QNX 1.44MB Demo Diskette

QNX is a real-time operating system, used in industrial, network, telecom, medical, and automotive devices. You may have used it without even knowing it.

At one point QNX had two 1.44 megabyte demo disks available for download, one version with PPP/Modem networking, the other with NIC-based networking. This one is the NIC version.
Both disks required a minimum of a 386, 8 MB RAM, a serial or PS/2 mouse, and a VGA or VESA 2.0 compatible video card. In addition to that an NE1000/2000, DEC 21x4x or 3Com 509-based network card was required for the NIC version, while a hardware modem was required for the PPP version. No hard drive is needed.

Since there is no standard for NIC card compatibility and each card needs a unique driver, the NIC version only works with certain older cards. Also, the PPP version does not recognize those fake "winmodems" that most computer have, since those do all their processing in software (thus a driver is needed) as opposed to having a true hardware processor.

After you configure QNX, it displays the desktop and this Voyager window. Voyager is a HTML 3.2-compatible web browser that also supports Javascript.

The demo disk includes a minimalistic start menu/taskbar.
The file browser does little more than let you view the files stored in the RAMdisk.

That "QNX IS COOL" box can be opened many times, and it will still run smoothly.

This is the display configuration dialog.
Cards that support VESA 2.0 can allow the Photon GUI to run in modes like 1024*768*24.

It is (or was, rather) possible to install "extensions" from the QNX website. Since no data is saved to the demo disk you were required to reload them each time you booted the system.

Notepad is shown, and any files created by it would only be saved to the RAMdisk.

Conclusion:
While not practical for use as a desktop operating system, QNX is a great platform for running many day-to-day mission-critical operations and tasks that would only be good on systems that can multithread things and keep everything running smoothly even with multiple instances of multiple programs. QNX does all that.