QNX 1.44MB challenge
Dunno if this is on-topic for the community or not.
Earlier today I was reminded of this old what-can-we-jam-onto-a-floppy challenge:
To demonstrate the OS's capability and relatively small size, in the late 1990s QNX released a demo image that included the POSIX-compliant QNX 4 OS, a full graphical user interface, graphical text editor, TCP/IP networking, web browser and web server that all fit on a bootable 1.44 MB floppy disk for the 386 PC. - wiki
and found the files still on the net.
let's try it
un-7zipped it, and saw the makedisk.exe and the qnxdemo.dat the .bat said it worked on.
I (incorrectly) assumed the .dat was archived data the .exe would unpack and whip up into a bootable floppy so I...
dd bs=512 count=2880 if=qnxdemo.dat of=qmx.img
And mounted it as a virtual floppy. It booted/ran as shown in the pic, although did not see the NIC.
I imagine there's a way to tell VMM to use something like an old NE2000 for the nic. Maybe another day.
oh, I see
I shut down the virtual and looked at the directory again. Hmm.
file qnxdemo.dat
qnxdemo.dat: DOS/MBR boot sector...
It was a floppy boot image all along and the .exe was just dd-ing it over or whatever. Durrr. I set the .dat as the floppy image to boot in KVM and it came up fine. {edit: still with no NIC} I guess I shouldn't assume.
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