Dunno if this is on-topic for the community or not.
Earlier today I was reminded of this old what-can-we-jam-onto-a-floppy challenge:
To demonstrate the OS’s capability and relatively small size, in the late 1990s QNX released a demo image that included the POSIX-compliant QNX 4 OS, a full graphical user interface, graphical text editor, TCP/IP networking, web browser and web server that all fit on a bootable 1.44 MB floppy disk for the 386 PC. - wiki
and found the files still on the net.
let’s try it
un-7zipped it, and saw the makedisk.exe and the qnxdemo.dat the .bat said it worked on.
I (incorrectly) assumed the .dat was archived data the .exe would unpack and whip up into a bootable floppy so I…
dd bs=512 count=2880 if=qnxdemo.dat of=qmx.img
And mounted it as a virtual floppy. It booted/ran as shown in the pic, although did not see the NIC.
I imagine there’s a way to tell VMM to use something like an old NE2000 for the nic. Maybe another day.
oh, I see
I shut down the virtual and looked at the directory again. Hmm.
file qnxdemo.dat
qnxdemo.dat: DOS/MBR boot sector...
It was a floppy boot image all along and the .exe was just dd-ing it over or whatever. Durrr. I set the .dat as the floppy image to boot in KVM and it came up fine. {edit: still with no NIC} I guess I shouldn’t assume.
Qnx man. It was too beautiful and niche for the world. That Neutrino Desktop; a chef’s kiss.
I guess you’d be shocked to hear that QNX is alive and well in industries with strict safety and security requirements. No graphical environment, of course, but even more niche than ever.
Yeah I know that. The QNX RTOS microkernel is super versatile. I had the Neutrino Desktop ran on my Pentium PC way back and it was such a joy to use. The built in programs were amazing compared to the out of the box experience you got from windows 95.
I had that demo disk back in the day, it was neat to play with, and amazing for only 1.44MB.
We were working with a PC based, industrial controller that used QNX Neutrino (IIRC), with an Isagraf HMI. That was over twenty years ago. I can’t even remember the name of the controller. It was pretty buggy and underdeveloped compared to Allen Bradley, Modicon or Siemens stuff, I do remember that.
surprisingly, QNX still exists - https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/7.0.0/#com.qnx.doc.qnxsdp.nav/topic/bookset.html
What’s more surprising is that they kept the BlackBerry branding.
I really hoped that one day QNX would open source this. It was a fast, light and cool desktop.
It’s probably inside your car’s stereo.
I remember trying it out back in 2002-2003. Pretty cool little unix-like system.
I was blown away by that when I booted it on my 486 way back when. I was not quite skilled enough to get networking going under linux, and the modem I had was hell to setup in windows (plug and pray!)… Under QNX everything worked out of the box, and it ran circles around Win 95. Really impressive
Love stuff like this! This site still has a listing of a bunch of them https://tinyapps.org/system.html
I specifically remember http://www.menuetos.net/index.htm It’s still being maintained!
Reminds me of putting QNX on a Compaq IPAQ PDA around that time. Unix-like OS on a small device then felt amazing.
I don’t understand what’s the difference between directly using the file and DD. Copying 2880 512-byte sectors isn’t the same of copying an image?
I didn’t know what I was doing, or what I was working with. I made some assumptions that led me down an unnecessary path.
