There were rumours of Amiga doing a QNX based OS after demise of Commodore. I wrote an email to QNX to ask what they were about and they mailed this to my home in Turkey - imagine my surprise, my first original software (beyond Amiga Workbench disks) was QNX!
They were going into all directions, another thing Amiga was doing was going into an Inferno/Android kind of OS architecture (bytecode userland with JIT/AOT), with Amiga DE from Tao Group.
That disk was indeed impressive. What impressed me even more than all of it fitting on a disk and being pretty fast was that it just worked. This was at a time where I did my first experiences with Linux (redhat and suse) and often I could not even get the xserver to start. This disk however just worked...
I got that floppy with some magazine. It was incredible and magic. I cry when some one application update pulls gigabytes over the line for some changes I don't give a crap about and don't notice but 'you have to update to continue' (yes, it's xcode).
This demo was so cool. There were lots of alternative OSes out there back then that felt very impressive.
Linux at the time was cool too but less polished than now. Lots of people were on the Win 9x series, which wasn't amazing - and Mac OS X was not yet fully baked.
These other OSes (QNX, BeOS) felt polished, amazingly fast - and slightly alien. The main sad thing from my perspective was that I couldn't get them online (my machine had a winmodem and nobody had open source drivers for those for ages).
Yeah, I'm still sad that my NeXTcube quit booting up and then I never got OpenStep running on Intel hardware.
BeOS was a hoot, but I was essentially bodily ejected from a demo/user's group meeting when I asked how the slides were printed (at that time it didn't have printer drivers).
The sheer number of hoops one has to jump through before even getting the image says to me, "Nope." What a shame, because I was just as impressed with that floppy as anyone else.
This was such a cool demo back then. There were many systems that could boot from a floppy, of course, but booting into a GUI with TCP/IP stack showing a real internet browser was really something!
It goes well beyond being well liked. For us - mid sized company, building a very large message switch for the shipping industry - it was an enabling technology. I don't think we could have built the product at all without using QNX as the foundation. It got us about as close as we could get to Erlang like concepts while not breaking the bank and with a toolset that we already knew how to use. That system broke record after record every Monday morning for two decades before some new PM decided that it all had to go and be replaced by Windows. I don't think that system ever saw the light of day, but I could be wrong, I left shortly afterwards.
Back in ?1990, I was working on a collaborative project for multivariable control for heating and blowing plastic bottles. I think I was writing the back end, and a colleague in Germany was writing the front end, both to run on the same QNX system. The back end could be written in ANSI C, but the windowing system required K&R C. We didn't have email connection, so the only way to coordinate development was a write down an integration interface, develop to that, then head over to Germany holding a floppy disk. The thing was up and running in five minutes. Very nice OS to work with!
QNX powered so many success stories it is interesting how it stayed almost entirely hidden from those that weren't directly working with it. The joke went that if you removed QNX from the planet we'd die within a week. I'm not sure if that isn't still true to some degree today because so much infrastructure runs on it and that stuff lasts for decades.
Back in the 2000’s we built a complete network operating system on top of QNX for OTN based long haul communication systems. In those days we had to sign SLAs on equipment and customers fined us for downtime. QNX was bulletproof despite running on our then PowerPC based custom CPU complex.
QNX's true microkernel architecture (only 12KB) was the secret behind fitting a complete GUI OS with networking on a single floppy - most competing OSes used monolithic kernels that couldn't achieve this level of modularity and efficiency.
Still one of the single most impressive tech demos I've seen.
There are other tiny multitasking GUI OSes, such as Oberon and RISC OS. There were even some on x86, such as the original Psion EPOC from the Series 3/3a/3c/3mx line.
Looking at some YouTube videos, it looks like this was the greeting upon booting:
“Stored on this single, 1.44 Mbyte floppy disk is a demo copy of the QNX realtime operating system, the Photon microGUI windowing system, the Voyager web browser, Ethernet networking, TCP/IP, an embedded web server, an editor, a file browser, a vector graphics animation, and a television set-top box simulation.
Just think — if we can do all this with a 1.44 Mbyte floppy disk, imagine the devices you could build with QNX realtime technology.”
Sweet memories. It was indeed incredible to see a full fledged OS with a Window System that actually worked and if I remember correctly, there was some free space left on that floppy drive.
I used to demo this for my IT class back in the early 2000s and it blew their minds that a GUI-based OS - with apps! - could run from such a small footprint.
Still remember using this with fondness --- it was a great way to get a quick bit of web browsing done on a machine w/o leaving a trace or worrying about the settings of the web browser on the machine.
Wish that the TronOS folks would do a similar demo (or better still, graphical desktop-oriented distribution).
Is there any way to get this to run in a browser? I get until the point where the GUI starts up (without a modem though), but then I cannot move the cursor.
This demo seems to be dated 1999. I recall the context where and when (school) I saw it first and I moved to a different school in autumn 1998. It seems there was an even earlier disk that I am confusing it with:
For folks interested in more about QNX, Software Engineering Daily podcast did an interview with folks from there. It is titled "Secure Communications" but the entry few minutes traces the roots of QNX and a bit about how they use a microkernel architecture in order to increase reliability. One of the interviewees, John Wall, has been at QNX since 1993 with a focus on automotive applications.
For example, a lot of systems used VxWorks that would run paravirtualized Windows 9x for user interface - you normally booted into windows, and during boot a .VXD file would get loaded that was actually a VxWorks bootstrap that preempted Windows kernel components and continued running them as "userspace" task in a way that allowed other realtime tasks to work.
This architecture was used for example in KUKA robots KRC1 controllers.
Similar setups are used by "PC PLC" products for example from Siemens.
It was one of the first, things t was the fastest, the other was Intel RTX, but it only ran on their hardware,and a very few others. QNX booted on anything PC, they were out soon after the Compaq 386. Their demo was late 1980s WindRiver did not get rolling until the early 90s, HP was doing Forth.