Submitted by You know what’s fun? Making claims on the internet about how something or someone was first with something or someone – if you catch my drift. You know what’s also a lot of fun? QNX, the microkernel realtime operating system that powers just about any possible piece of kit you can think of. As it turns out, QNX was the first operating system to support a hard drive on a PC. On a related note, a new pre-release has been released of QNX 6.5.0.
The claim is made by Paul Leroux, who works for QNX. He recalls the tale of how, in the early ’80s, he came across an IBM XT, with a whopping 10MB hard drive. “The XT in question used MS-DOS, but DOS wasn’t the first OS to support a hard drive on a PC,” Leroux recalls, “That honor belongs to QNX, which in 1982 introduced support for a 5MB Davong. If that sounds small, you’re right: it’s just enough to store a single photo from one of today’s low-end digital cameras.”
QNX also had other firsts. For instance, it was the first realtime operating system to support 286 protected mode. It appears that even back then, QNX was insanely awesome: “Due to amazing forethought, most programs ran in protected mode unmodified,” wrote Mitchell Schoenbrun, a QNX veteran, “In fact re-compilation was not even needed. Remember all the recompiles for other OS’s to switch between modes? Following a few simple rules, even drivers could run in either mode.”
The constraints these guys had to deal with – the first commercial version of QNX ran in 64k of RAM, and supported multitasking. “Amazingly enough, 64K was enough memory to run the OS, a shell, and actually compile programs,” Schoenbrun recalls, “I believe it was even possible to do a few background chores at the same time, like printing a file.”
Of course, now it’s up to teh interwebs to either prove or disprove these claims. I’d love to take them at face-value, but if there’s one thing I learned during my time here, it’s that absolute claims like this rarely stand; someone else is always first. Something always did something earlier. Come on guys and girls, don’t let me down!
By the way, Leroux is dedicating an entire series of posts to the 30 year anniversary of QSSL. It contains gems like these photos of the very first QNX-based computer, or the very first QNX newsletter from 1984.
On a related note, the QNX Software Development Platform 6.5.0 has been released. Yes, I, too, long for the days you could download an installable copy of the operating system for on your desktop without any hassle, with up-to-date software. Those were the days. I think that‘s something QNX could look at providing, now that they mark their 30 year anniversary.
I find this a very strange statement since I am pretty sure that Commodore’s hard drive for the CBM series came out earlier than that.
They were:
CBM D9060 5 MB Hard Drive with an IEEE-488 port.
CBM D9090 7.5 MB Hard Drive also with an IEEE-488 port.
Check out http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/hds.html
Am I wrong?
PS. Commodore’s design meant there was not difference in code for a floppy vs a hard drive, and that there was no need to worry about the drive’s size or format.
Edited 2010-03-09 01:01 UTC
No, you’re not wrong. The OS’s for both the Atari 400/800 and Commodore 8-bit computers of the late 70’s/early 80’s were *YEARS* ahead of OS’s like QNX, and they did it using much less RAM.
What I was asking about is shipping dates, I remember installing a 8050 dual 1MB floppy drive in a lawyer’s office then we had to upgrade him to the 5MB hard drive when he ran out of space, then upgrade once again to the 7.5MB drive.
At that point we asked him what was he doing since we had calculated that he needed less than 1MB per year only to discover to our horror/shame that we had misunderstood him.
He was not just putting all open and new cases onto the drive, but was trying to store the last 80 years of cases for reference purposes – He needed at-least 100MB to do it all!
My problem is, I know this was somewhere between 1979-1982 and these were some of the first hard drives from Commodore, but I can’t remember the exact date we got them.
PS. Upgrading the drives was just a simple matter of plugging them in and entering the drive number (8-11) into the program.
Err.. pardon? The Atari 400/800 did not have an OS by any definition we use nowadays. And yes, since QNX started in the early 80s, late 70s computers were indeed “years ahead”, but only in terms of chronological time, not in terms of “advancement”. QNX is, and was, a true OS, and you make it sound like it was somehow worse than an Atari 400.
Total and Complete Bullshit. The Atari 400/800 computers had and still have one of the most powerful OS’s around. Hell NASA was using the 8-bit Atari’s for thermal imaging work among other things during the 70’s and 80’s.
You could say that the 8-bit Atari joystick ports and the OS’s support of them were the forunners of today’s USB ports.
Anything and everything wound up being connected to them as an interface port.
Modems,Harddrives, Video Cameras,Printers,Scanners,ect.
The problem with people like you is that you know *NOTHING* about the history of computing.
You’re just a jerk who bought a Windows/Dos based PC and thought that made you hot stuff.
Calm down, no need to burst a vessel. I know the innards of a Commodore 64, and an OS it does not have. It has a loosely strung together kernel running off of the IRQ. BASIC is just a vector at the foot of memory. GEOS was the first “OS” for the system, providing APIs and input mapping and drivers &c.
QNX was a recognisable OS rather than a glorified function library that the 8-bit systems were.
Total and Complete Bullshit. The Atari 400/800 computers had and still have one of the most powerful OS’s around. Hell NASA was using the 8-bit Atari’s for thermal imaging work among other things during the 70’s and 80’s.
You could say that the 8-bit Atari joystick ports and the OS’s support of them were the forunners of today’s USB ports.
Anything and everything wound up being connected to them as an interface port.
Modems,Harddrives, Video Cameras,Printers,Scanners,ect.
The problem with people like you is that you know *NOTHING* about the history of computing.
You’re just a jerk who bought a Windows/Dos based PC and thought that made you hot stuff. [/q]
QFT. The Atari 400/800 had the most sophisticated OS of the time, putting the BIOS in IBM PCs to shame. It was even made open source, with Atari publishing the full source code to the OS, along with complete hardware specifications for the 400, 800, floppy drive, and RS232 interface peripheral.
The OS was so complete and sophisticated that DOS for the Atari was little more than a translation layer for commands to the OS, allowing DOS to fit in less than 8KB of code. A minimal DOS layer for disk based programs used less than 4KB of code.
One correction on the interface port – it wasn’t the joystick ports but the peripheral port on the side that everything was run off of. It was a high-speed (for the time) serial port that used a standardized command packet to control any peripheral, from disk drives to RS232 to custom peripherals.
Frankly, I am having trouble discerning if your posts are really an attempt to humor… so revolutionary that the world is just not ready for it yet.
LOL
I quote Wikipedia: “The standard Atari OS only contained very low-level routines for accessing floppy disk drives.” Of course there was ATARI DOS, and maybe you are referring to that. But I consider that more of a “Norton Commander” for the Atari than part of the core OS.
Appeal to authority. Yeah, that’ll win you an argument.
So it had pretty hardware. We’re talking OSes here dude, not hardware.
It’s a good thing you know about people like me. It’ll keep you sane.
“I quote Wikipedia: “The standard Atari OS only contained very low-level routines for accessing floppy disk drives.” Of course there was ATARI DOS, and maybe you are referring to that. But I consider that more of a “Norton Commander” for the Atari than part of the core OS.”
You do realize that the Atari DOS was a command translator layer that took DOS commands and converted them into native Atari system commands? Thats why it took only 8K to do it. We had a WANG computer that used a 37K DOS program to emulate MS-DOS across the built-in WANG DOS. Not anything like a “Norton Commander” that I remember, nor the “Norton Disk Utilities” floppy disk everyone coveted.
You’re reading the sentence wrong. It doesn’t say the ONLY thing in the OS was low level disk support, it says the only disk support in the OS was low level. Those are NOT the same thing!
The Atari OS had a unified design for devices that used a standard jump table for commands that was way ahead of its time. Built in libraries included:
“C:” – the cassette device.
“E:” – a full-screen console for text IO.
“K:” – the keyboard device.
“P:” – the printer device.
“S:” – the screen device. Used to setup the display and print/draw graphics.
Loaded into memory:
“D:” – the disk device, which used those low level support routines in the OS.
“R:” – the RS232 device.
The OS also had a built in floating point library, but it didn’t use the standard device format. You have a bunch of entry points for various math operations instead.
I wish that after we comment the thumbs up/down were not disabled. I’d of given you a thumbs up for posting something decent. Not only because it was the last decent reply in the thread, but because it also was informative and interesting.
People can stop reading after your post because the rest of the thread is ad hominem and other complete nonsense.
So it had pretty hardware. We’re talking OSes here dude, not hardware. [/q]
Dude we’re talking about OS support of *HARDWARE*
[/q]It’s a good thing you know about people like me. It’ll keep you sane. [/q]
We *DO* know about people like you. You write the *GARBAGE* we see in ZIFF-DAVIS publications/magazines.
Look it up at Wikipedia, article “logical fallacies”.
So the Atari 400/800 supported, out of the box, all of that hardware you mentioned, including video cameras? That would be pretty impressive.
We? You suffer from MPS? And I’m a writer? Cool, I didn’t know that. Dude, what have you been swallowing…
Technically BASIC is not an operating system, but an interpreter.
LOL
1) The XT is not the first PC, that was, well, the PC.
2) No, it is not the only one allowed, but we all know what we mean by “PC”, the IBM PC. The C64 is not a PC.
1) Yes, agreed.
2) No, do not agree. Remember the packaging of software in the 80’s? Well, I don’t completely either, but didn’t it say IBM PC or compatible. According to what’s left of my memory, it wasn’t until every other platform except the IBM PC ( and clones) and MAC were left as the dominant platforms that the term PC came to mean only IBM x86 PC’s.
My C64 has “Personal Computer” on the front. PC was a device category before IBM made it into a specific device.
I use to have a Miracle Systems hard drive on my Sinclair QL that plugged into the ROM port, though i can’t remember what year .. sure it was before then.
I believe the confusion is over the “First OS to Support a PC Hard Drive” headline. First off, the floppy drive was not a PC Hard Drive. Nor was the previous hard drives and floppy drives for home computers like the “PC” equivalent.
Each device was a standalone machine. You could hot swap floppy drives and hard drives back then because they were independent devices that talked through serial bus cables. The PC revolution slaved the hardware minus its brain to the system. This was a whole different way of making the peripheral devices and it suddenly cut the price down to where it was AFFORDABLE for home users.
Edited 2010-03-10 16:52 UTC
You do realize by that logic all present-day external hard drives are not hard drives?
Nor do I see anything in the original article talking about what type of interface to the hard drive was used? Just that QNX supports hard drives on a personal computer before anyone else. And that is not true.
For that matter what about CPM machines? They supported hard drives too, and many were sold as personal computers: in-fact the Altair 8800, the Sol-20, and the HP H8 were all sold as personal computers. While I have not found the dates when they recieved their first hard drives all these models pre-date the IBM PCs by half a decade and they all supported hard drive too. When exactly, I am not clear, but to believe they *ALL* had to wait on the IBM-PC to do it first is not believable.
Edited 2010-03-11 06:27 UTC
pkgsrc was just getting well supported on 6.4.0 and now this? A new XPhoton is in the works, too.
6.5.0 is gonna be awesome. then again all QNX is awesome! Personally I welcome our new QNX powered overloards. I will do thy bidding masters!
Xerox had the first if you mean a small personal sized computer. IBM had the first for sale hard drives would be my guess on mainframes. I remember in the early 70’s we had drum storage that was basically a very large open hard drive.
I think the author means on a x86 type of PC, not any CPU’ed personal computer. For instance, in 1981, the Profile Hard drive (5 meg of winchester’ed tech) was released for 3499 USD for the Apple /// computer. Later to go to 10 meg, and then surpassed and obsoleted with the 20 SC in 1986. But no way were any of these before the big open drums of the IBM storage systems in the 70s.
I have a problem with the original statements, in the 1970s and the early 1980s the term PC did not just mean IBM-86-type machines, and crowing about how great your OS for doing something first when you put drastic limits on the hardware/computer range to be looked at so as to make your software look good is questionable.
Reading the original article you would think no-one else had hard drives on their personal computers of that time period.
Are you sure? It seems to me that they were called “home computer”, not “personal computer”. See also Wikipedia.
Idiot, they were the *SAME THING*. “Personal Computer” was an IBM marketing term.
Personal Computer used to refer to the IBM-compatible (and thus, x86) home computers. That’s pretty basic knowledge, and I assumed everybody reading OSNews would understand that.
And please, refrain from such an aggressive tone, there’s no need for that.
Actually, here in the US at least, before the IBM PC was released, the term “Personal Computer” was used commonly as a synonym for “Home Computer”. Even for several years afterward, the two meanings of the phrase existed side-by-side. (Which meaning one used was typically determined by which type of computer one owned.)
I owned a VIC-20, C-64, and several Amigas, and all of these were called “personal computers” in their time. Gradually, as the smaller competitors disappeared, so did the ambiguity.
You seem to lack manners, and logic. If “personal computer” was an IBM marketing term, doesn’t it make sense to use that term when referring to IBM hardware?
Dude go back and watch the old IBM TV commercials. The ones with the *MIME* acting like Charlie Chaplin.
Notice *WHAT* they were selling to the public.
A personal (HOME) computer from IBM.
As opposed to a personal (HOME) computer from Atari,Commodore or Apple.
The two years I got paid to develop on QNX was a true joy. It “just works” is a huge understatement when it comes to QNX. Photon was a mixed bag. Technically it’s incredible. But the look and feel was very dated, and the desktop environment was absolutely terrible.
QNX is free for non-commercial usage, i.e: you can install it on a desktop or use it as a server.
1) Register on qnx.com for a “myQNX Account”
2) Go to the “Product Evaluation” page, http://www.qnx.com/products/evaluation.
3) Download “QNX Neutrino Light” (x86-only ISO, nearly 300M), http://www.qnx.com/download/feature.html?programid=19602.
4) Obtain a free non-commercial serial, no expiry date, from here, http://www.qnx.com/products/evaluation/non-commercial_developer.htm….
5) Now you can burn, boot and install QNX on any old beige box.
Most of the source code is up on Foundry27, you can find most of the kernel and userland there now.. log in using your “myQNX” password.
I did it :
4) Obtain a free non-commercial serial, no expiry date, from here, http://www.qnx.com/products/evaluation/non-commercial_developer.htm….
I didn’t use the licence for months but when I tried to redownload I couldn’t because they said I was already registred. I tried to contact them but after 2 attempts I got no response.
Edited 2010-03-09 09:23 UTC
Does it work in virtual machines like Parallels?
Cisco is going to be acquired by Apple. This exciting new development is going to give the term integration a whole new set of meanings.
One of the first results is that all home pages are now going to feature a picture of the immortal Kim Yung Job in his famous black turtleneck. This is going to be part of the firmware of the new Internet. The whole population of the world salutes this inspired new development, and looks forward to an ever freer future, in which the burden of choice has been lifted, and iTunes is the only way to buy anything, and the only software will come from the app store and be written only by licensed developers. Oh, and hardware will have to be licensed as well, so its properly integrated with the software. It all makes sense when you think about it from the correct perspective.
Amazon. did I hear you say Amazon? That was a fabled tribe of lady warriors many years ago. We are talking computing and networking here. Comrade, your mind seems to be wandering. Google? That was an old expression for a very big number. What does that have to do with the Internet?
Microsoft? The comrades from Redmond are of course an integral part of this great venture. That is one of the many things that will give the concept of integration a whole new meaning.
Thank you all for your questions. Long live Kim Yung Job! Long live the heroic leader!
Wrong article.
Hmm… I hadn’t thought about QNX for years. It was a nice environment, even though it seemed outdated ten years ago.
Wondering how it’ll run on a netbook.
The only issue would be drivers for, well, everything beyond the basics. Network, wireless, video, audio…
Considering they could get the core OS onto a floppy it probably would be very, very fast! Things would appear to complete as soon as you clicked a mouse or pressed ‘enter’.
Using Haiku-OS I see a real speed difference between it and Windows 7 on the same machine. QNX while it would be very limited on a NetBook for what it does do well it should be able to blow even Haiku-OS away.
QNX’s floppy version was QNX 4, a completely different OS from QNX 6. QNX 6 will not fit on a floppy.
QNX has drivers for standard devices. anyway, the problem is not the OS but the vendors. They should have created devices working with cross OS provided generic class drivers, no specific CDs tweaks or blobs.
I remember when Compaq 386 was presented. There was no mention of QNX. It was MS-DOS, Windows and Xenix (or another *IX), if my memory serves.
On the other hand, it might be that combination of my age at the time (13 years) and news source (computer magazine in ex-communist country) makes my memories inacurate.
If that sounds small, you’re right: it’s just enough to store a single photo from one of today’s low-end digital cameras.
Modern cameras can hold close to 50 pictures at low resolutions and around 10 pictures on high resolutions with 5MB …
.. So .. umm .. yeah, your claim have been disproven.
I don’t know what camera you have but my *OLD* 7.1MP Kodak could do do to 50 pictures at low-res but I doubt it will even hold 3 pictures in high-res in just 5MB, I use a 2GB SD card for picture taking.
My friend’s 12MP SLR is over a year old and 5MB will only hold one picture in high-res mode.
And RAW mode you need still more storage.
Edited 2010-03-10 16:37 UTC
Reading through the comments for this article, gave me the biggest laugh in a long time. It is most hilarious watching a bunch of juvenile internet posters engaging in their imaginary pissing contest, endlessly bickering about who was first or best.
“The Atari XYZ was first!”
“No you dumb moron, the Kumadoor C128 was first!”
“My God is bigger than your God!!!”
Thanks for the laugh boys. Keep going.
<img src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wvoLtwni0kc/R13FdLyfTkI/AAAAAAAAMiI/J1b2l…
the chrysler or I should say harmon kardon mygig/uconnect uses qnx it is rather plain but it works excellent, I have one in my Jeep Patriot.