[HN Gopher] The QNX Operating System
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The QNX Operating System
Author : BirAdam
Score : 138 points
Date : 2025-10-05 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| WillAdams wrote:
| For folks who want to experiment and have a spare rPi:
|
| https://carleton.ca/rcs/qnx/installing-qnx-on-raspberry-pi-4...
| haunter wrote:
| Or an albeit older version if you want to play around in a VM
|
| https://archive.org/details/qnxnc621_202306
| gmueckl wrote:
| It's somewhat refreshing to see this OS going strong in 2024. I
| briefly used it for some ill fated project around 2008 and that's
| when I learned to appreciate its design and well written
| documentation (including a warning that a timer would overflow
| after 400-odd years of continous uptime).
| _joel wrote:
| 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 :)
| riffraff wrote:
| I remember getting it around the year 2000 after having fiddled
| a bit with Linux desktops and being blown away.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| Same. I used to use it as my "cybercafe" OS, since cybercafes
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I remember that. It even included a web browser. There's a copy
| here:
|
| https://winworldpc.com/product/qnx/144mb-demo
| marcodiego wrote:
| 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
| kotaKat wrote:
| Who else remembers hacking on QNX from the i-opener and 3com
| Audrey era? ;)
| cramcgrab wrote:
| Yep, remember the 3com Audrey, probably still have it in a box
| in my basement!
| throwdat9082734 wrote:
| Hell yeah, iopener represent. :)
|
| I was a contractor to Netpliance Inc early in my student days.
| They kept charging people for service that slowly degraded to
| the point of clients not getting their email for months and
| being told to try getting a Hotmail account. Watched the share
| go to pennies, then the company imploded and then everyone on
| my contract got laid off. Important early life lessons about
| how loyal to be to your job and keeping your resume fresh. A
| priceless education you can't get in college.
|
| Anyway, I _liberated_ an RMA'd Iopener, built a handmade IDE
| cable to connect to the funky pinout, added a disk and ran it
| at home as a music server and internet device (with a hacked
| Netzero dialup account, of course). Ah, those were the days.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| QNX is a really cool OS (it's fast AND elegant AND extremely
| reliable) and QNX dude Dan Dodge gave the only conference keynote
| so far that I greatly enjoyed. It was basically fun stories from
| over 30 years (at the time) of OS development. It's sad to see
| QNX use, apparently, decline.
| yangosoft wrote:
| This series are quite interesting to understand and play with QNX
| 8.0
|
| https://devblog.qnx.com/tag/from-the-board-up-series/
| 51Cards wrote:
| What a great summary. I was reminded of QNX through the
| Blackberry acquisition but I had forgotten it's history went back
| so far. (I should have remembered, I was around in those early PC
| days) With so many things these days having an operating system
| running them (including the mentioned cars, rockets and robots)
| QNX seems to have a bright future ahead doing what it does best,
| being the solid core to build upon.
| dvratil wrote:
| I was involved in porting some software to Qt back when Photon
| was deprecated, and I always found the system very interesting.
| This is the first time I'm actually learning more about its
| history. Thanks for the great read.
|
| I was also a huge fan of BlackBerry phones (having used Q5 and
| Z10 as daily drivers). The system was solid and had some really
| cool ideas. Too bad it didn't work out...
| faluzure wrote:
| I had some fun history with this OS.
|
| First, we had ICON computers in my elementary school, we'd all
| try to spin the trackball as quickly as it would go. Not sure if
| we ever broke one.
|
| The second is when I worked at BlackBerry. I was building a
| feature that allowed you to use your QNX BlackBerry as a
| Bluetooth HID device. You could connect it to any device and use
| the trackpad + physical keyboard to remotely control a computer.
| It was fantastic. You could hook your laptop up to a project and
| control slides from your BlackBerry.
|
| Then some product manager with questionable decision making told
| me to lock it down so it would only work with Blackberry
| Playbooks for "business purposes", rendering it effectively
| useless (since Playbooks are all ewaste). I distinctly remember
| that meeting where Dan Dodge argued that since it's a standard,
| it should not be locked down.
|
| I respect Dan Dodge for that, I don't think I'd work with that PM
| again.
| Rochus wrote:
| Nice article, interesting read.
|
| The Neutrino 6.4 version, which was made accessible as "openQNX"
| to the public, can still be downloaded from e.g.
| https://github.com/vocho/openqnx.
|
| Here is an AI generated documentation of the source:
| https://deepwiki.com/vocho/openqnx
| CalChris wrote:
| This is not the same Gordon Bell as the early DEC programmer and
| later VP.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell
| Theodores wrote:
| I had to use QNX for realtime applications in the late 1990s
| before the Pentium came along. Windows, Linux and existing UNIX
| flavours were not an option as none of them could do the realtime
| thing in quite the same way that QNX could. That was the strength
| of the OS and I am glad I knew this before reading the article.
|
| What I also liked about QNX was the petite size. If I remember
| correctly it came on one floppy disk, and that included a GUI,
| not that you need a GUI with QNX since the product will be an
| embedded system of sorts. All of the documentation was clear and,
| even if you had not read the manual, the overlap with UNIX meant
| that the system was far from intimidating as most of the commands
| that I knew would work fine, albeit with different options to
| commands.
|
| I had not fully realised how QNX had gone from strength to
| strength in automotive, and I didn't even know Harmon owned them
| for a while.
|
| Given that we have gone from single core, 32 bit 386/486 to
| today's sophisticated SOCs that are thousands of times more
| capable, the question has to be asked, how important is QNX's
| superpower of realtime goodness, particularly if it is just for
| automotive applications such as turning on the A/C?
|
| Surely a modern CPU that goes so much faster can do a better job
| without having to care about realtime performance? Or maybe
| Android Auto and Automotive Linux have those bases covered?
| Regardless, I am sure that if you want realtime embedded
| applications then you hire the guys that know QNX and reject
| those that haven't a clue.
| varispeed wrote:
| I had shareware floppy of QNX. I still remember how I admired it,
| but unfortunately had no use case.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Interesting to see this a couple of days after my post. I wonder
| if there is any link, but in case there isn't: QNX is well worth
| studying, it is in so many ways an OS done right.
| kristianp wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400006
| transitorykris wrote:
| This Icon was a hunk of junk. The only value it provided were to
| the students with any sort of curiosity about how this
| frankensystem worked. It was only later that it was clear it took
| advantage of procurement processes in the most extreme sense. A
| pure embarrassment of technology, grifters, and government. We
| learned more from the PETs, Commodores, and after that the PS/2s.
| Lammy wrote:
| QNX 6 was the first non-Microsoft non-Apple OS I ever used, even
| before Linux, and after trying and failing to pirate OS/2 Warp 4.
| It came on the Maximum CD with the March 2001 issue of Maximum PC
| alongside the "Alt OS" article in the same issue:
| https://books.google.com/books?id=yAEAAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PT53&dq=%...
|
| So much '90s anime in those screenshots -- super nostalgic!
| michaelw wrote:
| Oh this brings back some fun memories. I worked with QNX for the
| ICON computer at Cemcorp and ESP Educational Software Products.
|
| The OS was so clean but it lacked a lot of basic tooling. Back
| then there was no GUI or even a graphics library. We had to build
| or port a lot of things, including a VCS, from scratch. My editor
| of choice was JOVE (I couldn't get Emacs to build). I remember
| digging up various papers on graphics and creating our first
| graphics library.
| aclark wrote:
| I used QNX in the 2000s at NIH to run experiments! We eventually
| replaced it with Linux and Windows and dedicated "experiment"
| hardware to handle the "real time" needs.
| brynet wrote:
| I used ICONs in school growing up in Ontario, Canada, they were
| so cool. It was a sad day when Windows PCs replaced them in the
| computer lab.
|
| All but a few of these computers were destroyed by the ministry
| of education. And without the LEXICON server that accompanied
| them, they're basically useless.
|
| For a bit of fun, I ran the DOOM shareware demo using the
| official QNX4 port on a 486SX with 8M of ram.
|
| https://brynet.ca/video-qnxdoom.html
|
| I picked up QNX6 again as a hobbyist later in life... until self-
| hosted QNX was killed, no bootable .ISOs after 6.5. Then they
| killed the hobbyist license, killed the Photon desktop GUI,
| dropped any native toolchain support in place of a Windows/Linux-
| hosted IDE. Porting software became difficult, pkgsrc no longer
| maintained.
|
| They are completely noncommittal as a company, nothing short of
| actually open-sourcing it under the MIT/BSD would convince me to
| use it again.. and not another source-available effort that they
| inevitably rug pull again.
|
| https://www.osnews.com/story/23565/qnx6-is-closed-source-onc...
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I loved the idea of QNX. Got way excited about it. We were moving
| our optical food processor from dedicated DSPs to general purpose
| hardware, using 1394 (FireWire). The process isolation was
| awesome. The overhead of moving data through messages, not so
| much. In the end, we paid someone $2K to contribute isochronous
| mode/dma to the Linux 1394 driver and went our way with RT
| extensions.
|
| It was a powerful lesson (amongst others) in what I came to call
| "the Law of Conservation of Ugly". In many software problems,
| there's a part that just is never going to feel elegant. You can
| make one part of the system elegant, which often causes the
| inelegance surface elsewhere in the system.
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(page generated 2025-10-05 23:00 UTC)