{"id":69,"date":"2010-03-09T21:24:28","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T02:24:28","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-02-02T00:05:23","modified_gmt":"2011-02-02T05:05:23","slug":"qnx-30th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/?p=69","title":{"rendered":"QNX 30th Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

QNX Software Systems<\/a>, makers of the QNX<\/a> operating system, one of the more awesome and under-appreciated operating systems, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the QNX platform with a series of posts<\/a> about the history of the company and OS. <\/p>\n

I love weird OSes. I love computer history. I’m all over this one. <\/p>\n

QNX\/Neutrino is a pretty nifty OS, which is a semi-open<\/a> platform, with ports available for almost every common architecture. It is UNIX-like, so the environment is familiar, and is so small, lean, and cleanly interfaced that you can simply plug\/unplug everything above the mircrokernel with their modules or your own code. It is noticeably a real time OS, and has a reputation for high reliability\/availability, which is (thanks to it’s small, elegant codebase) certifiable, the combination meaning it is in all kinds of “critical control systems:” stuff like medical equipment and nuclear reactors, but is flexible enough to present a workstation-like environment as well. <\/p>\n

There is a famous (among OS nerds) demo QNX used to offer, which provided a complete environment, including windowing environment, networking, browser, and some useful programs, on a 1.44mb floppy, with incredibly tiny system requirements. It is still available from the wayback machine<\/a>. A commentary on the demo disc is here<\/a>. It’s fun to bring up and fiddle with on a virtual machine (qemu, bochs, whatever; it isn’t demanding), but isn’t quite as impressive as it used to be since the demo hasn’t been updated in roughly a decade, and the UI looks very<\/em> dated. <\/p>\n

Sometime in the imaginary future where I have time for such things I’d love to sign up for the non-commercial source access and wallow in it for a while, it’s always struck me as beautiful and ahead of it’s time in the same way as BeOS, but without all the tragedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

QNX Software Systems, makers of the QNX operating system, one of the more awesome and under-appreciated operating systems, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the QNX platform with a series of posts about the history of the company and OS. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1,12],"tags":[42,41,40],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-general","category-oldblog","tag-demo-disc","tag-neutrino","tag-qnx"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pappp.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}