In about 2000 we had a "bootable business card" which was a CD-ROM on which we loaded a bootable ISO image that we made with various tools that might be useful to a system administrator. The original version was made to promote Linuxcare.

Most CD-ROM drives in PCs had a small inner ring that could hold "mini CDs" with a smaller diameter than a full CD, and a truncated version of this could be a business card CD (which we did not invent; it was commercially available from CD duplicating companies). So, if you had a machine that was broken in some way or you just wanted an ephemeral Linux system, you could take our live CD out of your wallet and boot it in the machine's CD-ROM drive. (Since optical drives are no longer common, nowadays people would use a "live USB" instead of "live CD" for this.)

It's so cool that about 20 years of technological progress has taken us from "your business card can be a tiny optical storage medium containing a usable OS image" to "your business card can be a tiny computer containing a usable OS image" (giving a totally new meaning to "bootable business card").

It's a 32bit 48Mhz CPU, clocked to 90Mhz. I used to run a major EFnet server on Linux on a 25Mhz 386 in about 1996.

If you'd given me this business card in the mid-90s, it would have been useable as my primary desktop.

The PCB edge connector to USB-C is a nice trick. I need to steal that one for my next project.

subtle off green PCB, my god, that's really nice

Impressive, but does it come in eggshell with Romalian type?

That Atmel chip sounds like quite a heck to work with... the DMA section alone. Also related, 'Improving RAM bandwidth' section.

The author's final conclusion about the chip... "Thanks for nothing, Atmel."

I wonder if there are better options available today, but I fear anything useful might involve BGA or similar surface mount techniques.

Maybe I missed something, but what does this cost?

I nominate "ultrix" as the most ironic name ever for a piece of software. Not only was it not the last, it turned out to be one of the first!

Cool, imagine after a collapse of civilization, last survivors dig out this, as the cornerstone to rebuild the old-time industry.

This card has such a sci-fi taste.

this is amazing! the one sin you've committed is not running neofetch / fetch lol. I want to learn a lot more about booting in this aspect. It seems pretty neat that all it really does is load a couple of addresses that then look for an ELF binary vmlinux that is parsed and ran. Seems fairly simple all things considered.

Just from the schematic, it took me longer than necessary to figure out the leftmost symbol was for USB-C

I must say, I love the tagline

“creating order out of chaos (or reverse if needed)”

Does it run Doom?

The tenacity if this guy is insane.

Very Cool!

very cool

Very impressive! Thanks for sharing.

No PalmOS, Dmitry?

Lol, I kid, this is awesome.