31–36 of 36 posts
What I remember was the trackball, the multi-player games ... and if you used the equivalent of "NET SEND" to send a message to another terminal to another you could crash the network. Maybe we had an older/non-patched version of the system.
I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real UNIX system without actually being well-designed. They had networking. They had a very primitive speech synthesizer chip or subsystem of some kind - I had no documentation for it, but there were a handful of samples that said fixed words and so I was able to c…
Curious, what wasn’t actually well designed about it? QNX generally seems to be regarded as superior to 80’s era Unix in most regards.
I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real UNIX system without actually being well-designed. They had networking. They had a very primitive speech synthesizer chip or subsystem of some kind - I had no documentation for it, but there were a handful of samples that said fixed words and so I was able to c…
Curious, what wasn’t actually well designed about it? QNX generally seems to be regarded as superior to 80’s era Unix in most regards.
One problem with saying they had written it was that clients would report bugs which they would forward to Quantum (much later renamed to QNX Software Systems) but nothing would happen. When I produced the decompiled sources it took me a single afternoon to fix the pending bugs and implement the feature requests.
The first step was to disassemble the binaries. As an OEM Softec had access to the .obj files so they could link in new drivers if needed, and those included the symbol tables giving me at least the function names. The C compiler didn't do any optimizations, so compiling a few sample programs was enough for me to then read through the assembler while typing in C and adding comments as I went along.
The version I worked on was called 1.1e even though versions 1.2 and 2.0 (which was just 1.2 plus networking) were available.
The overall idea for QNX (originally QUNIX) was solid, but early implementations were not so nice. In 1.1e it was possible to see that a lot had been fixed from earlier versions, but there still were a lot of problems. The File Manager was responsible for decoding executable files (the Task Manager should have done that instead), for example, and most of the functionality that should have been in the shell were hardwired into the Task Manager instead. This was greatly improved in version 1.2 which I looked at though I didn't decompile.
Even in version 1.1e, running QNX on a 256KB PC with floppies only was way nicer than other Unixes on much beefier machines. Each version was much better than the previous ones so by the 1990s the QNX people saw was a different experience than what was on those old machines.
I grew up using these throughout high school in the mid-to-late 80's. They were the perfect machine for a budding hacker because they were very close to a real UNIX system without actually being well-designed. They had networking. They had a very primitive speech synthesizer chip or subsystem of some kind - I had no documentation for it, but there were a handful of samples that said fixed words and so I was able to c…
The hardware itself had a number of features that predated similar hardware being widely available in the PC world. Every workstation had built in arcnet and booted from the network. They used an 80186 CPU, so slightly higher performance than an IBM PC. Every system came with audio hardware capable of playing back samples (I have no idea what sample rate or how many bits per sample it had, but it was grungy enough to probably be 8 bits at 20kHz). And they had glorious trackballs built into the keyboards that us kids would often swipe furiously. It was certainly an interesting system at the time, but I had already been exposed to 80386 PCs running MS-DOS with NetWare over ethernet in the summer which was far more performant.
At the end of my grade school year I ended up breaking the network horribly and knocked the ICONs offline until the system was reinstalled. By this time I had root acess, and mistakenly typed a 1 instead of a 4 and destroyed the root filesystem on the server. Ooops! That was quite the lesson. At least I didn't get in trouble (unlike some of my earlier antics in the school year that stemmed from complete boredom and an utter lack of interest in going outside for recess in -25C to -30C weather). Ah, those were quite the years.
Did it not have a Turing compiler?
Our teachers were pretty novice, and as admins ... um, not really. All the teachers signed in as the superuser (I guess it was root?) to do anything, and they'd often just walk away, leaving us a superuser shell. Fun times. A friend in that class would create superuser accounts, but they find them and delete them. If I remember correctly, there wasn't a RTC backup, so turning the system off meant you had to set the date; and they would only power on the lab when there were students there. So they had this clever script that would run on superuser login that would set the time. So I wrote a little addition that would create a SUID-like shell in some obscure part of the system, so we could have the superuser privs whenever we wanted. A first hack! :) QNX was fun, and it was a good baseline for learning Unix later in University.