I'm old enough to have played the embedded engineer using floppyfw on a spare 486 board screwed on a piece of wood along with a 1.44 fdd and a power supply cannibalized from somewhere. That was my embedded development system nearly 20 years back:) A bit later I ditched the floppy in favor of a spanking new 4 or 8 MB (megs, not gigs) flash parallel ATA "diskonmodule". Just checked, I'm surprised that the floppyfw page is still there. https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/

Speaking of small distros, I gave a try at both DietPI and TinyCoreLinux on virtual machines and was amazed at how good they perform.