[techrat]

Coming from someone who grew up during the floppy diskette booting and installing era of computing... what Knoppix managed to do by giving us the LiveCD just still seems like pure black magic fuckery to me. Install an OS from CD? Fine. USING an OS only booting from CD? HOLY SHIT.

I'm glad it became an option on the majority of distributions. IMHO it still remains the killer feature over Windows if you want to show someone what Linux can do.

[int_19h]

If I remember correctly, QNX 4 demo was the first graphical OS that I've seen booting and running from a floppy. That was somewhere in late 90s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0

https://web.archive.org/web/19991128112050/http://www.qnx.co...

[techrat]

As impressive as it was at the time (and still is), a floppy is writable.

Booting from read only media and having a fully functioning OS was completely groundbreaking. Especially when you consider how much hardware was supported without configuration.

[int_19h]

As I recall, it worked exactly like a modern live CD, with no state saved to the disk.

[cozzyd]

I recall a dormmate of mine, probably circa 2008, had a broken Windows installation and just ran off a live Ubuntu CD for a while. He didn't see the point in installing, I guess.

[II2II]

There were Linux distributions which were intended to run from Live CDs. I remember one that offered the core Gnome desktop with OpenOffice. It was created for people who needed a distraction free working environment.