That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026
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That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026
In a world of mass-produced bot-slopware, small is more beautiful than ever
Liam Proven
Liam<br>Proven
Published<br>fri 29 May 2026 // 10:15 UTC
If you're old enough, you might remember using floppy disks, either of the 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch variety. They didn't hold much and often you had to have many disks to install one program. Don't be misled by Fits on a Floppy's retro-tech name: it is most<br>definitely not about 20th century data media. It's about compactness and<br>comprehensibility.<br>Fits on a Floppy describes<br>itself as "a Manifesto for Small Software," and as we read it, we found<br>ourselves nodding in agreement, right from the opening line:
Software has lost its way.
That is certainly the impression of this author, and it is not just<br>us. We are irresistibly reminded of the Red Hat developer's six waves of<br>industry BS that we recounted<br>in February.
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Like any eternal verity of the computing industry, there's even an XKCD comic about it, if you needed<br>any more persuading. XKCD's own internal citations, both about voting machines and indeed about the use of the blockchain,<br>reinforce the message. Randall Monroe spells it out:
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Our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.
That sounds about right. And parenthetically, anyone who says that<br>they can improve anything with either blockchain or AI<br>is no more to be trusted than a schoolteacher who gives no homework.<br>A year before that Red Hat engineer talked to us about waves of<br>industry BS, Belgian consultant Bert<br>Hubert talked to The Reg about digital sovereignty – and he<br>feels similarly. In 2024, he wrote A<br>2024 Plea for Lean Software in tribute to the great Niklaus Wirth,<br>who passed away earlier that month.
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In our own obituary<br>for Professor Wirth, we mentioned the 1995 paper that inspired<br>Hubert: A Plea for Lean<br>Software (this is a PDF of a scan – but we have posted a more<br>readable plain<br>text version here).<br>One of the lasting effects of that paper is what is now called Wirth's Law:
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
Sadly, that seems to have been its main impact. As a usable<br>demonstration of his 2024 "plea," Hubert offered a working example, which<br>he explained in Trifecta<br>Technology. It's a web image-sharing tool, implemented in under<br>2000 lines of code. There's also a page for the Trifecta app<br>itself, which comes in as a 1.7 MB compressed Docker file. (With<br>some clever<br>disk formatting, you could get that<br>on a 1.4 MB floppy.)<br>There are, as that anonymous Red Hatter observed, so many different<br>layers of unnecessary complication and plain old marketing lies in<br>modern IT that it is now hard to even keep track of them. One point of<br>the Fits on a Floppy idea is that if you impose an artificial<br>limit on project size, merely by keeping it very small, you will be<br>forced to keep it very simple. That simplicity is the goal here, not<br>fitting on 1980s physical media.<br>You might react with scorn when you hear the idea that in the 2020s,<br>anything useful could fit into under 1.5 MB. When even a leading tool to<br>write an ISO file onto a USB key is a hundred times that size, it sounds absurd. But it really is not.<br>The mind behind the manifesto is developer Matt Sephton, and he<br>offers 18 tiny but useful apps that he's written to prove his point –<br>plus a screensaver which we feel sure is an hommage to<br>Berkeley's classic<br>Flying Toasters screensaver.
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Others are still making useful single-floppy-sized apps today. We<br>wrote about the revival<br>of the Dillo web browser, and at last year's FOSDEM, the project<br>lead was handing out<br>floppies with the latest release. The whole app, on one diskette. Drew<br>DeVault's Hare programming language is still in<br>development, but when it reaches version 1.0, he plans to sell copies on a floppy:
Hare fits on a 3.5-inch floppy disc — these will be available for purchase when Hare 1.0 is released!
Another tiny modern language is the Janet Language. It's not<br>quite so small, but its just over 2MB<br>download could fit onto the 2.8 MB floppies that were used<br>in later IBM PS/2 models and the NeXTstation.<br>The real point here is about the readability and long term<br>maintainability of compact, even minimalistic code. It's a similar point<br>to that made in Dave Gauer's Ascetic Computing<br>essay, which we cited and linked to when looking<br>at OpenBSD 7.9.<br>Small size and simplicity is what Fits on a Floppy is really<br>talking about, not about physical media. He explicitly spells it out for<br>the hard-of-thinking:
I don't miss floppy disks. I miss the...