[schoen]

In about 2000 we had a "bootable business card" which was a CD-ROM on which we loaded a bootable ISO image that we made with various tools that might be useful to a system administrator. The original version was made to promote Linuxcare.

Most CD-ROM drives in PCs had a small inner ring that could hold "mini CDs" with a smaller diameter than a full CD, and a truncated version of this could be a business card CD (which we did not invent; it was commercially available from CD duplicating companies). So, if you had a machine that was broken in some way or you just wanted an ephemeral Linux system, you could take our live CD out of your wallet and boot it in the machine's CD-ROM drive. (Since optical drives are no longer common, nowadays people would use a "live USB" instead of "live CD" for this.)

It's so cool that about 20 years of technological progress has taken us from "your business card can be a tiny optical storage medium containing a usable OS image" to "your business card can be a tiny computer containing a usable OS image" (giving a totally new meaning to "bootable business card").

[cbanek]

I remember these! And they weren't exactly circle CD-ROMs either, they had round sides but then straight top and bottom, so you could fit them in a business card holder / wallet. I always thought these were pretty cool.

[tstrimple]

I remember seeing a few of these too. For reference, this is what they typically looked like from my experience.

https://mediaduplication.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

[65j56j56]

Any drive that wasn't one where you insert the CD could read those, including portable music players of the time. You could buy mini CD'R's and burn all kinds of mini distros to it.

[Doxin]

They came in all sorts of shapes. I distinctly recall jars of peanut butter having shirt-shaped ones in the lid for a while. Something like this[0]. As I understand it since CDs are written from the inside-out, you can make them roughly any shape you like as long as it's more or less balanced. You'll just lose capacity.

[0] http://www.dvdreplication.co.nz/packaging/dvd-cases/mini_sha...

[from-nibly]

I had pokemon TCG on one of those disks. Those were the days.

[_joel]

They were cool, until you loaded them into a 4 cd autoloader and they got stuck. Not that I ever did that... :)