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.
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.
Or walking in for computer class and they would all be hung on the boot screen
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.
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.