[hnlmorg]

> I wish there was some kind of 2024 equivalent to doing this

Lots of OS support live USB images. It’s only Windows and macOS that don’t (though I’m sure Windows could with a little effort).

> Sony really should have brought the minidisc to the pc as a floppy and cd/dvd rom replacement.

Sony did. But there were already removable writable formats that had larger capacity than a CD back when the minidisk was a thing and they didn’t become mainstream either.

Frankly I think MiniDisk is one of those technologies that people remember as being better than they actually were.

[miki123211]

Windows does, it's called Winpe. It's what the Windows installer media runs, but you can (could?) create your own images that boot straight to desktop. Winpe images that included a third-party screen reader were somewhat popular among the blind community at one point, before Narrator (the built-in screen reader) got decent and Microsoft started including it and related components in the installer. I think the original rationale behind this feature was the ability to make custom disks with data recovery tools and such.

Mac OS can boot from external volumes too. It's not a traditional live image, the volume is usually writable and it's a real copy of Mac OS. We're probably talking actual HDD or SSD portable hard drives here, not flash drives, Mac OS isn't that small. You need a Mac to run one of these of course. No idea if this works across computers on Apple Silicon. The new Macs store a lot of the encryption and boot policy stuff in the SE, so I have no idea if booting an unrecognized system would actually work.

[fuzzfactor]

Not merely the limited functionality of WinPE or WinRE.

It's "Windows-to-Go", introduced in Windows 8.0 which had the full Windows functionality contained on the USB stick, if the bootable stick met the high-performance requirements and had firmware indicating to Windows that the USB stick was not a "Removable Device".

This was gradually deprecated for the most part:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

[bitwize]

Mac OS used to boot from an HFS filesystem on a CD. I wouldn't be surprised if it could boot from Goddamn anything that could hold it today.

[codetrotter]

I remember in the WinXP era there existed a tool called BartPE that you could use to make WinXP bootable live CDs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BartPE

[godzillabrennus]

Who can also forget the venerable “nlite” for slipstreaming updates, drivers, third party software, and minimizing the foot print of Windows XP.

https://www.nliteos.com/index.html

[accrual]

I credit nLite for my general NT knowledge today. Taking Windows apart and putting it back together was a fun way to squeeze every MHz/Mb from your hardware.

[miah_]

Hiren's bootcd is a bootable Windows image with lots of utilities bundled in.

https://www.hirensbootcd.org/

"Hiren’s BootCD PE (Preinstallation Environment) is a restored edition of Hiren’s BootCD based on Windows 11 PE x64. Given the absence of official updates after November 2012, the PE version is currently under development by the fans of Hiren’s BootCD. It features a curated selection of the best free tools while being tailored for new-age computers, supporting UEFI booting and requiring a minimum of 4 GB RAM."

[fsiefken]

I recently found a 90 minute cassette from 40 years ago with some good obscure music I had forgotten. The accessibility and touch of the cassette and a floppy interfacing with the player or controller gives a better tactile feedback then a USB disk or MicroUSB disk. You can more easily loose the USB disks as well as they are smaller and don't really make noise when dropped.

As MiniDisc and Zipdrive are obsolete I'd like to have a minicd or businesscard CD audioplayer based on a RaspberryPi Zero. With using Vocos, EnCodec or Lyra v2 you could fit 200 hours of stereo audio on the small cd at around 3 kbps and select them with some buttons and a LCD screen. Similar to the Imation RipGo or Memorex portable 8cm mini-cd players which could play mp3. https://languagecodec.github.io/

Alternatively I could use cassette or microcassette. https://hackaday.com/2021/10/20/audio-tape-interface-revives... https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/10/17/a-wind-up-cassette-play...

I could run a bootable OS on MicroSD and using external small cd's as data or app storage, perhaps also to boot from. An OS experience [Redox, Haiku, KolibriOS, Dragonfly, Fuchsia, MorphOS, Serenity] booting from a 8 cm business card CD depending on the day, weather or mood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_CD

Or perhaps just boot into a Raspberry Pi zero menu to select or boot a random OS from the Zero and use Airtagged encrypted USB-C sticks (making sure each OS can read the encrypted volumes).

[hnlmorg]

Bootable business cards have been around for a while. Eg

CD based: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

PCB based: https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/now-even-your-business-card-...

There’s also NFC based digital business cards, which are now really common. But they’re obviously it bootable / running Linux.

[shiroiushi]

>> Sony really should have brought the minidisc to the pc as a floppy and cd/dvd rom replacement.

>Sony did. But...

If it was from Sony, it was probably ridiculously expensive. Everything they sold had (and still has I think) the "Sony tax", making it uncompetitive with other standards, especially for something like removable media where the per-unit cost adds up quickly.

[m_eiman]

> It’s only Windows and macOS that don’t

You can run macOS from a USB disk, although it won't be a readonly live disc like the Linux ones.