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by asdefghyk 9 days ago
This post - the title made me remember ... ( as a credit card is about the same size as a business card )

A Linux Business Card CD is a miniature, credit-card-sized optical disc containing a stripped-down, bootable Linux operating system. They hold around 50MB to 100MB of data and were highly popular in the early-to-mid 2000s

More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

7 comments

Or the Rex 6000 or other PCMCIA cards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_6000

I had one of those - I think it is still in my office desk.
Seth Schoen (<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=schoen> at HN) was lead dev in building one of the best-known instances of these, the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card (LNX-BBC), and has occasionally commented on that here:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

Reminds me more of the smart card with small chip in it - SLE4442 -> https://firmware.buspirate.com/devices/sle4442
These things were cool! I believe I had some drivers installed via some of them, and a Kubuntu livecd.
Business card CD ROM's were a nice idea in the day.....

.... trouble was they would often 'misfeed' when using a tray style CD Rom drive and jam in the mechanism, meaning you had to dismantle the drive to get the card out.

Understandably, this would quickly piss off people you gave the card to. This helped make the cards rather unpopular.

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

this is really cool. I didn't know we had these