Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON | Hacker News Reader

Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON

jasoneckert.github.io

87 pointsjasoneckert34 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

QNX was superior to '90s Unix, too.

QNX still exists, and is likely running in your car!

QNX is superior to 2022 Unix.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yes yes yes!!! I had these in elementary school in Northern Ontario. The blog doesn't mention it but it also had multiplayer games. I remember a few..

- a horse race game where people raced horses by answering math questions

- a fishing game where your boat went across the top of the water and you had to catch fish and lobster without snagging your line

- a typing game that did not check if you typed the correct words or all the words, and would just calculate "number of words entered / time you took", so if you started a typing test and hit a letter and then escape, it would give you a ridiculous WPM score

It's wild to think that this entire system was only for such a small segment of the population, that we'd have our own computer line. What a weird time, the 1980s

I also had these in my elementary school in Sault Ste. Marie. Mine were also used for games only, never programming.

I remember a game where you played the role of a colonial farmer in Canada and you got to decide what to plant every season. It always stuck with me because there was a bug that didn't allow you to skip one section.

I remember this as a huge political pork barrel project. The province gave grants to boards to buy these dogs, yep woof, woof, woof. The lack of programs and support/training and the huge fail rate meant these were soon relegated to storage, where a few techs/hackers kept some running with parts for others. They fell far behind Apple/IBM, commodore, radio shack etc. It was such a huge embarrassment that the government ordered their destruction = closed off and possible resale resource(in truth it was not worth keeping even for that) Burroughs POV was that data was valuable, so detailed circuits etc were denied. Want it fixed? Send it here, here are our rates $$$

I worked briefly for a Toronto company named Trigon that had a government contract in 1984 to produce interconnected office software (word processor, spreadsheet, calendar) for the Icon. The product was called "Emerald". I don't think the Icon hardware existed yet, we developed on Unix. As far as I know, the company went broke before the product was delivered.

The founder of Trigon was a guy named Don Tapscott. Back then, he had a gift for hyping the "next big thing". I haven't thought or heard anything about him in decades, so it was interesting just now to find that he has a website (dontapscott.com, of course), and that his current passion is Blockchain.

Tapscott has been a "futurist" for years, probably decades now. Sadly the trouble with being a futurist is that you gotta keep making up a new future every year.

See also Negroponte.

> you probably remember the ICON as a cool looking steel monstrosity that had an indestructible keyboard and trackball (which everyone tried to spin as fast as they could)

This is roughly my memory. I had forgotten about these entirely and now I'm racking my brain trying to remember how we used them. I do remember the trackballs, a big computer lab, and only using them on special occasions... I think it must have been around 1989 but I may be off by a year or two

I took typing in HS on these. Sadly the trackballs were almost always worn out or gunked up. The paint program was pretty painful because of it in elementary school.

We didn’t have any programming classes, just a room full of them for typing class, with the server in the closet.

F F F space H H H space. Ugh.

You could wander the menus of the word processor and actually dial the modem. We got endless joy from calling Pizza Pizza and hearing an annoyed voice coming from the closet.

We shared one dot matrix paper and my friend and I just split the odd and even pages and print twice because the teacher would let us listen to our walk/discman when we were finished and I really wanted to listen to The Bends.

So I guess I did learn a bit about programming :).

Anyone play a Oregon Trail type game where you would navigate rivers with the trackball?

The trackball had the advantage over a mouse where you could keep spinning it with force and it felt like endless fun.

Ah, this brings back memories. I took High School computers with these, and I think they inspired me to really get into computers as a profession. We used BASIC and I learned an actual second language -- Pascal.

Our teachers were pretty novice, and as admins ... um, not really. All the teachers signed in as the superuser (I guess it was root?) to do anything, and they'd often just walk away, leaving us a superuser shell. Fun times. A friend in that class would create superuser accounts, but they find them and delete them. If I remember correctly, there wasn't a RTC backup, so turning the system off meant you had to set the date; and they would only power on the lab when there were students there. So they had this clever script that would run on superuser login that would set the time. So I wrote a little addition that would create a SUID-like shell in some obscure part of the system, so we could have the superuser privs whenever we wanted. A first hack! :) QNX was fun, and it was a good baseline for learning Unix later in University.

I used these in kindergarten in Ontario in the 90s.

My first computer. I figured out the password on my own so I could play more. It was password!

Only used these for about 2-years in high-school (Picton)

What I remember was the trackball, the multi-player games ... and if you used the equivalent of "NET SEND" to send a message to another terminal to another you could crash the network. Maybe we had an older/non-patched version of the system.

I remember playing Robot R&D on these (a later version I think) in 4th grade. You walked a stick-man robot around. It has 3D wireframe graphics.

That was a good one - there were a lot of good icon edutainment titles: Math Town, A day in the life, Crosscountry Canada. We had these machines in my 5th grade class. I also recall multiple generations - we had multiple in the same class. Wikipedia seems to confirm (but with no additional information unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer))

Wow this dates me, but lots of typing classes in the 3rd grade on these machines.

another cool education computer: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

Ah yes, the computers of my youth at K-8 primary school. I spent many a computer period playing such fine games as Mathville and Offshore Fishing. Damn you, shark!

I worked for Burroughs from the early 80s; at first on B80s, latterly on B20s.

I never heard of one of these things. I would have been intrigued.

A 186 - the HP Palmtop years later would put basically this entire machine into a device the size of a paperback book.

Oh wow, this and Commodore 64 in the classroom. 'Dungeons and Dragons'. And QNX!

Did it not have a Turing compiler?

I don't remember a Turing compiler, but it did have a C compiler, and a bunch of other Watcom programs

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