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Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON (2022)


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If you took a computer programming course in high school during the 1980s or early 1990s, you likely remember learning C, BASIC or Pascal on the ICON, as well as many UNIX commands that would pay off later in college or university. When you booted an ICON, it downloaded the QNX operating system from a LEXICON file server in the corner of the room via a 2.5 Mbit/s ARCNET coaxial network. The UNIX man(manual page), ps(process), chmod(change mode), df(disk free space), vi(visual editor), and wall(warn all) commands did not exist on QNX.

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