QNX on the Commodore 900 – Raiders of the lost hard drive [video] (2025)

michalpleban

The speaker here. This is not QNX. This is Coherent, a Unix-like operating system from the eighties.

grandiego

Really great effort!!! A uber-nerdy anecdote to be appreciated by knowledgeable people. I'm feeling pretty envious :)

rjsw

A previous thread on the Commodore 900 here [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29837948

jdswain

Really good presentation, although I was nerd-snipped just by the title (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX). It's great we live in a time where enough information is available to restore these obscure machines, although getting the hardware seems almost impossible. I'm building up a small collection of old computers so that in 10 or 20 years when I have the time to work on them I'll have them there, I'm guessing I won't be able to afford them by then. Already missed the boat on the Lisa, probably the one computer I'd most like to have. I still remember the first time I got to use one, and the Apple employee explaining to me how to use a mouse. Michal showed a huge amount of persistence getting this computer going, and it paid off in the end, far from a likely outcome. I think I probably would have written a disk formatter in Z8000 assembly rather than using the terminal, but that was probably a lot easier.