13 ms·

QNX DEMO disk (1999)

226 points by lproven 4y ago

wslh 4y ago
SqueakNOS was a project to build a complete operating system via Squeak. In this way you can quickly hack it. There is a great page about these initiatives here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5727 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5727 Prior to SqueakNOS we implemented this: http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/ http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/ (using Linux and modifying Squeak to work with SVGALib instead of X) in just 900mb inspired in this QNX Demo Disk.
- lproven 4y ago
  I think you meant 900 kB not MB. TBH, even now, 900 meg isn't very impressive. ;-)
  - wslh 4y ago
    Right, thanks!
agumonkey 4y ago
I wonder what could be improved with todays knowledge while keeping it under 2MB.
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- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  Why would you keep it under 2MB?
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  - flenserboy 4y ago
    For one, to put retro systems to great use. For another, to keep as much cruft/unnecessary bells & whistles from being present as possible. Just because the space is there doesn't mean it has to be used.
    - CyberDildonics 4y ago
      What specific retro systems have a 2MB limit?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        2.88 for Extra High Density - pretty rare outside of Japan iirc. http://209.68.14.80/ref/fdd/formatKB2880-c.html http://209.68.14.80/ref/fdd/formatKB2880-c.html
        tssva 4y ago
        3COM NETBuilder II routers had 2.88MB floppies. I once spent an entire day tracking down a local supplier with a 2.88MB floppy drive and floppies in stock, so we could upgrade the software on a few routers being affected by a Vines/IP bug.
      - Findecanor 4y ago
        A "1.44 MB floppy" has that capacity for files when formatted with the FAT file system from MS-DOS. The unformatted capacity is actually closer to 2 MB but a proper file system has disk-space overhead for metadata and check sums. You could have a file system with much less disk-space overhead than FAT, and there are many out there. A demo disk would typically be read-only, and in particular there are some read-only file-systems that are really space-optimised, Another option would be to treat the disk sectors as a single compressed file which the bootloader decompresses into a RAM-disk image which the OS then boots from, but that would require a bit more than 2 MB of RAM.
      - flenserboy 4y ago
        It's not 2 mb in particular; honestly, I'd say 4 mb is the practical starting limit once you're into 16/32 bit CPUs — a Mac Plus / Classic would go to 4, for instance, and every speck of memory free under that made a difference in performance. 2 is a nice limit for total system size, as it allows for (as can be seen in QNX) a very capable, flexible OS, while leaving headroom for programs to run.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    I restricted myself, I wanted to say 1MB. I can't help but to find the min-max of everything. Well at least fantasize about what could be.
- lproven 4y ago
  I don't think there is anything today that comes close to equalling it, and very definitely nothing that can improve on it.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    Even without knowing it, I'm sure it's far from perfect and may enjoy a few tweaks here and there.
    - lproven 4y ago
      The QNX demo, from 25Y ago? Oh, yes. The miracle is that it worked at all, not that it's very complete. The full OS was a ~100MB download: https://archive.org/details/qnx-neutrino-rtos-x86-runtime-kit-6.3.0-sp3 https://archive.org/details/qnx-neutrino-rtos-x86-runtime-ki...
      - bmacho 4y ago
        The full OS was 1.4 MB, but they've distributed some additional software as well.
        lproven 4y ago
        Well, no, not really, AFAIK. But it depends what you define as "the full OS". It is mainly an embedded OS for routers and engine-control units and traffic lights. For that role, it doesn't need a GUI or a desktop or dev tools or a network stack. So are they part of the "full OS"? It depends where you stand, and how you look at it. The Demo Disk contains a lot more than 1.4MB of code. It's more like 3-4MB of code, but that does not mean it is "the full OS".
sloppycee 4y ago
I remember buying a magazine with this floppy disk attached, blew my mind back then. Great marketing from QNX at the time. How they did it: http://web.archive.org/web/20011106140711/http://www.qnx.com/demodisk/how.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011106140711/http://www.qnx.com...
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  That bit of web archaeology was very helpful, much appreciated!
- lloeki 4y ago
  Exactly my thought when reading the title. I remember it took a bit of time to boot because my floppy drive was glacially slow at seeking, but once there it was incredibly reactive. As a wow factor it probably comes a close second place to when I got to experience BeOS hands-on (which was like, how is that even possible)
bluedino 4y ago
I remember being impressed by the Geoworks environment that was contained in America Online 1.0 (?) for DOS. So snappy and smooth compared to Windows 3.11 on the same 2MB 386.
- lproven 4y ago
  Now FOSS: https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos
h2odragon 4y ago
QNX always sounded interesting, until one saw just how much effort the company was going to to prevent people from actually using it. Vaguely recall a story about someone trying to buy 50 licenses from them for a prototype kiosk thing but they wanted something like 1,000 minimum for a reseller account; and that killed the project.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Being proprietary killed such an huge large amount of great technology in the 90 and early 2000s.
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  - danuker 4y ago
    It also made a large amount of money for those who knew how to walk the fine line between profitability and adoption.
  - bmacho 4y ago
    Brought them to life first.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Sure, but if times are changing you need to start thinking about how to change. Some managed that others didn't.
- gbin 4y ago
  Now it is basically a company just as predatory as Oracle. It is just sad.
jakemauer 4y ago
This brings back memories. I remember marveling at this with my best friend when it came out. I got into BeOS around the same time. I used to use those ad-supported dial up ISP’s and found one that worked with a standard PPP dialer so I didn’t need their software. I remember carrying around the QNX disk and login info so I could get online with basically any computer.
- grendelt 4y ago
  I got into these back in the late 90s because of the hackable 3Com Audrey "internet appliance" (remember that term?) I never hear about QNX anymore, so this is def a blast from the past.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  > I used to use those ad-supported dial up ISP’s and found one that worked with a standard PPP dialer so I didn’t need their software Juno? Netzero?
  - jakemauer 4y ago
    I feel like it was literally called “freeinternetaccess”, definitely not one of the major ones like NetZero.
haunter 4y ago
Something similar: https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html The 4.0 version works perfectly, 2.2.26 kernel though which was released in 1999 Discussed before here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025
SirLJ 4y ago
I had one of those in another life :-)
basementcat 4y ago
Reminds me of tomsrtbt http://www.toms.net/rb/ http://www.toms.net/rb/
- lproven 4y ago
  I used that back when it was current. It was an impressive bit of kit, but TBH, what QNX did on a single floppy made -- and more than ever still makes -- Linux look very very bloated. Tom's Root-and-Boot just about got you a working command line on one floppy. For comparison, using FOSS equivalents, QNX got that, plus all of X.org, plus Firefox, onto one floppy. And if you used the status bar to find your IP address, and went to another machine and put that in a browser's URL box, you found that as well as all that, it was also a live webserver, serving live performance stats to the Internet. So, kernel, busybox, X server, desktop, web browser AND WEB SERVER on one (very heavily compressed) floppy. Sadly, the genius who built it died young. Cancer. Fsck cancer. https://openqnx.com/node/298 https://openqnx.com/node/298
  - gattilorenz 4y ago
    > For comparison, using FOSS equivalents, QNX got that, plus all of X.org, plus Firefox, onto one floppy. Except it’s not really ALL of X, and the browser is more like IE2 in capabilities… For a more fair comparison, where QNX wins in terms of absolute size, but Linux wins in terms of functionality, there’s muLinux: http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/ http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/
    - lproven 4y ago
      Well, yes, all right. :-)
FL410 4y ago
Is there any good way to play with QNX on a workstation/VM to get familiar with it?
- IncRnd 4y ago
  You can go to qnx.com and click the "FREE 30-DAY TRIAL" button to download.
senko 4y ago
QNX was (is?) such a great OS. This was my first encounter with a microkernel based OS that actually worked, and well. If I remember correctly, they were moving towards OSS at some point (or at least toward opening it to a wider community). I had it installed in a VM, did some packaging of open source stuff to QNX (bash and irssi, I think), was fun. At some point they focused on industry/enterprise and that was the end of that for me, but led me to discover L4 later on, and I still have a soft spot for microkernels.
- lproven 4y ago
  Indeed. I submitted this partly because I get so very tired of Linux zealots claiming that the HURD "proves" that microkernels can't work, or that Minix 3 shows that, OK, they can work, but they're crippled.
Animats 4y ago
Around 2003 there was a demo CD. This brings up a nice system with a GUI and browser.[1][2] QNX started closed source with a free version, went open source, went closed source, went open source after an acquisition, and then went closed source when RIM (Blackberry) acquired them. Then RIM dropped the GUI to focus on whatever it is Blackberry still does. As I once told one of their sales execs, "quit worrying about people pirating your system and worry about people ignoring it". During the first free version period, people were porting open source software such as GCC, Eclipse, and browsers to QNX. With all the licensing changes, the open source community got fed up with QNX and stopped making versions for it. We used QNX for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. All our desktop machines ran QNX, and we could run the real-time program on them as well as the vehicle. The real time features were so good that we could have the entire real-time vehicle system running, at hard real time priority, and run a browser or compile without missing a time check. [1] http://toastytech.com/guis/qnx621.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnx621.html [2] https://archive.org/details/qnx_momentics_6.2.1 https://archive.org/details/qnx_momentics_6.2.1
- ducktective 4y ago
  1- What's the FOSS alternative that is as good as QNX nowadays? FreeRTOS, NuttX, Zephyr etc are used for MCUs not general purpose computation AFAIK 2- What tech stack (language) you used for those challenges? 3- Your idea on Lisp (for these applications)?
  - Animats 4y ago
    1. Nothing. Someone was writing a QNX-type kernel in Rust. What happened to that? There's L4, but it's too low-level. It's more of a hypervisor. People usually run another OS, usually a stripped-down Linux, on top of L4. QNX offers a POSIX API, so you can run applications directly. 2. C++. Here's the source code. [1] 3. No. [1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/Overbot/ https://github.com/John-Nagle/Overbot/
    - snvzz 4y ago
      >People usually run another OS, usually a stripped-down Linux, on top of L4. Look into Genode.
basementcat 4y ago
A touching tribute to the creator of the demo. https://openqnx.com/node/298 https://openqnx.com/node/298
tibbydudeza 4y ago
I used to code a system that ran QNX 4 - it was great - not quite Linux but fast and responsive. The only issue was the file system and driver support - if it crashed there was not good recovery tools.
bedast 4y ago
A while back, Ford used QNX for their infotainment. Not sure if they still do.
- svorakang 4y ago
  Other automotive OEMs are using it also for other use cases, such as compute nodes doing plenty of crunching mixed with real-time control.
- octetta 4y ago
  I interviewed at Panasonic years ago due to their in car info systems using QNX. Also, Coca-Cola’s kiosks for drink selection uses QNX. In both cases, they’re using Qt instead of Photon. Photon was just about perfect as a GUI architecture IMHO, although I don’t know if it could have handled an alpha compositing as well as it handled blit stuff across a network connection.
helf 4y ago
I love how this gets rediscovered by people every few years :) I still have a floppy set somewhere. I loved it. I ran it in a 486 IBM all in one I had with a compatible NIC for a long time as a conversation piece and guest light surfing machine. Amazing how well it ran up till fairly recently when standards outstripped its browser too much
- duffyjp 4y ago
  I still have the Pentium box I used to run it on. Was that really 20+ years ago? How did that happen... I should boot it up and see how well frogfind.com works.
- lproven 4y ago
  I was there at the time. I just amuse myself digging up obscure, mostly-forgotten languages and OSes and posting them on HN to blow the kids' minds. :-D
  - helf 4y ago
    Doing the Lord’s Work lol. I need to rebuild my Ccmp collection. I ended up selling or giving it all away due to having to move. sniff I ran a NeXTstation Turbo Color as my daily driver up till around 2010. Me and some friends ported over newer line and what not for openstep 4.2. 33mhz 040 with 128mb of 60ns EDO RAM, SCSI HDD. Amazing what you could do with adequate performance on that. Also ran a BeOS r5 system with massive amounts of hacks and updates for way longer than was really reasonable lol
    - lproven 4y ago
      Impressed
flobosg 4y ago
(2008)
snvzz 4y ago
Closest thing we have today (microkernel multiserver OS with a desktop) is Genode[0]. 0. https://www.genode.org https://www.genode.org
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  Why Genode over Hurd and Minix considering those are also Unix-like same as QNX (which still exists btw)?
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Hurd is still stuck using Mach, unfortunately. The issues from the Hurd critique paper haven't been addressed either. Minix, as cool as it is, does not have a maintainer, and hasn't seen activity for years. There's a lot of out-of-tree work that's just sitting there. It is a shame, because it is a really cool system architecture. Genode is a modern, proper multiserver OS that has a good architecture, frequent releases and quite solid overall direction. And it has POSIX compatibility, so a lot of software runs, including modern web browser engines.
oidar 4y ago
Back when QNX was distributed on floppy, my work locked down their computers so that I couldn't dial out to the internet. So I booted up the QNX off the floppy and was browsing within minutes. My boss walked in on me browsing the internet and I nearly got fired over it. He was worried because he thought he might get in trouble for it. Once I explained how it worked, he was less worried. It was amazing that they could fit a semi-functional browser on a floppy.
yamtaddle 4y ago
In high school I'd extensively used Windows from 3.1-98se, Linux (Debian, Mandrake), and dabbled a ton with BeOS and QNX (hampered from making either my main OS only by software support). BeOS and QNX (Photon) were my two favorite desktop experiences of the bunch. They were so much better than the others—yes, very much including Linux. And BeOS was even at least as "friendly" and polished as Windows was at the time. Here we are and neither's on the desktop and their closest modern equivalent that is prevalent is probably macOS, which is... fine as a consolation prize, I guess, but I still wish I could see a world where either of those made a real splash in the desktop world (I know QNX wasn't really trying to, but man, it performed so much better as a desktop OS than Windows or Linux).
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > yes, very much including Linux That makes perfect sense for that period, the Linux desktop experience was, well, not atrocious, but definitely left things to be desired.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    It wasn't just that: it was much worse at handling multi-tasking and keeping the UI responsive, than either of those. But so was Windows, to be fair. I'm pretty sure it's not much better now but hardware's powerful enough to make that less-painful.
  - blablabla123 4y ago
    Well a lot had to be configured especially for non-standard hardware. But generally it was far more stable and snappy than Windows. Also constant reinstalling and rebooting wasn't necessary. The QNX demo was nice but to be fair you couldn't do much with it unless you wrote your own software I guess...
- agumonkey 4y ago
  For quite a while, watching 1997 BeOS demo brought tears to my eyes. It was so sweetly designed in every way. Maybe except the regular multithreading issues. Even the source code, at least the small bit I saw [0], was utterly brilliant. [0] part of the FS query language, so you could select/filter through file metadata for free.
sedatk 4y ago
"xNix", really? I thought we'd settled on using Unix as a generic name for all Unix-like operating systems.
- lproven 4y ago
  Unix is very much not generic, and is ®, ™ and © to the Open Group. Novell donated the trademark to them when it bought Bell Labs in 1993. 1 Linux is currently a registered UNIX™: Huawei EulerOS https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm Formerly Inspur K-UX was, too: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm You can view the list here: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ Apple macOS, IBM AIX, HP-UX, the 2 old SCO OSes, and -- oddly -- IBM z/OS. But no, UNIX is very much not generic, and I generally find Linux people get very upset when I call it a UNIX. Which it is, but even 29 years on, people still think that "Unix" means "based on AT&T code".
  - sedatk 4y ago
    Band-Aid, Bubble Wrap, Aspirin and many alike aren't generic either, but we use them as generic names. The same applies to Unix. Nobody means "V7 UNIX" or "Only OS implementations that conform to Open Group's standards" when they say "Minix is a Unix". They just mean "conforming to the original Unix design philosophy, as in file system structure, command-line tools, and process management". As I understand, Open Group's approval's just corporate politics to get permission for using the term "Unix" in marketing materials for enterprise customers, nothing else. You can argue all you want that Minix (the most popular Unix in existence) or Ubuntu (most popular Linux distro in existence) aren't Unix. They're Unix. They're probably more Unix than most Unices on that list. Some company owning the brand and enforcing some arbitrary licensing scheme doesn't change that.
    - lproven 4y ago
      Look, I personally agree with you, and >1 Linux distro has passed the certification, which means that, strictly and precisely, Linux is a UNIX. (However that means that FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD technically are not UNIX.) But that is not what the mainstream industry takes it to mean. Whereas terms like xNix are, I submit, well understood.
userbinator 4y ago
Somewhat similar to MenuetOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31290789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31290789
marcodiego 4y ago
Here the same, but done with linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025
- lproven 4y ago
  I suspect the functionality is rather less, but still, that is impressive.
glonq 4y ago
I remember attending the Embedded Systems Conference frequently during the late 90s and early 2000s. QNX always had a strong presence there. It always seemed too "big" (too capable, too complex, too pricey) for my projects so I never took it for a spin.
mdaniel 4y ago
Must be "old OS week" seeing this and the recent OS/2 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33107065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33107065
ncmncm 4y ago
I have long wondered... How was it possible to construct this? Is it just extreme self-discipline, omitting everything not strictly essential? Or is there an underlying formalism that makes a very small amount of code do a very great deal? It seems like the only way is for most of the code in the system to contribute to a multitude of different uses... Maybe an interpreter with especially powerful, composable operations and a very compact representation, and most of the system coded to that interpreter? (That got Apollo 11 from orbit to the moon and back.)
- Animats 4y ago
  > I have long wondered... How was it possible to construct this? Is it just extreme self-discipline, omitting everything not strictly essential? Or is there an underlying formalism that makes a very small amount of code do a very great deal? Two really good designers, Gorden Bell and Dan Dodge. Here are the key design decisions: - All the kernel does is manage memory, dispatch processes, handle interrupts and timers, and pass messages from process to process. No device drivers, no file systems. Everything else is in user space. The kernel is small (about 60KB of code in some versions), very well written, and rarely changed. It's so small, so heavily used, and so rarely changed that it reached an essentially bug-free state. - All non-preemptable kernel operations have fixed upper bounds on how long they can take, worst case. That upper bound is in microseconds. That's why real time works. - Message passing and CPU scheduling are integrated and very efficient. In particular, the case of sending a message to another process and getting a reply message is not only low overhead, but does not involve losing your turn for the CPU. The two systems are designed together. So calling another process can be used almost like a subroutine call. Most interprocess message systems botch this, and calling another process means two or more trips through the CPU scheduler and may cost you your CPU quantum. Which means a "microservice architecture" runs too slowly. Which means people work around making interprocess calls, putting too much in one process. - There is no swapping or paging. This is essential for real-time. It simplifies other things. Message passing is copying user space to user space, and can't page fault. The destination area has to be in memory. So there is no need for kernel data buffers. - At boot time, the boot program loads the kernel, a user space utility process called "proc", plus any user space drivers or programs you want at startup. That's how it gets started with no device drivers in the kernel. More drivers can be loaded later, if desired. Having a file system or disk is optional. The minimal configuration is a CPU, boot ROM with the software, and memory. That's a common configuration for small embedded systems. - File systems, networking, and drivers are all user programs. Some have the privilege of writing to device space. The kernel turns interrupts into interprocess messages. It's a nice architecture for small and medium real-time systems that have to Just Work.
AceJohnny2 4y ago
I have fond memories of QNX. We used QNX in my last company as the foundation for our router. It was a "tandem" HA system (at least one of our lead architects were formerly from Tandem, the company). It had 2x Control Plane (1 Active, 1 Standby) boards, and 3x Data Plane boards (2 Active, 1 Standby). QNX was an important part of our architecture. Some features I loved in QNX: process control across the network. I could control processes on any of the processors (running QNX) on any of the boards of the system. Launch a program on a different processor with just the appropriate command prefix (which I forget). Also, driver restart: by the nature of being a microkernel, drivers were "just another process", and if they crashed or hung I could just restart/kill the process. Also, tighter coupling between drivers and files under /dev, unlike whatever Linux is doing, especially for networking devices!
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  While I'm at it, I want to write down the lifecycle of that company. The router served as a "security endpoint", meaning it could "terminate" (decode), thousands of IPSec connections. Thus it would serve as the "border router" for a network operator. The company's big hit was providing this product to NTT Docomo for its LTE infrastructure. NTT had the (turned out unique) architectural challenge where they controlled the base stations, the core network... but not the backhaul (connection between the base stations and core)! The backhaul was on shared leased network. So they needed to encrypt [1], hence the IPSec, and hence the need for a "router" that could receive all these connections and decode them to feed into their Core Network. I joined the company shortly after they scored that huge contract, when they were flush with money and looking to grow. NTT Docomo was a pioneer in LTE deployment, so our company tried to sell this operating model to the rest of the world... but no-one took it. Turns out most operators just own their backhaul, so didn't feel the need to encrypt, or at least have the same architecture as NTT. So our company tried for a while to adapt our router (really, network middle-box, and really, its upgraded next version) for other emerging use-cases, but it was hard to get a grip both in emerging network architectures and against the incumbents (lol the number of times we had bugs with Cisco equipment which we proved was Cisco's fault but nope we just had to work around it). The company was eventually bought at fire sale price by one that did cheap Software-Defined Networking on commodity hardware. Our expensive router was discontinued. (Also, fuck Broadcom) [1] It occurs to me that Snowden's revelations in 2013 happened during my tenure there. However the response of many operators was to have one fat encrypted pipe (which we didn't stand out for) rather than many small encrypted ones (which we did). (edit: also working with NTT Docomo was another level of reliability requirement compared to the half-assery that was tolerated everywhere else!)
robertheadley 4y ago
This is one of my favorite things in computing.
varispeed 4y ago
Ages ago I had original QNX Demo Disk. I was impressed that they could fit so much on a floppy.
- lproven 4y ago
  This is the original QNX Demo Disk. That's why I posted it. :-) Downloads here: https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo Screenshots here: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
  - varispeed 4y ago
    Oh the memories. Thank you!
    - lproven 4y ago
      :-) Glad you enjoyed it!
- TimedToasts 4y ago
  Same. I pulled aside peers to show them. I was gobsmacked. Honestly I'm still impressed. It was astonishing at the time.
myself248 4y ago
This needs a [1999] or a [2008] in the title. (Original release, modification date.)
taviso 4y ago
I once made an fvwm config designed to look like QNX photon (this was early 2000s). I got dozens of emails about it from people who had found the screenshot and wanted to try it! Here is an old screenshot from ~2003: http://www.xwinman.org/screenshots/fvwm2-taviso.png http://www.xwinman.org/screenshots/fvwm2-taviso.png All the panels and menus were all fwvm, it's highly configurable. I dunno, it kinda holds up!
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  I once used this for a while :-) Thx!
zuminator 4y ago
You can kind of play around with QNX by going here: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=qnx https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=qnx If you're on a Windows system, you may have to go to C:\Windows and temporarily rename the HelpPane.exe system application in order to stop it from hijacking the F1 keypress that QNX expects.
bumblebritches5 4y ago
whartung 4y ago
Ok, so skipping the kernel bit, where can I download the source to a GUI and a browser that runs off of 1.44MB binary? Why can't we run one of those on a generic Linux kernel?
vermaden 4y ago
QNX with its realtime microkernel and its GUI is probably one of the most underestimated OSes out there ... real pity its not free and open source. When done properly about two decades ago it would slingshot it against Linux really well.
ottoflux 4y ago
I miss QNX.
znpy 4y ago
Besides the qnx thing, a whole os on a floppy disk wasn’t anything cool at that time (the article is from 2008 and I suspect the disk images were some years older). I remember playing with menuet os and some other linux “floppydistros” back in the day…
ksaj 4y ago
I consider myself really lucky. Besides the really simple OS's like found on Commodore Vic 20, 64, PET and CBM, QNX is the first full fledged OS I learned on. I'm still a Unix style evangelist to this day. Students one year younger than me learned on Windows, and they didn't cover nearly the amount of ground that my year did. We had QNX running on a system called an ICON, which had lots of bells and whistles that made using them quite fun. It came with all the languages (the year-after students only learned BASIC and Turing), and had a voice synthesizer. Oh, and way better graphics - you could draw something in QPaint or Logo, and then export it as a header file to use in your C, Pascal, etc programs. We used that functionality for making splash screens for our assignments, even though that wasn't an actual requirement.
idatum 4y ago
There was a time before this article when I put QNX on an old iPAQ Pocket PC. Back then (mid 2000s) it was strange to see a Unix OS running on a handheld device! EDIT: I think I found a link for it: https://eqip.openqnx.com/sites/eqip.openqnx.com/files/ipaq_bsp/embed_intro.html https://eqip.openqnx.com/sites/eqip.openqnx.com/files/ipaq_b...
kmbfjr 4y ago
About 15 years ago, QNX was the OS for a couple different brands of multiplexers for ATSC television. After making adjustments to the streams, I’d fire up the solitaire game where the backs of the cards were a homage to the computing science heavyweights.
hestefisk 4y ago
I remember getting a copy of QNX “Proton” (?) on a cd-rom with a Danish computer magazine in the late 90ies. About the same time they distributed Red Hat Linux (5.2/Hedwig) and BeOS. I don’t recall if the QNX desktop was actually installable or if it was only a ram-disk. I remember it as blazing fast.

226 points by lproven 4y ago

wslh 4y ago

SqueakNOS was a project to build a complete operating system via Squeak. In this way you can quickly hack it. There is a great page about these initiatives here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5727 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5727 Prior to SqueakNOS we implemented this: http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/ http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/ (using Linux and modifying Squeak to work with SVGALib instead of X) in just 900mb inspired in this QNX Demo Disk.

lproven 4y ago
I think you meant 900 kB not MB. TBH, even now, 900 meg isn't very impressive. ;-)
- wslh 4y ago
  Right, thanks!

agumonkey 4y ago

I wonder what could be improved with todays knowledge while keeping it under 2MB.

deleted 4y ago
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CyberDildonics 4y ago
Why would you keep it under 2MB?
- deleted 4y ago
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- flenserboy 4y ago
  For one, to put retro systems to great use. For another, to keep as much cruft/unnecessary bells & whistles from being present as possible. Just because the space is there doesn't mean it has to be used.
  - CyberDildonics 4y ago
    What specific retro systems have a 2MB limit?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      2.88 for Extra High Density - pretty rare outside of Japan iirc. http://209.68.14.80/ref/fdd/formatKB2880-c.html http://209.68.14.80/ref/fdd/formatKB2880-c.html
      - tssva 4y ago
        3COM NETBuilder II routers had 2.88MB floppies. I once spent an entire day tracking down a local supplier with a 2.88MB floppy drive and floppies in stock, so we could upgrade the software on a few routers being affected by a Vines/IP bug.
    - Findecanor 4y ago
      A "1.44 MB floppy" has that capacity for files when formatted with the FAT file system from MS-DOS. The unformatted capacity is actually closer to 2 MB but a proper file system has disk-space overhead for metadata and check sums. You could have a file system with much less disk-space overhead than FAT, and there are many out there. A demo disk would typically be read-only, and in particular there are some read-only file-systems that are really space-optimised, Another option would be to treat the disk sectors as a single compressed file which the bootloader decompresses into a RAM-disk image which the OS then boots from, but that would require a bit more than 2 MB of RAM.
    - flenserboy 4y ago
      It's not 2 mb in particular; honestly, I'd say 4 mb is the practical starting limit once you're into 16/32 bit CPUs — a Mac Plus / Classic would go to 4, for instance, and every speck of memory free under that made a difference in performance. 2 is a nice limit for total system size, as it allows for (as can be seen in QNX) a very capable, flexible OS, while leaving headroom for programs to run.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  I restricted myself, I wanted to say 1MB. I can't help but to find the min-max of everything. Well at least fantasize about what could be.
lproven 4y ago
I don't think there is anything today that comes close to equalling it, and very definitely nothing that can improve on it.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Even without knowing it, I'm sure it's far from perfect and may enjoy a few tweaks here and there.
  - lproven 4y ago
    The QNX demo, from 25Y ago? Oh, yes. The miracle is that it worked at all, not that it's very complete. The full OS was a ~100MB download: https://archive.org/details/qnx-neutrino-rtos-x86-runtime-kit-6.3.0-sp3 https://archive.org/details/qnx-neutrino-rtos-x86-runtime-ki...
    - bmacho 4y ago
      The full OS was 1.4 MB, but they've distributed some additional software as well.
      - lproven 4y ago
        Well, no, not really, AFAIK. But it depends what you define as "the full OS". It is mainly an embedded OS for routers and engine-control units and traffic lights. For that role, it doesn't need a GUI or a desktop or dev tools or a network stack. So are they part of the "full OS"? It depends where you stand, and how you look at it. The Demo Disk contains a lot more than 1.4MB of code. It's more like 3-4MB of code, but that does not mean it is "the full OS".

sloppycee 4y ago

I remember buying a magazine with this floppy disk attached, blew my mind back then. Great marketing from QNX at the time. How they did it: http://web.archive.org/web/20011106140711/http://www.qnx.com/demodisk/how.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011106140711/http://www.qnx.com...

MonkeyClub 4y ago
That bit of web archaeology was very helpful, much appreciated!
lloeki 4y ago
Exactly my thought when reading the title. I remember it took a bit of time to boot because my floppy drive was glacially slow at seeking, but once there it was incredibly reactive. As a wow factor it probably comes a close second place to when I got to experience BeOS hands-on (which was like, how is that even possible)

bluedino 4y ago

I remember being impressed by the Geoworks environment that was contained in America Online 1.0 (?) for DOS. So snappy and smooth compared to Windows 3.11 on the same 2MB 386.

lproven 4y ago
Now FOSS: https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos https://github.com/bluewaysw/pcgeos

h2odragon 4y ago

QNX always sounded interesting, until one saw just how much effort the company was going to to prevent people from actually using it. Vaguely recall a story about someone trying to buy 50 licenses from them for a prototype kiosk thing but they wanted something like 1,000 minimum for a reseller account; and that killed the project.

panick21_ 4y ago
Being proprietary killed such an huge large amount of great technology in the 90 and early 2000s.
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- danuker 4y ago
  It also made a large amount of money for those who knew how to walk the fine line between profitability and adoption.
- bmacho 4y ago
  Brought them to life first.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Sure, but if times are changing you need to start thinking about how to change. Some managed that others didn't.
gbin 4y ago
Now it is basically a company just as predatory as Oracle. It is just sad.

jakemauer 4y ago

This brings back memories. I remember marveling at this with my best friend when it came out. I got into BeOS around the same time. I used to use those ad-supported dial up ISP’s and found one that worked with a standard PPP dialer so I didn’t need their software. I remember carrying around the QNX disk and login info so I could get online with basically any computer.

grendelt 4y ago
I got into these back in the late 90s because of the hackable 3Com Audrey "internet appliance" (remember that term?) I never hear about QNX anymore, so this is def a blast from the past.
Scoundreller 4y ago
> I used to use those ad-supported dial up ISP’s and found one that worked with a standard PPP dialer so I didn’t need their software Juno? Netzero?
- jakemauer 4y ago
  I feel like it was literally called “freeinternetaccess”, definitely not one of the major ones like NetZero.

haunter 4y ago

Something similar: https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html The 4.0 version works perfectly, 2.2.26 kernel though which was released in 1999 Discussed before here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025

SirLJ 4y ago

I had one of those in another life :-)

basementcat 4y ago

Reminds me of tomsrtbt http://www.toms.net/rb/ http://www.toms.net/rb/

lproven 4y ago
I used that back when it was current. It was an impressive bit of kit, but TBH, what QNX did on a single floppy made -- and more than ever still makes -- Linux look very very bloated. Tom's Root-and-Boot just about got you a working command line on one floppy. For comparison, using FOSS equivalents, QNX got that, plus all of X.org, plus Firefox, onto one floppy. And if you used the status bar to find your IP address, and went to another machine and put that in a browser's URL box, you found that as well as all that, it was also a live webserver, serving live performance stats to the Internet. So, kernel, busybox, X server, desktop, web browser AND WEB SERVER on one (very heavily compressed) floppy. Sadly, the genius who built it died young. Cancer. Fsck cancer. https://openqnx.com/node/298 https://openqnx.com/node/298
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  > For comparison, using FOSS equivalents, QNX got that, plus all of X.org, plus Firefox, onto one floppy. Except it’s not really ALL of X, and the browser is more like IE2 in capabilities… For a more fair comparison, where QNX wins in terms of absolute size, but Linux wins in terms of functionality, there’s muLinux: http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/ http://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/
  - lproven 4y ago
    Well, yes, all right. :-)

FL410 4y ago

Is there any good way to play with QNX on a workstation/VM to get familiar with it?

IncRnd 4y ago
You can go to qnx.com and click the "FREE 30-DAY TRIAL" button to download.

senko 4y ago

QNX was (is?) such a great OS. This was my first encounter with a microkernel based OS that actually worked, and well. If I remember correctly, they were moving towards OSS at some point (or at least toward opening it to a wider community). I had it installed in a VM, did some packaging of open source stuff to QNX (bash and irssi, I think), was fun. At some point they focused on industry/enterprise and that was the end of that for me, but led me to discover L4 later on, and I still have a soft spot for microkernels.

lproven 4y ago
Indeed. I submitted this partly because I get so very tired of Linux zealots claiming that the HURD "proves" that microkernels can't work, or that Minix 3 shows that, OK, they can work, but they're crippled.

Animats 4y ago

Around 2003 there was a demo CD. This brings up a nice system with a GUI and browser.[1][2] QNX started closed source with a free version, went open source, went closed source, went open source after an acquisition, and then went closed source when RIM (Blackberry) acquired them. Then RIM dropped the GUI to focus on whatever it is Blackberry still does. As I once told one of their sales execs, "quit worrying about people pirating your system and worry about people ignoring it". During the first free version period, people were porting open source software such as GCC, Eclipse, and browsers to QNX. With all the licensing changes, the open source community got fed up with QNX and stopped making versions for it. We used QNX for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. All our desktop machines ran QNX, and we could run the real-time program on them as well as the vehicle. The real time features were so good that we could have the entire real-time vehicle system running, at hard real time priority, and run a browser or compile without missing a time check. [1] http://toastytech.com/guis/qnx621.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnx621.html [2] https://archive.org/details/qnx_momentics_6.2.1 https://archive.org/details/qnx_momentics_6.2.1

ducktective 4y ago
1- What's the FOSS alternative that is as good as QNX nowadays? FreeRTOS, NuttX, Zephyr etc are used for MCUs not general purpose computation AFAIK 2- What tech stack (language) you used for those challenges? 3- Your idea on Lisp (for these applications)?
- Animats 4y ago
  1. Nothing. Someone was writing a QNX-type kernel in Rust. What happened to that? There's L4, but it's too low-level. It's more of a hypervisor. People usually run another OS, usually a stripped-down Linux, on top of L4. QNX offers a POSIX API, so you can run applications directly. 2. C++. Here's the source code. [1] 3. No. [1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/Overbot/ https://github.com/John-Nagle/Overbot/
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >People usually run another OS, usually a stripped-down Linux, on top of L4. Look into Genode.

basementcat 4y ago

A touching tribute to the creator of the demo. https://openqnx.com/node/298 https://openqnx.com/node/298

tibbydudeza 4y ago

I used to code a system that ran QNX 4 - it was great - not quite Linux but fast and responsive. The only issue was the file system and driver support - if it crashed there was not good recovery tools.

bedast 4y ago

A while back, Ford used QNX for their infotainment. Not sure if they still do.

svorakang 4y ago
Other automotive OEMs are using it also for other use cases, such as compute nodes doing plenty of crunching mixed with real-time control.
octetta 4y ago
I interviewed at Panasonic years ago due to their in car info systems using QNX. Also, Coca-Cola’s kiosks for drink selection uses QNX. In both cases, they’re using Qt instead of Photon. Photon was just about perfect as a GUI architecture IMHO, although I don’t know if it could have handled an alpha compositing as well as it handled blit stuff across a network connection.

helf 4y ago

I love how this gets rediscovered by people every few years :) I still have a floppy set somewhere. I loved it. I ran it in a 486 IBM all in one I had with a compatible NIC for a long time as a conversation piece and guest light surfing machine. Amazing how well it ran up till fairly recently when standards outstripped its browser too much

duffyjp 4y ago
I still have the Pentium box I used to run it on. Was that really 20+ years ago? How did that happen... I should boot it up and see how well frogfind.com works.
lproven 4y ago
I was there at the time. I just amuse myself digging up obscure, mostly-forgotten languages and OSes and posting them on HN to blow the kids' minds. :-D
- helf 4y ago
  Doing the Lord’s Work lol. I need to rebuild my Ccmp collection. I ended up selling or giving it all away due to having to move. sniff I ran a NeXTstation Turbo Color as my daily driver up till around 2010. Me and some friends ported over newer line and what not for openstep 4.2. 33mhz 040 with 128mb of 60ns EDO RAM, SCSI HDD. Amazing what you could do with adequate performance on that. Also ran a BeOS r5 system with massive amounts of hacks and updates for way longer than was really reasonable lol
  - lproven 4y ago
    Impressed

flobosg 4y ago

(2008)

snvzz 4y ago

Closest thing we have today (microkernel multiserver OS with a desktop) is Genode[0]. 0. https://www.genode.org https://www.genode.org

forgotpwd16 4y ago
Why Genode over Hurd and Minix considering those are also Unix-like same as QNX (which still exists btw)?
- snvzz 4y ago
  Hurd is still stuck using Mach, unfortunately. The issues from the Hurd critique paper haven't been addressed either. Minix, as cool as it is, does not have a maintainer, and hasn't seen activity for years. There's a lot of out-of-tree work that's just sitting there. It is a shame, because it is a really cool system architecture. Genode is a modern, proper multiserver OS that has a good architecture, frequent releases and quite solid overall direction. And it has POSIX compatibility, so a lot of software runs, including modern web browser engines.

oidar 4y ago

Back when QNX was distributed on floppy, my work locked down their computers so that I couldn't dial out to the internet. So I booted up the QNX off the floppy and was browsing within minutes. My boss walked in on me browsing the internet and I nearly got fired over it. He was worried because he thought he might get in trouble for it. Once I explained how it worked, he was less worried. It was amazing that they could fit a semi-functional browser on a floppy.

yamtaddle 4y ago

In high school I'd extensively used Windows from 3.1-98se, Linux (Debian, Mandrake), and dabbled a ton with BeOS and QNX (hampered from making either my main OS only by software support). BeOS and QNX (Photon) were my two favorite desktop experiences of the bunch. They were so much better than the others—yes, very much including Linux. And BeOS was even at least as "friendly" and polished as Windows was at the time. Here we are and neither's on the desktop and their closest modern equivalent that is prevalent is probably macOS, which is... fine as a consolation prize, I guess, but I still wish I could see a world where either of those made a real splash in the desktop world (I know QNX wasn't really trying to, but man, it performed so much better as a desktop OS than Windows or Linux).

MonkeyClub 4y ago
> yes, very much including Linux That makes perfect sense for that period, the Linux desktop experience was, well, not atrocious, but definitely left things to be desired.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It wasn't just that: it was much worse at handling multi-tasking and keeping the UI responsive, than either of those. But so was Windows, to be fair. I'm pretty sure it's not much better now but hardware's powerful enough to make that less-painful.
- blablabla123 4y ago
  Well a lot had to be configured especially for non-standard hardware. But generally it was far more stable and snappy than Windows. Also constant reinstalling and rebooting wasn't necessary. The QNX demo was nice but to be fair you couldn't do much with it unless you wrote your own software I guess...
agumonkey 4y ago
For quite a while, watching 1997 BeOS demo brought tears to my eyes. It was so sweetly designed in every way. Maybe except the regular multithreading issues. Even the source code, at least the small bit I saw [0], was utterly brilliant. [0] part of the FS query language, so you could select/filter through file metadata for free.

sedatk 4y ago

"xNix", really? I thought we'd settled on using Unix as a generic name for all Unix-like operating systems.

lproven 4y ago
Unix is very much not generic, and is ®, ™ and © to the Open Group. Novell donated the trademark to them when it bought Bell Labs in 1993. 1 Linux is currently a registered UNIX™: Huawei EulerOS https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm Formerly Inspur K-UX was, too: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm You can view the list here: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ Apple macOS, IBM AIX, HP-UX, the 2 old SCO OSes, and -- oddly -- IBM z/OS. But no, UNIX is very much not generic, and I generally find Linux people get very upset when I call it a UNIX. Which it is, but even 29 years on, people still think that "Unix" means "based on AT&T code".
- sedatk 4y ago
  Band-Aid, Bubble Wrap, Aspirin and many alike aren't generic either, but we use them as generic names. The same applies to Unix. Nobody means "V7 UNIX" or "Only OS implementations that conform to Open Group's standards" when they say "Minix is a Unix". They just mean "conforming to the original Unix design philosophy, as in file system structure, command-line tools, and process management". As I understand, Open Group's approval's just corporate politics to get permission for using the term "Unix" in marketing materials for enterprise customers, nothing else. You can argue all you want that Minix (the most popular Unix in existence) or Ubuntu (most popular Linux distro in existence) aren't Unix. They're Unix. They're probably more Unix than most Unices on that list. Some company owning the brand and enforcing some arbitrary licensing scheme doesn't change that.
  - lproven 4y ago
    Look, I personally agree with you, and >1 Linux distro has passed the certification, which means that, strictly and precisely, Linux is a UNIX. (However that means that FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD technically are not UNIX.) But that is not what the mainstream industry takes it to mean. Whereas terms like xNix are, I submit, well understood.

userbinator 4y ago

Somewhat similar to MenuetOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31290789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31290789

marcodiego 4y ago

Here the same, but done with linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025

lproven 4y ago
I suspect the functionality is rather less, but still, that is impressive.

glonq 4y ago

I remember attending the Embedded Systems Conference frequently during the late 90s and early 2000s. QNX always had a strong presence there. It always seemed too "big" (too capable, too complex, too pricey) for my projects so I never took it for a spin.

mdaniel 4y ago

Must be "old OS week" seeing this and the recent OS/2 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33107065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33107065

ncmncm 4y ago

I have long wondered... How was it possible to construct this? Is it just extreme self-discipline, omitting everything not strictly essential? Or is there an underlying formalism that makes a very small amount of code do a very great deal? It seems like the only way is for most of the code in the system to contribute to a multitude of different uses... Maybe an interpreter with especially powerful, composable operations and a very compact representation, and most of the system coded to that interpreter? (That got Apollo 11 from orbit to the moon and back.)

Animats 4y ago
> I have long wondered... How was it possible to construct this? Is it just extreme self-discipline, omitting everything not strictly essential? Or is there an underlying formalism that makes a very small amount of code do a very great deal? Two really good designers, Gorden Bell and Dan Dodge. Here are the key design decisions: - All the kernel does is manage memory, dispatch processes, handle interrupts and timers, and pass messages from process to process. No device drivers, no file systems. Everything else is in user space. The kernel is small (about 60KB of code in some versions), very well written, and rarely changed. It's so small, so heavily used, and so rarely changed that it reached an essentially bug-free state. - All non-preemptable kernel operations have fixed upper bounds on how long they can take, worst case. That upper bound is in microseconds. That's why real time works. - Message passing and CPU scheduling are integrated and very efficient. In particular, the case of sending a message to another process and getting a reply message is not only low overhead, but does not involve losing your turn for the CPU. The two systems are designed together. So calling another process can be used almost like a subroutine call. Most interprocess message systems botch this, and calling another process means two or more trips through the CPU scheduler and may cost you your CPU quantum. Which means a "microservice architecture" runs too slowly. Which means people work around making interprocess calls, putting too much in one process. - There is no swapping or paging. This is essential for real-time. It simplifies other things. Message passing is copying user space to user space, and can't page fault. The destination area has to be in memory. So there is no need for kernel data buffers. - At boot time, the boot program loads the kernel, a user space utility process called "proc", plus any user space drivers or programs you want at startup. That's how it gets started with no device drivers in the kernel. More drivers can be loaded later, if desired. Having a file system or disk is optional. The minimal configuration is a CPU, boot ROM with the software, and memory. That's a common configuration for small embedded systems. - File systems, networking, and drivers are all user programs. Some have the privilege of writing to device space. The kernel turns interrupts into interprocess messages. It's a nice architecture for small and medium real-time systems that have to Just Work.

AceJohnny2 4y ago

I have fond memories of QNX. We used QNX in my last company as the foundation for our router. It was a "tandem" HA system (at least one of our lead architects were formerly from Tandem, the company). It had 2x Control Plane (1 Active, 1 Standby) boards, and 3x Data Plane boards (2 Active, 1 Standby). QNX was an important part of our architecture. Some features I loved in QNX: process control across the network. I could control processes on any of the processors (running QNX) on any of the boards of the system. Launch a program on a different processor with just the appropriate command prefix (which I forget). Also, driver restart: by the nature of being a microkernel, drivers were "just another process", and if they crashed or hung I could just restart/kill the process. Also, tighter coupling between drivers and files under /dev, unlike whatever Linux is doing, especially for networking devices!

AceJohnny2 4y ago
While I'm at it, I want to write down the lifecycle of that company. The router served as a "security endpoint", meaning it could "terminate" (decode), thousands of IPSec connections. Thus it would serve as the "border router" for a network operator. The company's big hit was providing this product to NTT Docomo for its LTE infrastructure. NTT had the (turned out unique) architectural challenge where they controlled the base stations, the core network... but not the backhaul (connection between the base stations and core)! The backhaul was on shared leased network. So they needed to encrypt [1], hence the IPSec, and hence the need for a "router" that could receive all these connections and decode them to feed into their Core Network. I joined the company shortly after they scored that huge contract, when they were flush with money and looking to grow. NTT Docomo was a pioneer in LTE deployment, so our company tried to sell this operating model to the rest of the world... but no-one took it. Turns out most operators just own their backhaul, so didn't feel the need to encrypt, or at least have the same architecture as NTT. So our company tried for a while to adapt our router (really, network middle-box, and really, its upgraded next version) for other emerging use-cases, but it was hard to get a grip both in emerging network architectures and against the incumbents (lol the number of times we had bugs with Cisco equipment which we proved was Cisco's fault but nope we just had to work around it). The company was eventually bought at fire sale price by one that did cheap Software-Defined Networking on commodity hardware. Our expensive router was discontinued. (Also, fuck Broadcom) [1] It occurs to me that Snowden's revelations in 2013 happened during my tenure there. However the response of many operators was to have one fat encrypted pipe (which we didn't stand out for) rather than many small encrypted ones (which we did). (edit: also working with NTT Docomo was another level of reliability requirement compared to the half-assery that was tolerated everywhere else!)

robertheadley 4y ago

This is one of my favorite things in computing.

varispeed 4y ago

Ages ago I had original QNX Demo Disk. I was impressed that they could fit so much on a floppy.

lproven 4y ago
This is the original QNX Demo Disk. That's why I posted it. :-) Downloads here: https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo Screenshots here: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
- varispeed 4y ago
  Oh the memories. Thank you!
  - lproven 4y ago
    :-) Glad you enjoyed it!
TimedToasts 4y ago
Same. I pulled aside peers to show them. I was gobsmacked. Honestly I'm still impressed. It was astonishing at the time.

myself248 4y ago

This needs a [1999] or a [2008] in the title. (Original release, modification date.)

taviso 4y ago

I once made an fvwm config designed to look like QNX photon (this was early 2000s). I got dozens of emails about it from people who had found the screenshot and wanted to try it! Here is an old screenshot from ~2003: http://www.xwinman.org/screenshots/fvwm2-taviso.png http://www.xwinman.org/screenshots/fvwm2-taviso.png All the panels and menus were all fwvm, it's highly configurable. I dunno, it kinda holds up!

LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
I once used this for a while :-) Thx!

zuminator 4y ago

You can kind of play around with QNX by going here: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=qnx https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=qnx If you're on a Windows system, you may have to go to C:\Windows and temporarily rename the HelpPane.exe system application in order to stop it from hijacking the F1 keypress that QNX expects.

bumblebritches5 4y ago

whartung 4y ago

Ok, so skipping the kernel bit, where can I download the source to a GUI and a browser that runs off of 1.44MB binary? Why can't we run one of those on a generic Linux kernel?

vermaden 4y ago

QNX with its realtime microkernel and its GUI is probably one of the most underestimated OSes out there ... real pity its not free and open source. When done properly about two decades ago it would slingshot it against Linux really well.

ottoflux 4y ago

I miss QNX.

znpy 4y ago

Besides the qnx thing, a whole os on a floppy disk wasn’t anything cool at that time (the article is from 2008 and I suspect the disk images were some years older). I remember playing with menuet os and some other linux “floppydistros” back in the day…

ksaj 4y ago

I consider myself really lucky. Besides the really simple OS's like found on Commodore Vic 20, 64, PET and CBM, QNX is the first full fledged OS I learned on. I'm still a Unix style evangelist to this day. Students one year younger than me learned on Windows, and they didn't cover nearly the amount of ground that my year did. We had QNX running on a system called an ICON, which had lots of bells and whistles that made using them quite fun. It came with all the languages (the year-after students only learned BASIC and Turing), and had a voice synthesizer. Oh, and way better graphics - you could draw something in QPaint or Logo, and then export it as a header file to use in your C, Pascal, etc programs. We used that functionality for making splash screens for our assignments, even though that wasn't an actual requirement.

idatum 4y ago

There was a time before this article when I put QNX on an old iPAQ Pocket PC. Back then (mid 2000s) it was strange to see a Unix OS running on a handheld device! EDIT: I think I found a link for it: https://eqip.openqnx.com/sites/eqip.openqnx.com/files/ipaq_bsp/embed_intro.html https://eqip.openqnx.com/sites/eqip.openqnx.com/files/ipaq_b...

kmbfjr 4y ago

About 15 years ago, QNX was the OS for a couple different brands of multiplexers for ATSC television. After making adjustments to the streams, I’d fire up the solitaire game where the backs of the cards were a homage to the computing science heavyweights.

hestefisk 4y ago

I remember getting a copy of QNX “Proton” (?) on a cd-rom with a Danish computer magazine in the late 90ies. About the same time they distributed Red Hat Linux (5.2/Hedwig) and BeOS. I don’t recall if the QNX desktop was actually installable or if it was only a ram-disk. I remember it as blazing fast.