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 use

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.