QNX DEMO disk (1999)
Around 2003 there was a demo CD. This brings up a nice system with a GUI and browser.[1][2]<p>QNX started closed source with a free version, went open source, went closed source, went open source after an acquisition, and then went closed source when RIM (Blackberry) acquired them. Then RIM dropped the GUI to focus on whatever it is Blackberry still does.<p>As I once told one of their sales execs, "quit worrying about people pirating your system and worry about people ignoring it". During the first free version period, people were porting open source software such as GCC, Eclipse, and browsers to QNX. With all the licensing changes, the open source community got fed up with QNX and stopped making versions for it.<p>We used QNX for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. All our desktop machines ran QNX, and we could run the real-time program on them as well as the vehicle. The real time features were so good that we could have the entire real-time vehicle system running, at hard real time priority, and run a browser or compile without missing a time check.<p>[1] <a href="http://toastytech.com/guis/qnx621.html" rel="nofollow">http://toastytech.com/guis/qnx621.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://archive.org/details/qnx_momentics_6.2.1" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/qnx_momentics_6.2.1</a>