I love lightweight distros. QNX had a "free as in beer" distro that fit on a floppy, with Xwindows and modem drivers. After years of wrangling with Slackware CDs, it was pretty wild to boot into a fully functional system from a floppy.
That famous QNX boot disk was the first thing I thought of when reading the title as well.
Me too! And the GUI was only a 40KB distribution and was waaaaaay better than Windows 3.0!
And incredibly responsive compared to the operatings systems of even today. Imagine that: 30 years of progress to end up behind where we were. Human input should always run at the highest priority in the system, not the lowest.