5 ms·

I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real

I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real UNIX system without actually being well-designed. They had networking. They had a very primitive speech synthesizer chip or subsystem of some kind - I had no documentation for it, but there were a handful of samples that said fixed words and so I was able to chop up the sample utterances and make it say other things to some degree. You could redirect these requests over the network and make other people's machines speak during class. There was a basic inode-type file system but it had weird permissions and was pretty closely mapped to the physical disk topology so you could edit directories and reassign file locations to be the locations of other files, like, say, the password file. There wasn't anything to stop you from writing a fake login prompt to capture passwords from the unsuspecting. They had structured pascal, a decent LOGO interpreter and a C compiler so they could support really any sort of sophisticated program that a high school student of the day could write. It's sad they ordered them all destroyed. While they were obsolete the day they were made it would be great for there to be a working installation of them to show off how advanced Ontario was once upon a time.

enos_feedler 5y ago
I remember the sad moments when something went wrong and the teacher went to the corner of the room to reset _all the machines_ Or walking in for computer class and they would all be hung on the boot screen
- guyzero 5y ago
  I think they had some sort of GUI but we never got it at our school - they just dropped you into a command prompt on boot like God, Thompson and Ritchie intended.
KerrAvon 5y ago
Curious, what wasn’t actually well designed about it? QNX generally seems to be regarded as superior to 80’s era Unix in most regards.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  QNX was superior to '90s Unix, too.
  - zokula 5y ago
  - helloooooooo 5y ago
    QNX still exists, and is likely running in your car!
  - bregma 5y ago
    QNX is superior to 2022 Unix.
- guyzero 5y ago
  It simply wasn't super hardened, but I'm no expert on mid-80's UNIX variants, maybe they had all the same issues. The filesystem was questionable as I said. But certainly it was pretty advanced for its time - probably not a lot of high schools had a lab of networked standalone UNIX machines and these were the closest thing you were likely to get.
- jecel 5y ago
  In 1985 I was hired by a company in Brazil to decompile QNX to commented C sources. Softec launched the first PC XT clone in Brazil in May 1983 but it was initially absurdly expensive ($15K for a configuration that was $5K in the US) so they sold it with QNX telling clients they could add up to 5 terminals to divide the cost by 6 users. Most clients preferred to pirate MS-DOS instead, but a few did pay for Analix (the 1977-1992 reserved market policy in Brazil forced them to claim to have written it themselves instead of licensing it from Quantum Software Systems). One problem with saying they had written it was that clients would report bugs which they would forward to Quantum (much later renamed to QNX Software Systems) but nothing would happen. When I produced the decompiled sources it took me a single afternoon to fix the pending bugs and implement the feature requests. The first step was to disassemble the binaries. As an OEM Softec had access to the .obj files so they could link in new drivers if needed, and those included the symbol tables giving me at least the function names. The C compiler didn't do any optimizations, so compiling a few sample programs was enough for me to then read through the assembler while typing in C and adding comments as I went along. The version I worked on was called 1.1e even though versions 1.2 and 2.0 (which was just 1.2 plus networking) were available. The overall idea for QNX (originally QUNIX) was solid, but early implementations were not so nice. In 1.1e it was possible to see that a lot had been fixed from earlier versions, but there still were a lot of problems. The File Manager was responsible for decoding executable files (the Task Manager should have done that instead), for example, and most of the functionality that should have been in the shell were hardwired into the Task Manager instead. This was greatly improved in version 1.2 which I looked at though I didn't decompile. Even in version 1.1e, running QNX on a 256KB PC with floppies only was way nicer than other Unixes on much beefier machines. Each version was much better than the previous ones so by the 1990s the QNX people saw was a different experience than what was on those old machines.
roter 5y ago
Same ~1983, though we only had three of them at the back of the CS lab and they were never used. We had ~20 Commodore "SuperPET"s, wired in to the University of Waterloo [0]. You could actually send things to run at UW. Good times. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET
bcrl 5y ago
The permissions in the QNX version running on the ICONs were somewhat interesting. Both users and groups were 8 bit numbers, and groups had an admin if the user id in the group was 255, while root was 255:255. I had just learned how to program in C the summer prior to grade 7 when we first had the ICONs in my grade school, and was able to convince the admin to let me have a shell account. I ended up doing some useful things for the teachers by writing a program to migrate applications from one partition on the system to another (the applications partition was full while the user data partition was not, and apps were fine running from either partition - QNX essentially made it invisible to them). I found a few holes in the system as well - you could ctrl-c from the speach therapy app and get a root shell after logging while waiting for it to load. The hardware itself had a number of features that predated similar hardware being widely available in the PC world. Every workstation had built in arcnet and booted from the network. They used an 80186 CPU, so slightly higher performance than an IBM PC. Every system came with audio hardware capable of playing back samples (I have no idea what sample rate or how many bits per sample it had, but it was grungy enough to probably be 8 bits at 20kHz). And they had glorious trackballs built into the keyboards that us kids would often swipe furiously. It was certainly an interesting system at the time, but I had already been exposed to 80386 PCs running MS-DOS with NetWare over ethernet in the summer which was far more performant. At the end of my grade school year I ended up breaking the network horribly and knocked the ICONs offline until the system was reinstalled. By this time I had root acess, and mistakenly typed a 1 instead of a 4 and destroyed the root filesystem on the server. Ooops! That was quite the lesson. At least I didn't get in trouble (unlike some of my earlier antics in the school year that stemmed from complete boredom and an utter lack of interest in going outside for recess in -25C to -30C weather). Ah, those were quite the years.

enos_feedler 5y ago

I remember the sad moments when something went wrong and the teacher went to the corner of the room to reset _all the machines_ Or walking in for computer class and they would all be hung on the boot screen

guyzero 5y ago
I think they had some sort of GUI but we never got it at our school - they just dropped you into a command prompt on boot like God, Thompson and Ritchie intended.

KerrAvon 5y ago

Curious, what wasn’t actually well designed about it? QNX generally seems to be regarded as superior to 80’s era Unix in most regards.

ncmncm 5y ago
QNX was superior to '90s Unix, too.
- zokula 5y ago
- helloooooooo 5y ago
  QNX still exists, and is likely running in your car!
- bregma 5y ago
  QNX is superior to 2022 Unix.
guyzero 5y ago
It simply wasn't super hardened, but I'm no expert on mid-80's UNIX variants, maybe they had all the same issues. The filesystem was questionable as I said. But certainly it was pretty advanced for its time - probably not a lot of high schools had a lab of networked standalone UNIX machines and these were the closest thing you were likely to get.
jecel 5y ago
In 1985 I was hired by a company in Brazil to decompile QNX to commented C sources. Softec launched the first PC XT clone in Brazil in May 1983 but it was initially absurdly expensive ($15K for a configuration that was $5K in the US) so they sold it with QNX telling clients they could add up to 5 terminals to divide the cost by 6 users. Most clients preferred to pirate MS-DOS instead, but a few did pay for Analix (the 1977-1992 reserved market policy in Brazil forced them to claim to have written it themselves instead of licensing it from Quantum Software Systems). One problem with saying they had written it was that clients would report bugs which they would forward to Quantum (much later renamed to QNX Software Systems) but nothing would happen. When I produced the decompiled sources it took me a single afternoon to fix the pending bugs and implement the feature requests. The first step was to disassemble the binaries. As an OEM Softec had access to the .obj files so they could link in new drivers if needed, and those included the symbol tables giving me at least the function names. The C compiler didn't do any optimizations, so compiling a few sample programs was enough for me to then read through the assembler while typing in C and adding comments as I went along. The version I worked on was called 1.1e even though versions 1.2 and 2.0 (which was just 1.2 plus networking) were available. The overall idea for QNX (originally QUNIX) was solid, but early implementations were not so nice. In 1.1e it was possible to see that a lot had been fixed from earlier versions, but there still were a lot of problems. The File Manager was responsible for decoding executable files (the Task Manager should have done that instead), for example, and most of the functionality that should have been in the shell were hardwired into the Task Manager instead. This was greatly improved in version 1.2 which I looked at though I didn't decompile. Even in version 1.1e, running QNX on a 256KB PC with floppies only was way nicer than other Unixes on much beefier machines. Each version was much better than the previous ones so by the 1990s the QNX people saw was a different experience than what was on those old machines.

roter 5y ago

Same ~1983, though we only had three of them at the back of the CS lab and they were never used. We had ~20 Commodore "SuperPET"s, wired in to the University of Waterloo [0]. You could actually send things to run at UW. Good times. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET

bcrl 5y ago

The permissions in the QNX version running on the ICONs were somewhat interesting. Both users and groups were 8 bit numbers, and groups had an admin if the user id in the group was 255, while root was 255:255. I had just learned how to program in C the summer prior to grade 7 when we first had the ICONs in my grade school, and was able to convince the admin to let me have a shell account. I ended up doing some useful things for the teachers by writing a program to migrate applications from one partition on the system to another (the applications partition was full while the user data partition was not, and apps were fine running from either partition - QNX essentially made it invisible to them). I found a few holes in the system as well - you could ctrl-c from the speach therapy app and get a root shell after logging while waiting for it to load. The hardware itself had a number of features that predated similar hardware being widely available in the PC world. Every workstation had built in arcnet and booted from the network. They used an 80186 CPU, so slightly higher performance than an IBM PC. Every system came with audio hardware capable of playing back samples (I have no idea what sample rate or how many bits per sample it had, but it was grungy enough to probably be 8 bits at 20kHz). And they had glorious trackballs built into the keyboards that us kids would often swipe furiously. It was certainly an interesting system at the time, but I had already been exposed to 80386 PCs running MS-DOS with NetWare over ethernet in the summer which was far more performant. At the end of my grade school year I ended up breaking the network horribly and knocked the ICONs offline until the system was reinstalled. By this time I had root acess, and mistakenly typed a 1 instead of a 4 and destroyed the root filesystem on the server. Ooops! That was quite the lesson. At least I didn't get in trouble (unlike some of my earlier antics in the school year that stemmed from complete boredom and an utter lack of interest in going outside for recess in -25C to -30C weather). Ah, those were quite the years.