[TUHS] Clever code (was Re: Re: Stdin Redirect in Cu History/Alternatives?

[Andrew Warkentin]

On 12/18/22, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't have any citations for this, but it looked to me, watching in
> the magazines at the time, that _before_ the Amiga deal, QNX did run
> on PCs for testing purposes, but I am not totally sure if it had a GUI
> at all, and little to no multimedia support.
>
> My impression is that QNX implemented that for Amiga Inc and then were
> left with it when Amiga turned its gaze on Tao and Elate.
>

QNX Classic and 4.x only ran on x86 machines, most of which were
either standard PCs or at least sort of PC-like (although AFAIK the
ability to run without a BIOS was present very early on). It was quite
common to run QNX on desktops as a development host for embedded
systems AFAIK.

GUIs for QNX predate the Amiga deal, and have existed since the late
80s. The original was QNX Windows, which was either a reimplementation
or port (not quite sure which) of Open Look on a custom non-X11 window
server, running on later versions of 2.x and all versions of 4.x.

Later versions of 4.x added Photon 1, which looks like a cross between
Motif and Windows 9x, again based on a custom window server (this time
with a rather unconventional multi-process architecture). The 90s-era
demo disk was based on 4.25 and Photon 1 (there was also a 2.x demo
disk back in the 80s but this didn't have a GUI).

6.0 came with Photon 2, which is still Win9x-ish in terms of
organization and is a fairly straightforward evolution of Photon 1,
although the widgets look very vaguely Amiga-like in 6.0-6.2. 6.0 came
out slightly after the Amiga deal, so that might be the reason for the
Amiga-like theming.

Neutrino was not the name of a GUI, but rather of the entire OS that
succeeded QNX 4 (the first versions of Neutrino used Photon 1 but were
incapable of self-hosting and were developed alongside 4.x; 6.0 was
the first mainline QNX version to be Neutrino-based).

>
> But the only mass-market end-user-facing graphical multimedia-capable
> QNX devices I know of were the Blackberry X smartphones. (And
> cancelled tablet and netbook.)
>

There were also the i-Opener (running 4.25) and Audrey (running 6.0)
internet appliances of the late 90s.