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After using ICON's at highschool for 4 years you couldnt force me back onto QNX... It was simply HORRIBLE!

AAAIIIIEEEEE ! Thank you for dredging up repressed memories for me. Those things were simply awful. I remember that we could bring down the entire network for kicks, by simply powering on two systems at the same time.

I don't think we had very many classes where the network remained stable and operational the entire time, it was always going down whether intentionally or not. They really were buggers of a system to have to use.

Dude, the ICONs ran a version of QNX that was "current" before QNX 2 was released on PCs waaaaaaay back when.

The hardware didn't even have memory protection back then, that's why it sucked for multi-user. And yes, it was still better than other products at the time, at least for schools.

QNX 6 is an entirely different beast. In fact, QNX 2 and QNX 4 were also completely different from the version than ran on the ICONs.

- chrish @ QNX

At our highschool, the choice was between Commodore PETs which could only run Basic and use floppies only, and the ICONs, which could run C, Interpreted Pascal, Logo, UNIX shell scripts, and a few other languages, and provided a shared Unix-like home directory structure on a central hard drive, and provided some cool animation and drawing packages, there was no contest at our high school. The ICONs were favoured by a large margin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON

Now the machines did have their problems. The first of which was that it was possible for some of us (4 people, to my knowledge) to gain root access through a few silly security holes. Fortunately it was an unwritten code at the time that no root user would abuse his power to cheat on assignments, so the teacher turned a blind eye to it (possibly since OSes like Linux didn't exist at the time to provide eager future programmers a way to learn). But this exploring of how QNX ticked occassionally lead to problems. For instance one annoying thing on QNX was that it was possible to create a file that was non-deletable, non-readable, and non-writable by everyone including root. Basically dead disk space that could only be removed by reformatting.

Ugh ... Dead disk space & the glorious CGA graphics....

Although I do recall getting windows 3.0 real mode running on an icon.. and some sierra CGA games (man hunter sanfrancisco) with the dos emulator....

I also recall something about cd .. not working correctly....

And that 'turing' thing? Pascal wanabe.. how horrid. Although I always wondered what Ontario did with all those old things... The ICON II's were 100000% better than the I's though.

You have to remember that the first generation of ICONs were 80186 and 80286 machines. Any OS on those systems would be painfully slow, not to mention it was using a dedicated file server using 10base2 network.

"After using ICON's at highschool for 4 years you couldnt force me back onto QNX... It was simply HORRIBLE! Yes I'm sure they have 'fixed' things in the last 13 years but QNX for a multiuser primary OS was just painfull!"

Wow! 13 years ago... 1993! If you use the MS Windows comparison, then you'll be thinking back to even before the original MS Windows 95 days; all the way back to when Windows 3.1 was MSs popular OS!

Comparing the changes to MS Windows, and *nix --> Linux OSs, and many many more OSs, then I think QNX'll be quite different.

Back 13 years I was still using Amiga OS, RISC OS (Acorn Archimedes), and my humble Atari ST occasionally. How things have changed!


PS. BTW, thanks to James Ingraham for the QNX review!

Yes it was windows 3.0.. Windows 3.1 had just shipped and I remember having to use the windows 3.0 CGA driver.

I'm just saying as a former day to day user of QNX it was horrible. I know it has a huge fan boy following because its a microkernel, but try to actually use it. I'll take windows 3.0 any day over qnx.