Comment by _joel

9 days ago

Probably about 1996(?) remember getting this on a floppy disk, full RTOS GUI with a networking stack, wondering how they could do that with such a small footprint. For reference I recall having to write stacks of disk set floppies for Slackware basic install, let alone Windows 95 :)

7 comments

_joel

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marcodiego  9 days ago

That was for show purposes. It was certainly intended to display OS capabilities while impressing people at the same time. Linux eventually came to dominate the live-cd scene in the early 2000's but, to this day, people still cute this demo as specially incredible. Actually, there was Linux with X11 and a functional browser that run from a floppy. And that is something that is really impressive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025

  • schoen  9 days ago

    I worked on one of the Linux live CDs (Linuxcare bootable business card / LNX-BBC), which we designed to fit in 50 megabytes. I remember being kind of jealous of the QNX floppy, because I felt that it had about 25% as much software functionality as we did, but in about 3% of the storage space!

    I mean, basically we could interact with a lot more hardware, support more file formats, filesystems, and network protocols, and had more high-level scripting languages. But there still seemed to be a huge disproportion where the QNX floppy was just so much more space-efficient for what it did.

riffraff  9 days ago

I remember getting it around the year 2000 after having fiddled a bit with Linux desktops and being blown away.

  • d3Xt3r  9 days ago

    Same. I used to use it as my "cybercafé" OS, since cybercafés at the time were untrustworthy (big risk of keyloggers and malware), I'd boot QNX on their PCs and browse the web securely. Used to carry it around everywhere and everyone I showed to were blown away.

    I even ran the full QNX Momentics desktop OS on my home PC (a PIII 450) and it was very very impressive, way better than Linux and pretty much everything out there. Well, BeOS was also impressive with its multimedia performance, but QNX was just so much more polished and professional.

    The late 90s-early 2000s was such an interesting era in computing in general - at one point I was multi-booting something like a dozen different OSes - DOS, Windows, Linuxes, BSDs, QNX, BeOS, MenuetOS.. all thanks to this fully graphical boot manager, I forget the name but it even had a built-in partition manager - and it even had mouse support! All these OSes were also quite usable, unlike all the niche OSes of today, many of which sadly can't even be installed on real modern hardware because of all the complexity. I really miss those days, it was truly a golden era of computing.

    • realty_geek  9 days ago

      Good times indeed. knoppix was my best friend then but I remember that QNX floppy and being pissed off that I didn't have enough geeky friends who were blown away by it.