Dunno if this is on-topic for the community or not.

Earlier today I was reminded of this old what-can-we-jam-onto-a-floppy challenge:

To demonstrate the OS’s capability and relatively small size, in the late 1990s QNX released a demo image that included the POSIX-compliant QNX 4 OS, a full graphical user interface, graphical text editor, TCP/IP networking, web browser and web server that all fit on a bootable 1.44 MB floppy disk for the 386 PC. - wiki

and found the files still on the net.

let’s try it

un-7zipped it, and saw the makedisk.exe and the qnxdemo.dat the .bat said it worked on.

I (incorrectly) assumed the .dat was archived data the .exe would unpack and whip up into a bootable floppy so I…

dd bs=512 count=2880 if=qnxdemo.dat of=qmx.img

And mounted it as a virtual floppy. It booted/ran as shown in the pic, although did not see the NIC.

I imagine there’s a way to tell VMM to use something like an old NE2000 for the nic. Maybe another day.

oh, I see

I shut down the virtual and looked at the directory again. Hmm.

file qnxdemo.dat 
qnxdemo.dat: DOS/MBR boot sector... 

It was a floppy boot image all along and the .exe was just dd-ing it over or whatever. Durrr. I set the .dat as the floppy image to boot in KVM and it came up fine. {edit: still with no NIC} I guess I shouldn’t assume.

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    I guess you’d be shocked to hear that QNX is alive and well in industries with strict safety and security requirements. No graphical environment, of course, but even more niche than ever.

    • macniel@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I know that. The QNX RTOS microkernel is super versatile. I had the Neutrino Desktop ran on my Pentium PC way back and it was such a joy to use. The built in programs were amazing compared to the out of the box experience you got from windows 95.