web dracat
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made:
internet-ti.me, @Watch, Wayback Classic, etc.
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avatars appearing:
in 2D by nox lucent
in 3D by Zcythe
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"If it were me, I'd have [changed] her design to make [her species] more visually clear" - some internet rando
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I post embeds of other peoples' things at @ticky-reposts
"Octagon systems" is a fake brand to me. not even a movie one, but like, a videogame one
as someone whose early formative professional years revolved around working with QNX, seeing that particular graphic paired with Momentics irritates me for multiple unbearably pedantic reasons, which I will spare you from
i would prefer not being spared. please, tell me the sordid details.
AUGH, FINE. I warned you! But first, a questionably-necessary exposition dump for context, so that when I eventually end the post with "colours wrong" you might feel something besides pity.
I started working with QNX in late 1999. At that time, anyone working with QNX would be using QNX 4, which I believe required at least a 386, and which was a total rewrite of QNX 2, which happily ran on 8086s and therefore didn't have useful things like process isolation (so any program could overwrite any other program's memory, including the kernel). The QNX 1.44mb demo floppy with the web browser, the Netpliance i-Opener, that stuff was all built on QNX 4.
But QNX 6 was coming. Also known as QNX Neutrino, it was another total rewrite, from the kernel up, with a couple of big improvements. The first was that QNX 4 fundamentally did not support threads, and this was starting to become a problem. Neutrino added threads. The second was that QNX 4 was inextricably bound to x86, whereas Neutrino was portable to different processors. (I got it up and running on the Dreamcast during some downtime at work and thus experienced a few minutes of Slashdot fame.)
At the time, QNX shipped a desktop environment, so you could run it as your daily-driver desktop OS. Everyone at my company did this. Their GUI wasn't based on X, like every other Unix, it was their own thing called Photon microGUI, which leveraged the microkernel design to be massively simpler and smaller. Visually, QNX 4's desktop environment was more or less a direct lift of Motif / CDE, but with Windows 95's start menu and taskbar added awkwardly alongside it. Why have one task launcher when you can stack two on top of each other? Ugly as hell, but workable.
QNX 6 had a big release in 2001 as QNX RTP, or the QNX RealTime Platform, and it was a big deal. This was a total rewrite of everything. An entirely new desktop environment, with a completely revamped UI design language, by an actual designer. Full POSIX support, so you could actually run Firefox, and not just QNX's Voyager browser (though Voyager ran a lot more smoothly for a long time). Ports of important desktop software like Flash and RealPlayer on day one. 3D accelerator support, so if you had a Voodoo3 card, you could deathmatch Quake 3. A friendly package manager, which allowed folks to build working ports of software and make the binaries trivially installable. And they gave it away free for noncommercial use! Totally new visual design language for everything, huge engineering effort getting impressive demos running, huge marketing push.
All of this investment in a user-facing desktop almost certainly happened because QNX had been under contract to deliver a new desktop OS for the Amiga and then had the rug pulled out from under them. I don't really remember hearing about that in my circles, but there's no way they weren't trying to recoup some of that investment. As a product, it was probably always doomed, but as a marketing flex? Well, we all got Voodoo3 cards at work, anyway.
So, with all of that background out of the way, I can talk about the two nitpicky things that bug me here.
1: You'll notice that I mentioned QNX 4, QNX 6, QNX Neutrino, QNX RTP, but have yet to say the word "Momentics". That's because QNX Momentics isn't an operating system. It's one of maybe two* products they shipped that doesn't even have to run on QNX.
Momentics is the SDK for building stuff on QNX without living inside QNX. They first released it with QNX 6.2, I think. It includes an Eclipse-based IDE and various cross-compilation tools that run comfortably on Windows (and these days, Linux + Mac). You could use the Momentics IDE from inside QNX too, but since I was already very comfortable doing all my development from within QNX directly, and Eclipse was this huge bulky Java thing, it just felt like a really slow, buggy text editor to me, and I generally didn't bother.
* the other one I can think of is "Phindows", which was a remote desktop tool that lets you use a QNX machine running Photon from Windows.
2: That "Works With QNX" sticker is using QNX 4's design language! The blue and purple bars were everywhere in that era, but by the time QNX 6 hit, they had hired some real designers, and the weird colour scheme and pointy lines were no longer anywhere to be found. The QNX Neutrino logo was cool! (Seen here as part of the desktop background, along with the official Momentics logo, which, as a fancy letter "M" is kind of a hilarious design honestly.) If you wanted to advertise QNX 6 readiness in particular, why not use that!
In writing this, I discovered, to my horror, that there was a secret third thing that felt weird about seeing that badge. Apparently the reason it looked so familiar to me was that the company I worked for lifted it for our website! So we were basically just as guilty as these guys!! Hoisted by my own pedantry