QNX 1.1 Demo Disk

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(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Fresh from the oven, or rather Kryoflux dump – a QNX version 1.1 Demo Disk:

QNX 1.1 Demo Disk

I managed to boot it on 86Box:

QNX 1.1 booted on 86Box Emulator

For the readers with more curiosity and time at their hands please could you try it on different emulators and comment what works and what doesn’t.

For the less curious this how the demo actually looks like once you log in as demo user:

QNX 1.1 Demo Menu

As the authors demand to make as many copies of this disk as possible here it is. Please download and spread!

I also managed to dump the rest of QNX 1.2 including boot disk, utils and even c compiler. Unfortunately the boot disk is copy protected:

I have raw stream dump made with Kryoflux as well as regular disk images. If you are interested in circumventing checking the copy protection so the system could be run in an emulator let me know in a comment. Perhaps time for another Virtualization Challenge?

Previously:

Virtualizing QNX 2

QNX Windows – First Look

QNX 2.21 Arrived Today

8 thoughts on “QNX 1.1 Demo Disk”

  1. First, thank you Tenox!, thank you very much!
    This is a software that would be impossible for me to acquire.
    Since the 80’s I saw the ads for QNX at the magazines and have curiosity to see it and test it, it looked like something special.
    -“please could you try it on different emulators and comment what works and what doesn’t.”
    I will test it in the following days and report about it.
    -“circumventing checking the copy protection”
    I don’t have experience about this, but if no one stand up, I will see what I can do.
    One question. Do you know if this is different from the operating system that run at the CEMCorp/Burroughs/Unisys Icon?

    • I’ve been wondering this since I left High School in Ontario.

      I’ve seen pictures of a rescued system on reddit a year ago but I think the guy died.

      I’ve been hoping someone would image the hard disks/and machine ROMS along with any media but that seems that it’ll never happen.

      I know the model 2 terminals were capable of running a PC emulator (I think it mostly did disk redirects) as I installed space quest II onto my home directory and was able to play it. I believe it was EGA too!

      They had 8088 compatible processors for sure (8088/8086/80186!?) as the speed was very good.

      I assume that the iCON qnx has a bit going on regarding the video hardware, but who knows.

      It’s a shame the majority of them were crushed and sold as scrap. Seems like it was a networked product that could have been something

    • I unfortunately don’t know much about ICON. I wish they were in my school.

      Also note that we covered QNX here several times before so you want a fully working system in a little later version of QNX like v2 we have these. I will update the post with some links.

  3. What happens when you try to boot the images of the copy-protected disks? Do you get an error or just no boot?

    I’m pretty sure I can bypass it using IDA to create a patch if you post the dumps

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