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Remember the QNX 4.25 demo disk that fit on a single 3.5 floppy and included a GUI, networking, a web browser (with basic javascript), clustering, and various o

by PeCaN 9y ago

Remember the QNX 4.25 demo disk that fit on a single 3.5 floppy and included a GUI, networking, a web browser (with basic javascript), clustering, and various other applications? What a great little OS.

vram22 9y ago
I had tried it out too. It was really fast, a lot more than the Linuxes I was using then - Red Hat and Mandrake. (Not comparable, I know.) I think they had a UI / desktop environment called Photon.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  That 'really fast' bit that you perceived was your processor slicing 200K+ times / second versus maybe 2000 times/second under Linux or Windows. QNX is crazy fast in that respect simply because it has almost no context to switch. The soft-realtime aspect of the kernel also helps tremendously in keeping things moving, everything that is interactive runs at a high priority so you'll never see frozen mousepointers or stuff like that.
  - vram22 9y ago
    Interesting and makes sense, thanks.
insulanian 9y ago
Still have it somewhere!
- PeCaN 9y ago
  I boot it up in virtualbox periodically and play with it. Setting up the clustering and dragging Photon windows between two VMs is really satisfying. I wish RIM/Blackberry hadn't bought it, closed the source¹, and killed off Photon. QNX was a really solid and fast OS. 1. For those who don't follow QNX development closely, the source was available for a few years but was not open in the usual sense. It was still under a proprietary license. RIM bought QNX and closed it off completely.
  - jagger27 9y ago
    Stallman was right.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    If they had I would have never left QNX. Quantum had a great thing going, then first the sale to Harman and after that RIM buying it may have been a good business decision for RIM but it was terrible for the mass adoption of QNX. Even so, there probably are still untold millions (or even 10's of millions) of embedded QNX installations out there besides the Blackberries that are still in use. That little os is about as elegant as they come this side of plan9/inferno.
FreakyT 9y ago
That's exactly what I thought of when I saw this post. Still astounding they managed to fit so much into 1.44mb!
rootbear 9y ago
I really wish that there was still a free version of QNX around. I enjoyed playing with it.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  I am sorely tempted to push my own little OS for another round but just porting the whole thing from 32 bit to 64 bit has me depressed. It should be a lot easier than the first time around though, now that we have VMs to test with, that is a lot faster turnaround wise than to have to reboot a physical machine every time you mess up in kernel code or some critical device process.
dguaraglia 9y ago
Yes! That was amazing, specially compared with the basic KDE/Gnome Linux distro at the time that would take a whooping 100mb. Now I install OS X apps that are > 150mb on a regular basis. It's ridiculous.

by PeCaN 9y ago

vram22 9y ago

I had tried it out too. It was really fast, a lot more than the Linuxes I was using then - Red Hat and Mandrake. (Not comparable, I know.) I think they had a UI / desktop environment called Photon.

jacquesm 9y ago
That 'really fast' bit that you perceived was your processor slicing 200K+ times / second versus maybe 2000 times/second under Linux or Windows. QNX is crazy fast in that respect simply because it has almost no context to switch. The soft-realtime aspect of the kernel also helps tremendously in keeping things moving, everything that is interactive runs at a high priority so you'll never see frozen mousepointers or stuff like that.
- vram22 9y ago
  Interesting and makes sense, thanks.

insulanian 9y ago

Still have it somewhere!

PeCaN 9y ago
I boot it up in virtualbox periodically and play with it. Setting up the clustering and dragging Photon windows between two VMs is really satisfying. I wish RIM/Blackberry hadn't bought it, closed the source¹, and killed off Photon. QNX was a really solid and fast OS. 1. For those who don't follow QNX development closely, the source was available for a few years but was not open in the usual sense. It was still under a proprietary license. RIM bought QNX and closed it off completely.
- jagger27 9y ago
  Stallman was right.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  If they had I would have never left QNX. Quantum had a great thing going, then first the sale to Harman and after that RIM buying it may have been a good business decision for RIM but it was terrible for the mass adoption of QNX. Even so, there probably are still untold millions (or even 10's of millions) of embedded QNX installations out there besides the Blackberries that are still in use. That little os is about as elegant as they come this side of plan9/inferno.

FreakyT 9y ago

That's exactly what I thought of when I saw this post. Still astounding they managed to fit so much into 1.44mb!

rootbear 9y ago

I really wish that there was still a free version of QNX around. I enjoyed playing with it.

jacquesm 9y ago
I am sorely tempted to push my own little OS for another round but just porting the whole thing from 32 bit to 64 bit has me depressed. It should be a lot easier than the first time around though, now that we have VMs to test with, that is a lot faster turnaround wise than to have to reboot a physical machine every time you mess up in kernel code or some critical device process.

dguaraglia 9y ago

Yes! That was amazing, specially compared with the basic KDE/Gnome Linux distro at the time that would take a whooping 100mb. Now I install OS X apps that are > 150mb on a regular basis. It's ridiculous.