The Unisys Icon: One Canadian Xennial's Memories of Ontario's Obscure Computer
80 points by ecolonsmak 6 days ago | 34 comments
  • 31337Logic 6 days ago |
    I used these in grade school back when I lived in Ontario. Your write-up on these is detailed and brought back lots and lots of memories. Thank you!!
    • bfdm 6 days ago |
      Ditto that. Hours and hours on these in the 1990s.

      Mostly Mathville and Offshore Fishing, of course.

      • TheCycoONE 6 days ago |
        A day in the life or Crosscountry Canada for the edgyness. Robot R&D for fun but I don't remember actually trying to pass the tests in it.

        A lot of hours with a mostly absent gr. 5 teacher.

  • nubinetwork 6 days ago |
    Ah the icon... the one system where you can just tell it to run a shell as root to gain superuser privileges...

    https://www.juliandunn.net/2006/08/21/on-hacking-the-unisys-...

    • thijson 6 days ago |
      It was possible to poke two byte memory locations with the value 255, run a new shell, and you would be root. I figured that out by comparing memory dumps as different users, figuring out which locations corresponded to user and group number.
      • cloudsec9 6 days ago |
        At our school, the "computer" teachers were often teachers who were specialists in other areas that had some interest in computers, and weren't very ... security aware. They all had admin/root user access, and they'd often forget to sign out, leaving us with the keys to the kingdom, at least temporarily.

        We figured out how to create a SUID shell, so we could get back to root even after we head logged out. Poking a few bytes would have been more interesting!

        • thijson 5 days ago |
          I really enjoyed the whole process of figuring out how to get the keys to the kingdom. Our teachers were pretty good about logging out after they were done. The first way I got root was by running a fake login program remotely from another computer. That was a thing about the Icon's, you could run programs remotely from another computer. I knew which computer the teachers liked to log into, so I patiently waited. Eventually it happened, he tried to log in, got "Invalid password or login name", and thought he had fat fingered it. Meanwhile I now had root's password. At that point I put in a backdoor on one of the bootup shell scripts, which checked for the presence of a file, if that file existed, it would copy the first part of the password file somewhere else. At that point, if they changed root's password, I would create the file, reboot my computer, then check for the copy of "passwd" somewhere else. The passwords were in plaintext, they weren't stored as a hash. I discovered the poke method later as I got bored of my existing method. I once got a copy of an exam before the actual exam. I saw the teacher printing something out on the dot matrix printer, and guarding the contents, so I logged into root, and copied the printer spool file. Upon examining the file I discovered it was an exam.
  • Scoundreller 6 days ago |
    > Each Unisys ICON came with its own monitor and a very robust keyboard with a trackball embedded in it.

    The trackballs were robust indeed.

    Due to the client/server nature; a classroom of kids logging in at the same time could take several minutes and most of that time would be filled with a classroom of 7 year olds spinning the heck out of the tennis ball sized trackball.

    One more knowledgeable teacher once told us that the this probably made the computers slower because each time you do something it has to pause and decide what to do. I guess he understood interrupts somehow.

    But that logic doesn’t work on 8 year olds with a trackball and nothing else to do.

    • n00b101 6 days ago |
      Consider yourself lucky.

      My public high school in Ontario was supposed to be a "magnet school for the gifted" and instead turned out to be a scam.

      The computer class teacher was absent for a year, and the substitute teacher insisted that the keyboard and mouse cords should be neatly arranged at the end of each class as if it was a knitting class. The "coursework" consisted of learning how to type out "business memos" using a word processor.

      The school believed that this was an important skill and imagined that we would be writing "memos" on computers and printing them out in the "business world."

      I skipped every class I could to hang out with my girlfriend and got out with a 2.0 GPA.

      The school in question has since been demolished. The whole scam was to try to prevent the school from being demolished due to low performance, so they pretended to be a "magnet school for the gifted."

      • qingcharles 5 days ago |
        My secondary school changed headmaster in 1990. The new headmaster declared that "computers were a passing fad" and ended all IT lessons.
  • cabinguy 6 days ago |
    Ah, Unisys. I used to buy/sell refurbished laptops and stumbled upon a couple thousand Unisys laptops, one time. Pentium 133’s & 166’s. I wasn’t very familiar with them, but luckily they were all in “like new” condition when I got them. At that time I was probably paying sub $1/Mhz and selling them for $3-4-5/Mhz…so I have very fond memories of Unisys as well. The good old days.
  • overthink 6 days ago |
    My highschool had dozens of these. Hazy memories from 30+ years ago but I seem to recall they had a chat program called Coco (?). I remember chatting with friends in the library while in typing class and getting in trouble for it. High tech!
  • bitwize 6 days ago |
    The 186 produced some obscure, kinda great, but ultimately doomed (due to not being PC compatible) systems in the early 80s. My favorites are the Tandy 2000 and the Mindset. This is one I haven't heard of.

    I'm also fascinated by the early Canadian personal computer scene. They were trying some innovative things in the great white North. Things like the mostly PC compatible Hyperion, which beat the Compaq Portable to market by a hair (and which You Can't Do That on Television star Christine McGlade famously carried in to work on her motorcycle), and the NABU, an early network computer concept whose software was downloaded through a television cable network (unlike the ICON it was successfully rescued from total obscurity).

    • chipotle_coyote 6 days ago |
      The Tandy 2000 was the only 80186-based machine I'd known of until now. I actually had one for a while, bought from Radio Shack when they were quietly dumping the remaining stock for something like 90% off. It was like a computer from a slightly alternate timeline, one where MS-DOS's original notion of not being tied to PC-specific hardware (e.g., more like CP/M) actually took off.
      • bitwize 6 days ago |
        Yeah, I had one as a kid. My dad picked a few up during that same fire sale.

        In the early 80s, when it wasn't yet clear that PC clones would dominate, it was a wonderful machine: it had a workstation-class (for the time) graphical display and was faster than any IBM product until the second-rev AT came out.

        Microsoft was more focused on being cross-platform back then. Multiplan, for instance, ran on an abstract machine and so was ported to everything from minicomputers to the frickin' TI-99/4A. They even tried to consolidate Xenix and MS-DOS on a single unified API called "XeDOS"; fun fact: this is how MS-DOS 2.0 got subdirectories and piping/redirection.

        Did you spot the Tandy 2000 used as a prop in Stranger Things? It was the cash register for the video store they used to search for Eddie in I believe Episode 2 of Season 4.

    • qingcharles 6 days ago |
      British schools were filled with these non-IBM compat, DOS compat 80186 PCs:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus

      • tengwar2 6 days ago |
        The earlier Z80-based RML 380Z and 480Z machines from the same company were interesting as well. They were said to be the only computers designed to work with a boiled sweet shoved in the disk drive. They ran MP/M and CP/NET (effectively networking for CP/M).
    • MarkusWandel 6 days ago |
      Another pretty obscure Canadian non-PC 8086 or 8186 was the NABU 1600 or 1200 (never did figure out which was the right number). NOT the NABU that ran off the cable network.

      512K RAM, MMU (discrete logic), 4x serial, 10MB hard disk, floppy. No keyboard or video interface; you were expected to use serial terminals, typically three of them for users, with the fourth port used for a printer. Ran Xenix 1.0 which was basically V7 Unix ported to the platform. No networking except what would run over a serial port.

      I got a fully working one at a garage sale for $40 in the early 1990s and geeked out with and learned quite a bit about Unix on it for a while. Since it had about the same limitations as a PDP11 and Minix (64K code, 64K data) there was, in those days, a fair bit of software that could be made to run (i.e. lightly ported) easily. I remember getting a vi clone going that used 63K of the possible 64K code space. V7 didn't have a fullscreen editor stock.

      Long gone now. By the time Linux became my main OS a few years later, this was still in the "junk" category rather than "valuable collector's item" category and I gave it away.

  • sillywalk 6 days ago |
    Previous Discussion:

    87 points by jasoneckert on April 4, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30894348

  • Farfignoggen 6 days ago |
    Well I've seen and programmed on Burroughs Corporation Mainframes(IBM Mainframes as well) and have seen an actual Sperry Corporation Univac Mainframe Drum Storage system(Ginormous beast) in actual use! And has anyone here actually played Space Invaders(ASCII Characters used) on a Burroughs TD830 CRT monitor! And modern day Unisys is the merger of those 2 mainframe makers some time ago!

    But none here are maybe from that Era that was coming to a close in the late 70s and are not yet qualified to shake their fist and angrily yell at that singular cloud floating in a beautiful blue sky!

    • univacky 6 days ago |
      I was there as well. I punched the cards and read the core dumps and programmed in machine language using the front panel switches and lights. I programmed the Burroughs machine in Algol, and the IBM in assembly language (BALR, USING); the GCOS operating system which gave the GCOS field in the Unix/Linux /etc/passwd file its purpose and name; and the Univac 494 with the FASTRAND II drums. It was the most fearsome computing equipment I've ever encountered thanks to its spinning tonnage.

      You are seen.

    • vincent-manis 6 days ago |
      In my OS course, in 1969, I wrote an IPL (bootstrap) program that copied cards to the printer, running in supervisor mode. It ran on a 360 virtual machine under the MTS time-sharing system. Before that, I wrote programs in assembly language for an IBM 7044, and I even was allowed to operate the 7044 on some graveyard shifts. I also wrote programs that ran on a CDC 3600, a Univac 1108, and a Honeywell 200.

      But I liked the PDP-8 best.

      So there!

    • JSR_FDED 6 days ago |
      Respect
  • jasoneckert 6 days ago |
    The picture in this blog is the later version of the ICON, but it ran the same QNX OS, programs, and games, and used the same LEXICON file server for it all.

    In case anyone is interested in more information about the earlier version of the ICON (and the LEXICON file server it ran from), here are my two blogs posts:

    https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/

    https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/lexicon-computer/

    One interesting QNX command we used to get in trouble in high school was apb (all points bulletin) - here's a demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8ts6zV2DU

  • rbanffy 6 days ago |
    We need a lot more photos of these machines. Maybe even 3D scans.
    • thijson 5 days ago |
      They should be preserved somehow. Even a modern web browser has enough compute power to emulate a network of them probably.
      • rbanffy 5 days ago |
        We can preserve their function, but the physical experience of using them requires the ability to produce a physical approximation. I can say the C64 Maxi is a low-cost and pretty good approximation of both a C64 and a VIC20 computer. I only wish it could also be a C16 and a Plus/4.
    • jfil 4 days ago |
      Here are lots of photos: https://vintagecomputer.ca/the-burroughs-icon-computer/

      It looks like this computer is also known as the Burroughs ICON and the CEMCORP Icon.

  • mmphosis 6 days ago |
    I implemented the very slow flood fill for Spectricon, the paint software.
    • thijson 5 days ago |
      The paint program we used was called "fged". It could generate C code for animations. People would spend hours generating their animation masterpiece, then bring their friends to play it back for them.
      • mmphosis 5 days ago |
        I think I remember fged. Wire-frame transformations were popular at that time. There was also IPaint. Spectricon could paint in various graphic modes including 16 colors on the newer Icon computer. The flood fill's hand coded 80186 assembly was still slow due required calls to the Cemcorp graphics API.

        https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/29770

  • xattt 6 days ago |
    My Scarborough elementary school in the early/mid 1990s must have been an exception.

    Each classroom had a IIe, some with green screens and some with colour monitors. All outfitted with a well-rounded collection of educational game 5 1/4” floppies.

    We also had a networked Mac Plus computer lab with a couple of Performas at the “head” of the table.

  • clwg 6 days ago |
    I grew up in Ottawa, where QNX originates. My high school must have had someone with family connections to the company, because we could have built a significant Beowulf cluster with all the Icons.

    These systems had numerous problems, one of which was the school board's severe lack of resources to manage them. The teachers were limited in what they were allowed or able to do, so if a lab went down, it typically took about a week to get someone to fix it. As students, we used this to our advantage. I have fond memories of causing all sorts of issues on these systems as a kid. Another perk was that my school wasn’t air-conditioned, except for the computer labs, so during the hot months it's where you wanted to be.