I know what your talking about and it was really, really cool. But I
just looked and I don’t think it’s still available.
QNX had a 1.44 MB floppy that you could download that contained the OS
(V4.25), Photon (The GUI), and TCP/IP. You would boot the floppy, it
loaded the OS & Photon. You were then prompted for connection
information. It could connect to the internet through several of the
most common ethernet cards or a dial-up modem. Once connected it
used the Voyager web browser to surf the web.
It never even looked for a hard disk. It was reallt awesom to see that
you could do all of that from just booting a 1.44 MB floppy. It was
one of the best sales pitches for QNX that I’ve seen.
But alas, all of that was for QNX 4. They’re up to QNX6 now. QNX 6 is
much more versitile (I’ll avoid the word better for now. You’ll see
why.) QNX 6 supports multiple hardware platforms (QNX4 was just X86).
QNX6 fully supports POSIX threads (Multi-threading under QNX4 was lame
and buggy at best). QNX6 supports SMP (QNX4 was single processor only).
QNX 4 had a few advantages. It had a much smaller memory foot print
(1/2 to 1/8 dependnig on the application). And any given piece of
software would run faster under QNX 4 then the exact same software
under QNX6.
But time marches on. Hardware marches on. As long as you have newer
hardware to support QNX6 it is easier to work with. And the days of
squeezing that much stuff onto a 1.44 MB floppy have gone the way of
the Do-do bird.
Mind you, if you knew beforehand what hardware mix you needed you could
do the same thing today with QNX6 on say 3 floppies. But then again
it’s actually already getting hard to find 1.44 MB floppies!
The good news is this. QNX 6 is available for a free download FOR
NON-COMMERCIAL USE! Try it. It’s great.
Mario van Rijt <m-vanrijt@chello.nl> wrote:
MvR > Hello,
MvR > Maybe this is a dumm question, but I just don’t know where else to go but
MvR > here.
MvR > I heared about QNX from a course instructor.
MvR > She told me it was a complete OS including GUI which runs from one single
MvR > floppy disk.
MvR > Of course, I want to try it out.
MvR > But, I can’t find a place to download this disk version. I found a lott
MvR > about QNX on the web, but it says nowhere that you can download a version
MvR > which runs from disk.
MvR > The instructor mailed me that she found a disk which contains this QNX
MvR > version and it works.
MvR > However, she doesn’t know how to copy the disk to another one (Windows can’t
MvR > read it) or pack it and send it to me by e-mail.
MvR > Maybe I’m asking this question on the complete wrong news server, but can
MvR > anyone help me get to this fantastic OS.
–
Bill Caroselli – Q-TPS Consulting
1-(708) 308-4956 <== Note: New Number
qtps@earthlink.net