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For a lot of folks, QNX is something new mostly unheard of and as we noted earlier, they work behind the scenes to make cool things we all come across in our daily lives and don't often collect much credit for it. Until BlackBerry acquired the company, a lot of QNX talk was held to the hardcore computer community, BBS boards and even mailing lists but now interest in the organization is growing.
As people become more familiar with QNX and the history, there's more eyes out there looking for information surrounding the company as well and when CrackBerry Forums member, edyb, came across a floppy labeled QNX he decided to fire it up and find out what exactly it contained.
I found a QNX demo from 1999. It demonstrates the amazing efficiency, speed and tiny size of the QNX Real time POSIX OS and Neutrino technology, which later will become the foundations for the BlackBerry 10 OS after BlackBerry acquired QNX! The entire operating system, web browser, web server, several demo apps and more all fit on a 1.44mb floppy! That is about the size of a single photo on your phone! Nice piece of history that had to be shared... and to think that I almost threw out this floppy disk with all the rest!
Pretty interesting to see an entire OS running on a 1.44MB floppy. For comparisons sake, Windows 98 came on 39 DMF formatted floppy disks if you chose that method, though it was rather abnormal to go that route when it originally shipped as a CD-ROM. If you go looking around, there's still plenty of ways to run what's shown off in the video yourself provided you have some older gear. Remember kids, don't copy that floppy!
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