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QNX: The Incredible 1.44M Demo

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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).

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!

https://www.trollaxor.com/2005/06/how-qnx-failed-amiga.html

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.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami...

https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byt...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607

That arctechnica article man - brings back memories, every little announcement, every little new and crushed hope. Wild roller coaster.

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...

Also, it contained an OpenGL Teapot demo, and it ran very smoothly, I remember being quite impressed by it.

QNX was well-liked in the embedded world. A friend of mine wrote some river lock control software in Pascal under QNX in the early 1990s.

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.

I feel privileged to have used a QNX-based system at work. The desktop environment (Photon) is almost enchanting in its simplicity.

I've since learned about its ties with BlackBerry and the automotive Linux world and I'm glad the hard work put into it hasn't been for nothing.

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.

It's still used to this day!

Yes, it's powering the 'digital instrument cluster' in my 2015 Volvo.

Cisco also used it in ios-xr which ran on their larger core routers, though they switched to wind river Linux.

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).

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!

You can still get a QNX demo image [0], only nowadays it requires an 8 GB SD card and Raspberry Pi.

[0] https://gitlab.com/qnx/quick-start-images/raspberry-pi-qnx-8...

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.

I remember trying this on an actual floppy disk.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33123697

226 points by lproven on Oct 7, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 151 comments

:-)

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.

But this was for a generic x86 COTS PC.

While RISC OS was very impressive as a GUI, like classic Mac OS it lacked preemptive multitasking and memory protection, having been designed to run on the base 512KB Archimedes 305.

I believe AmigaOS was the only home computer OS of that era with preemptive multitasking, but the GUI looked pretty bad, I think having originally been designed to work on TVs rather than dedicated monitors.

You're not wrong, but there is a bit more subtlety here.

Classic MacOS had no multitasking at all until Multifinder arrived, several years after the Mac was released. I was going to say it appeared in System 6 but I checked and it was actually System 5 in 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiFinder

Similarly, the "Jackintosh", the multi-million-selling Atari ST with DR GEM on TOS (launched 40 years and 2 months ago, in June 1985) also was single-tasking.

That was normal for the mid-1980s. DOS was single-tasking. The ST shipped before Windows 1.0.

But RISC OS 2 shipped in 1988, the same year as the Mac System 6, and it had cooperative multitasking built-in as standard from Day 1.

(RISC OS 1 was "Arthur" in 1987 and its multitasking was basically just multiple Clock apps.)

Secondly, yes, the Amiga had full multitasking even at launch (the month after the ST) but it also had no memory protection at all. It was not very stable at all. Amiga users got very used to "Guru meditations."

Co-operative multitasking was pretty common in the 1980s because it's much more efficient. Microcomputers then barely had enough RAM and CPU to display a GUI and they didn't have enough for process isolation.

Windows 2, 3.0, and 3.1 could pre-empt DOS apps, but used co-op multitasking for all GUI apps.

Windows NT 3.1 (1993) was the first version that could pre-empt GUI apps. Win32 apps had pre-emptive multitasking, but 16-bit apps (that is, Windows 3 apps being run on NT) were co-op multitasked, unless you were rich, had a £5000+ PC with lots of RAM (like 32MB+) in which case there was a ticky-box to enable running a particular Win16 app in its own memory space. All the rest shared an instance. But this feature ate RAM.

I installed and supported Win NT 3.1 in production and used the option to run Excel in its own memory space, so that an errant copy of Word or MS Mail couldn't crash Excel. It was in a stockbroker and Excel was our single most important Windows app.

But we only had 1 guy with an NT PC at first and that box cost about £8000.

So, yeah, co-op multitasking wasn't as reliable, wasn't as stable, but it was much more memory-efficient and used less CPU, it worked fine on limited 16-bit CPUs, and so it was the norm for almost all computers.

Win NT was too expensive and needed a very expensive PC. OS/2 flopped. It wasn't until Windows 95, a full decade later, that most computers got pre-emptive multitasking.

Though like AmigaOS, Windows 95/98/ME still lacked memory protection. It wasn't until Windows 2000 brought NT to the mainstream that memory protection became common, and probably Windows XP until it became ubiquitous after 98/ME stopped being shipped on lower spec home PCs.

Interesting to wonder what an alternative timeline would have looked like where Acorn used QNX instead of trying to build ARX (the Mach microkernel based system abandoned for Arthur.)

ARM had memory management from the outset, but memory was too expensive to consider anything like unix for the base systems (the alternative RISC iX BSD derived OS required 4MB.) And the context switching overhead would probably have made the desktop experience worse even if they could afford the memory.

> one of the single

Exactly.

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.

In 2002 I fit linux, X11, ethernet drivers (+ everything provided by busybox) and vnc and rdesktop on a single floppy.

The demo disk included a GUI:

* https://crackberry.com/heres-how-qnx-looked-1999-running-144...

* http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

I always thought that if they had fully open sourced QNX 4.24, even a couple decades later, it likely would've surpassed Linux in the desktop space.

Later they made the source available for a newer version of QNX but under restrictive licensing, that was disappointing.

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.

Episode: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2025/02/06/secure-commu...

Transcript: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2025...

First time online at home, over dial-up, with this floppy. It just worked

Dan Hildebrand (1961 - 1998) was an amazing guy.

https://openqnx.com/node/298

https://youtu.be/G42xq7TnCt4

I couldn’t see passed the 100% mark.

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 remember wondering how this was even possible because it came out around when we were studying operating systems in uni.

Dan Hildebrand (RIP) did a great job of sharing the QNX architecture overview [1] which got cribbed into my OS thesis ;)

[1] https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.p...

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.

Remember booting from that floppy when I was a kid.

The only thing that would be even more impressive, if it also had a running .kkrieger FPS from the demo scene guys!

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).

I still get more impressed with xwoaf (X window ona floppy) https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/http://pupngo.dk...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240201194541/http://pupngo.dk/...

Nice. They're using the Xvesa server, which doesn't include any hardware drivers and instead runs the VESA BIOS in a 16-bit virtual machine.

https://www.xfree86.org/current/Xvesa.1.html

I still have that floppy stored somewhere back home.

Pity that we're still far off QNX architecture in most mainstream OSes, even though several steps have been done into that direction.

I don't have the floppy anymore, but I do have the old system I used to run it on. QNX even supported my network card out of the box, the demo blew my mind.

Was this really 25 years ago???

Yeah, time flies by, the hard time is telling some stuff on the office and then realising by the audience faces that a few of them weren't even born when Event XYZ happened, so they don't get what I was talking about.

In high school circa 2000, one of us put QNX on a floppy so we could bypass the school library's content filter. The library computers at the time still had floppy drives and would boot from them if a disk was present so we just inserted the disk and power-cycled the machine.

It was fun, but eventually we got funny looks from the staff when they walked by and I believe we were eventually asked to stop "whatever it was we were doing."

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.

You can use the 1440demo.img with the floppy image option on https://copy.sh/v86/#setup

One of the things that wowed me with that demo was the shutdown. It was real-time. Instantaneous.

Meanwhile on my GNU/Linux install (Arch x86_64):

   $ ls -lh /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
   -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.0M May  4  2024 /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive

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:

https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-chat&m=103030933111004

is it me or back then QNX was the only realtime OS for the PC's ?

Very much not the only one.

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.

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