>>advand+B1
http://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page

>>paulca+(OP)
MenuetOS is closed source. I particularly recommend take a view to KolibriOS [1] - formerly fork of the MenuetOS32, community driven and with better hardware support.

[1] http://kolibrios.org

>>bane+Xd
It's definitely a very neat project. It kind of reminds me of QNX Neutrino. It also fit on a single floppy disk, and had a GUI, web browser, etc. It's also a Unix-like with a microkernel design.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020205065733/http://www.qnx.co...

But what I really liked about QNX is how amazingly good it looks with just a bit more polish beyond the size of a floppy disk:

http://mobile.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=534

(I don't know the exact size of the OS today, but back in the early 2000's it was still extremely small and looked almost identical to the osnews screenshots. I want to say it was around ~80MB, and came with GCC and a bunch of other goodies.)

I could actually see myself running that instead of a Chromebook or on a server through VNC.

Unfortunately, QNX never really went beyond the embedded world: it's almost exclusively used in car navigation systems and such these days.

Hopefully at some point Menuet will grow as QNX did from its floppy disk days. The tiny tech demos are wonderful, but with a bit more polish they could see real-world production use.

>>bane+Xd
Yep. There is a study on this, worth to read, it is focusing on the historical aspect and how we got here:

https://twitter.com/lix/status/589171043010412544

>>userbi+gi
Remember that BASIC, Pascal, Modula, Oberon, Ada, and LISP were used in the past for OS's and system software on machines with almost no hardware by today's standards. Ada, Java subsets, and Astrobe's Oberon are still used in embedded systems today.

What makes today's software bloated is the crud built-up over time, standardization, security, reliability, a trend toward easier maintenance/productivity over raw speed, and so on. Here's [1] a simple program that got trimmed down to mere bytes. You can see how much overhead the aforementioned items add to C code which, by itself, produces very efficient assembler. For people wanting a middle ground, there are High Level Assemblers such as Hyde's HLA [2] and I've speculated we could do something similar with LLVM's bytecode.

[1] http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm...

[2] http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/HighLevelAsm/H...

>>TheLon+7k
Someone got a Linux image that could run `ls` down to 6.12MB by intercepting file accesses and deleting anything unused... See "How I shrunk a Docker image by 98.8%" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438323)

>>advand+B1
This course you build a small OS with the seL4 microkernel on a sabre lite board http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs9242/current/

Of course there's also Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions and the plan9 operating system design specs you can go through to see why they did what they did. They're "old" resources but basics have stayed the same.