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asdefghykyesterday at 9:30 AM6 repliesview on HN

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


Replies

WillAdamsyesterday at 1:07 PM

Or the Rex 6000 or other PCMCIA cards:

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

show 1 reply
GJimtoday at 3:05 PM

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

dredmorbiusyesterday at 4:37 PM

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...>

mmmehulllyesterday at 11:15 AM

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

devmoryesterday at 2:18 PM

These things were cool! I believe I had some drivers installed via some of them, and a Kubuntu livecd.