HamsterOS: A graphical desktop OS that fits on a 1.44MB floppy

HamsterOS Crams Complete Graphical Desktop Onto 1.44 MB Floppy | Hackaday

It’s not every day that there’s a new OS in the works for 386 and 486-era hardware, but [John Swiderski] let us know he working hard to bring HamsterOS to retrocomputing enthusiasts everywhere.

HamsterOS targets a November 2026 release.<br>HamsterOS is a tiny but full-featured multitasking 32-bit graphical operating system that fits on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk. It’s designed as a floppy-first OS, but can easily be installed to a hard drive and includes a suite of native applications. There’s even DOS support!

The list of features is impressive, many of which are targeted at making life a little easier for those working with vintage hardware. One example we like is the CMOS crash counter, which automatically forces the system into a basic VGA safe mode after three consecutive failed boot attempts.

Speaking of making vintage computing a little easier to handle, [John] also released HamsterWeazle, a free GUI front-end for Greaseweazle, the open-source USB device that makes interfacing to old floppy drives easy. If you’re finding yourself intrigued by software like HamsterOS but wondering how you’d write to a 1.44 MB floppy without already having some old hardware up and running, Greaseweazle over USB — and HamsterWeazle to make it much more user-friendly — is one way you’d do it.

We recently featured GentleOS, a charming and streamlined graphical OS aimed at vintage hardware that makes a point of showing what’s possible when new ideas meet old hardware. If you have a retrocomputing project you want to show off, custom OS or otherwise, let us know on our tips line!

10 thoughts on “HamsterOS Crams Complete Graphical Desktop Onto 1.44 MB Floppy”

Plan 9 achieved that 30 years ago. I got a floppy at Usenix ‘95 and talked to dmr about the system.

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So did QNX made a version available that booted from a single floppy, I had a copy around ’99; complete with web browser.

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Nowadays, a webbrowser alone is 100 floppies.

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I’m not sure they’d actually fit on that few.

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You absolutely nailed the historical flex there, and then finding http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html is total clutch!

It’s wild how much tech they managed to fit on a single floppy back then. GUI, networking stack, browser and more… it was giving revolutionary main character energy. Massive throwback vibe! IYKYK.

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It’s relatively easy when you’re only supporting a very narrow set of hardware options or functions, and don’t have any libraries or APIs to do much anything else.

For example, a pared down minimal copy of DOS plus a TCP/IP networking stack fits in little under 400 kB. Then you have a megabyte left over to write a "game" that pretends to be a full graphical operating system with some basic apps. A web browser similar to Netrik might take half a megabyte, while most other simple apps and games don’t need more than a couple dozen kilobytes each because they’re hard-coded in without any abstraction layers. The key is re-using all assets, which is possible because it’s such a tightly constrained and limited system.

HamsterOS: A graphical desktop OS that fits on a 1.44MB floppy

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