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DATE: 15 August-2008
Filed Under: Portable Applications

Floppy Office includes a collection of portable applications that includes text editors, utilities, and spreadsheet creation tools. Floppy Office the portable application suite has gotten a lot of press lately, as it should, and although Floppy Office’s name implies that it will fit on a floppy disk the suite of tools will not actually fit on one floppy disk. Once everything is unpacked Floppy Office is slightly better than 2MB in size.

I thought trying to cram as many useful applications on one floppy disk and create my own “Floppy Office” might be a chic experiment. I remember doing something like this back when floppy disks were the preferred portable storage devices. I used to carry a text editor, a copy of calendar and recorder (from windows 3.1) and a few hacker Werz’s.

My first attempt was small collection of portable applications that includes a Rich Text editor, a web browser, a to-do list application, a file encryption tool, a mini calculator with a tape display and a menu system. Although the six applications fit comfortable on the floppy disk and there was still 392KB of storage room left for file storage, opening any of the applications even the smallest of them all took some time. You don’t typically have this when opening applications from a USB drive.

Now that are so many useful portable applications I thought that it I might be a neat project to see just how many useful applications I could fit on one floppy disk. There are two sites in particular that feature “tiny” applications, many of which are well under 500KB, which are well suited for low capacity devices. Tiny Apps features dozens of tiny applications and Webxspace offers a dozen tiny applications.

The web browser was of course the largest application. Crazy Browser took up then 34% of the floppy’s storage capability. I borrowed Kpad from Floppy Office and it weighed in at 104KB, To Do List 193KB, Porta Menu 146KB, Minicalc 96KB, and dsCrypt, which was also borrowed from Floppy Office, around 25KB. Although I still had enough room for one or two applications I thought it might be a good idea to leave some room for a documents folder. The 392KB left over should leave enough room for a few documents and additions to application configuration files.

Perhaps I could fit more tiny applications on a floppy drive and make it a bit more useful. The second list I compiled consists of twelve tiny applications of various utilities and a text editor; got to have a text editor. I will be writing about them in another post and on a different subject.

In retrospect although it was a fun project I don’t know why anyone would want to create a “Floppy Office” on a device that no longer is practical. Saving and opening files from a floppy is grueling process and just how many portable applications will you be able to fit on one floppy anyway? Why create a Floppy Office on a floppy disk with twelve or so applications when you could carry three dozen applications on an USB drive. I suppose I created my “Floppy Office” for nostalgia and curiosities sakes.