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.
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...
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.
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.
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 :)
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).
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.
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...
For folks who want to experiment and have a spare rPi:
https://carleton.ca/rcs/qnx/installing-qnx-on-raspberry-pi-4...
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.
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.
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 :)
I remember getting it around the year 2000 after having fiddled a bit with Linux desktops and being blown away.
This series are quite interesting to understand and play with QNX 8.0
https://devblog.qnx.com/tag/from-the-board-up-series/
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).
Who else remembers hacking on QNX from the i-opener and 3com Audrey era? ;)
Yep, remember the 3com Audrey, probably still have it in a box in my basement!