TinyCoreLinux on virtual machines and was amazed at how good they perform.
--smaller without crapware
--just empirically true:
tv@tv:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 28G 11G 17G 39% /
this is my bloated as fuck ubuntu media machine. could be much smaller if it mattered, but that's pretty small already, no?
anyone remember damn small linux? I used to have that on a 128MB (yes MB) flash drive found in a desk at work. but bytes are cheap...