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 chop up the sample utterances and
make it say other things to some degree. You could redirect these
requests over the network and make other people's machines speak during
class. There was a basic inode-type file system but it had weird
permissions and was pretty closely mapped to the physical disk topology
so you could edit directories and reassign file locations to be the
locations of other files, like, say, the password file. There wasn't
anything to stop you from writing a fake login prompt to capture
passwords from the unsuspecting. They had structured pascal, a decent
LOGO interpreter and a C compiler so they could support really any sort
of sophisticated program that a high school student of the day could
write.
It's sad they ordered them all destroyed. While they were
obsolete the day they were made it would be great for there to be a
working installation of them to show off how advanced Ontario was once
upon a time.
I think they had some sort
of GUI but we never got it at our school - they just dropped you into a
command prompt on boot like God, Thompson and Ritchie intended.
Same ~1983, though we only
had three of them at the back of the CS lab and they were never used. We
had ~20 Commodore "SuperPET"s, wired in to the University of Waterloo
[0]. You could actually send things to run at UW. Good times.
The permissions in the QNX
version running on the ICONs were somewhat interesting. Both users and
groups were 8 bit numbers, and groups had an admin if the user id in the
group was 255, while root was 255:255. I had just learned how to
program in C the summer prior to grade 7 when we first had the ICONs in
my grade school, and was able to convince the admin to let me have a
shell account. I ended up doing some useful things for the teachers by
writing a program to migrate applications from one partition on the
system to another (the applications partition was full while the user
data partition was not, and apps were fine running from either partition
- QNX essentially made it invisible to them). I found a few holes in
the system as well - you could ctrl-c from the speach therapy app and
get a root shell after logging while waiting for it to load.
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.
In 1985 I was hired by a
company in Brazil to decompile QNX to commented C sources. Softec
launched the first PC XT clone in Brazil in May 1983 but it was
initially absurdly expensive ($15K for a configuration that was $5K in
the US) so they sold it with QNX telling clients they could add up to 5
terminals to divide the cost by 6 users. Most clients preferred to
pirate MS-DOS instead, but a few did pay for Analix (the 1977-1992
reserved market policy in Brazil forced them to claim to have written it
themselves instead of licensing it from Quantum Software Systems).
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.
It simply wasn't super
hardened, but I'm no expert on mid-80's UNIX variants, maybe they had
all the same issues. The filesystem was questionable as I said. But
certainly it was pretty advanced for its time - probably not a lot of
high schools had a lab of networked standalone UNIX machines and these
were the closest thing you were likely to get.
Yes yes yes!!! I had these
in elementary school in Northern Ontario. The blog doesn't mention it
but it also had multiplayer games. I remember a few..
- a horse race game where people raced horses by answering math questions
-
a fishing game where your boat went across the top of the water and you
had to catch fish and lobster without snagging your line
- a
typing game that did not check if you typed the correct words or all the
words, and would just calculate "number of words entered / time you
took", so if you started a typing test and hit a letter and then escape,
it would give you a ridiculous WPM score
It's wild to think that
this entire system was only for such a small segment of the population,
that we'd have our own computer line. What a weird time, the 1980s
I also had these in my elementary school in Sault Ste. Marie. Mine were also used for games only, never programming.
I
remember a game where you played the role of a colonial farmer in
Canada and you got to decide what to plant every season. It always stuck
with me because there was a bug that didn't allow you to skip one
section.
I remember this as a huge
political pork barrel project. The province gave grants to boards to buy
these dogs, yep woof, woof, woof.
The lack of programs and support/training and the huge fail rate meant
these were soon relegated to storage, where a few techs/hackers kept
some running with parts for others. They fell far behind Apple/IBM,
commodore, radio shack etc.
It was such a huge embarrassment that the government ordered their
destruction = closed off and possible resale resource(in truth it was
not worth keeping even for that) Burroughs POV was that data was
valuable, so detailed circuits etc were denied. Want it fixed? Send it
here, here are our rates $$$
I worked briefly for a
Toronto company named Trigon that had a government contract in 1984 to
produce interconnected office software (word processor, spreadsheet,
calendar) for the Icon. The product was called "Emerald". I don't think
the Icon hardware existed yet, we developed on Unix. As far as I know,
the company went broke before the product was delivered.
The founder of Trigon was a
guy named Don Tapscott. Back then, he had a gift for hyping the "next
big thing". I haven't thought or heard anything about him in decades, so
it was interesting just now to find that he has a website
(dontapscott.com, of course), and that his current passion is
Blockchain.
Tapscott has been a
"futurist" for years, probably decades now. Sadly the trouble with being
a futurist is that you gotta keep making up a new future every year.
> you probably remember
the ICON as a cool looking steel monstrosity that had an indestructible
keyboard and trackball (which everyone tried to spin as fast as they
could)
This is roughly my memory. I had forgotten about these entirely
and now I'm racking my brain trying to remember how we used them. I do
remember the trackballs, a big computer lab, and only using them on
special occasions... I think it must have been around 1989 but I may be
off by a year or two
I took typing in HS on
these. Sadly the trackballs were almost always worn out or gunked up.
The paint program was pretty painful because of it in elementary school.
We didn’t have any programming classes, just a room full of them for typing class, with the server in the closet.
F F F space H H H space. Ugh.
You
could wander the menus of the word processor and actually dial the
modem. We got endless joy from calling Pizza Pizza and hearing an
annoyed voice coming from the closet.
We shared one dot matrix
paper and my friend and I just split the odd and even pages and print
twice because the teacher would let us listen to our walk/discman when
we were finished and I really wanted to listen to The Bends.
So I guess I did learn a bit about programming :).
Ah, this brings back memories.
I took High School computers with these, and I think they inspired me to really get into computers as a profession.
We used BASIC and I learned an actual second language -- Pascal.
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.
Only used these for about 2-years in high-school (Picton)
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.
That was a good one - there
were a lot of good icon edutainment titles: Math Town, A day in the
life, Crosscountry Canada. We had these machines in my 5th grade class. I
also recall multiple generations - we had multiple in the same class.
Wikipedia seems to confirm (but with no additional information
unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer))
Ah yes, the computers of my
youth at K-8 primary school. I spent many a computer period playing
such fine games as Mathville and Offshore Fishing. Damn you, shark!
It's sad they ordered them all destroyed. While they were obsolete the day they were made it would be great for there to be a working installation of them to show off how advanced Ontario was once upon a time.
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