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Comment by dddw | Hacker News Reader

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dddw·

I remember qnx

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Full network stack and a web server on a 1.44MB floppy!

And a Javascript capable HTML4 browser, and a decent-looking and performant GUI desktop too.

It's a shame QNX (desktop) died, used to be way more performant and stable compared to Linux or anything else back in the day.

The problem is it wasn't really compatible with anything else, at a time when DOS/Windows and Unix-likes were the most common.

It was compatible with the radio and crypto equipment aboard my coast guard ship!

Isn't it still alive in automobile/infodesks?

The embedded version is, yeah. I was referring to their PC version though, which came with a full-fledged DE called Photon microGUI[1]. It was extremely responsive and could multitask without any stuttering, even on ancient hardware like the Pentium II - something wich other operating systems struggled with for a long time. In fact I would say Linux didn't "officially" resolve the issue until they introduced the EEVDF scheduler with kernel 6.6 in 2023.

[1] https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0SP1.update/com.qnx....

Do you recall which browser?

BrowseX, written mostly in Tcl/Tk, was included in one microdistro. Probably LNX-BBC, per Wikipedia.

<https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/BrowseX>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card#Operati...>

QNX is to this day the biggest "floppy" thing I ever saw.

I would love to have a modern recreation of it.

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