Floppy-EMC? and some other questions

["bfp" <bfp-at-earthlink.net>]

I've been doing some fiddling with the EMC-bin distro and it looks like
it can be shrunk down to fit on the root floppy of a two disk floppy set
(boot and root disks)
with the boot disk having the real time kernel and modules
and the root disk having a compressed ram disk image of the filesystem
with EMC and not much else ,may need a super-formated disk (~1.7 meg)
the root floppy would have to be configured for the specific machine it
would run on for example a stepper based machine would only have one
of the stepper-mot variations no simulation ,no test utilitys and only the
old keystick text interface (for now)

by using two floppy drives and editing the init scripts to boot into
single user mode ( runlevel 1,root access ,no login prompt), mount
and load the second disk and start EMC you could get by without having
a hard drive at all and be running the control straight from power up
(of course it would take a while to boot from floppys)

I havent gotten to far into building a system like this but it has brought
up a few questions

Q) is anyone working on a better text interface than keystick and if so
     how can curses be made to display large fonts in a sub-window for
     the axis coordinate display? I've looked thru the documentation and
     only found a few refrences to double wide fonts in terminfo but no
     examples of how to display them with ncurses

Q) is anyone else working on a machine control pannel/pendant?
     I would like to move many of the basic controls off the screen and
keyboard
     I have most of the hardware (pulse hand weel,rotary switches,toggle
     switches and buttons) and some ideas of how it could be tied in to
     the PC but havent gotten into the software side of it much

Q) is there any real intrest in a floppy-EMC type system? or would this be
     a dead end project?I know that a lot of work is going into the GUI
interfaces
     and a text interface seems like a step backwards but it does have many
     advantages as far as size and ease of setup on the computer(no X
config)

there are also several Linux mini distros with X that can fit on and be
booted
from an IDE or SCSI Zip drive or an LS120 drive ,with the binary EMC distro
most of the developement libs/tools can be left out of the system to greatly
reduce the system size (down to a reasonable downloadable size ,say ~20MB or
less)
these could keep the GUIs but may be harder to set up on some systems
so
Q) are enough people using the super size floptical drives to make this a
better
     project to start on than a standard floppy based system?

I know that milti Gig hard drives can be found for about the same price as a
floptical drive and one disk ,I'm just seeing how small I can make a useable
EMC
only system squish down to

Brian