yes, I was using Linux back then too :). Linux could do it in 1997 as well. I seem to recall (but we are talking 30 years ago so memory might be faulty) of Debian having a 1 disk install for its first release of 1.1 (and pre-releases of 0.x) if one was installing it over a network. by definition then this 1 disk was a fully working linux system on a single floppy.

my conceptual floppy was less to demonstrate it fitting on a floppy (that was just the carrot), the idea was to show how one could dynamically "rewrite" shared libs to only include the symbols one needed to run the apps and have them work.

argument being, static linking a single binary is smaller than dynamically linking it and including the shared library, but as one adds binaries, the duplicated code will eliminate that size advantage. But shared libraries (especially something like glibc) are large and apps dont always use vast sections of them), so what if one could iterate over all the dynamically linked apps one wanted to include and only include the sections of the shared libs that were needed.

So the project was demonstrating that. In practice, uclibc was smaller than the sliced up glibc (and at least for this project, worked just fine)

No Linux distro ran a live/usable system from a single floppy at the time. Netbooting obviously isn't an example of a self-contained usable live system. uclibc and Busybox you were referring to had come out years after QNX live floppy.