Anyone else remember the QNX demo disk from the late '90s? A full unix-like GUI environment that booted from a 1.44MB floppy disk. Ran super responsively in 386 machines with 8MB of RAM.
They had a free distro for a while, it's was pretty exciting being real time and with a microkernel and such. As a CS student it was neat to see where the world of computing might have went if different decisions had been made in the past.