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jll29
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.
zenoprax
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.

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

lproven
:-)

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.

Koshkin
> one of the single

Exactly.

laurencerowe
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.

anonzzzies
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).
rado
First time online at home, over dial-up, with this floppy. It just worked
wim
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!
red_trumpet
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.
mark_undoio
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).

katzenversteher
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...
murkt
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!

WillAdams
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).

ExoticPearTree
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.
ethan_smith
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.
wiz21c
is it me or back then QNX was the only realtime OS for the PC's ?
jasoneckert
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.
pjmlp
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.

duffyjp
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???

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

fouc
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.

plainOldText
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.”