April 26, 2026
Archaeology, but make it silicon
QNX on the Commodore 900 – Raiders of the lost hard drive [video]
Retro Indiana Jones revives a forgotten Commodore — cue cheers, tears, and spicy memes
TLDR: A hardware sleuth revived a rare Commodore 900 and booted QNX, turning a dead prototype into a working relic. The community is torn between reverent applause and playful “why tho?” debates, with memes, alternate-history arguments, and calls to preserve every trick so this rescue isn’t a one-off
The nerd-sphere just watched a modern-day tech archaeologist pull a long-lost computer from the grave, and the crowd is split between standing ovation and popcorn-fueled debate. In a new video, a collector revives the rare 1984 Commodore 900—a never-released office machine—by decoding cryptic errors, rebuilding a keyboard link, and coaxing an ancient hard drive back to life. He even gets it to run QNX, a tiny operating system used in embedded gear. Cue the drama.
The top comments are pure cinema. One camp crowns him a hero for “saving history Commodore didn’t,” calling it a museum-worthy rescue mission. Another camp argues it’s a glorious flex for a machine that never shipped—“cool, but why?” The fights get spicier: Amiga fans cheer the path Commodore chose, while alt-timeline dreamers insist the 900 could’ve made Commodore a serious business player. Meanwhile, meme lords flood in with “0xFF = press F to pay respects,” and Indiana Jones edits: “It belongs in a museum!”
Underneath the jokes, there’s real sentiment: awe at the painstaking, cross-continent sleuthing; gratitude that he then helped two other owners resurrect theirs; and a plea to publish every trick so this knowledge doesn’t vanish again. The verdict: impractical? maybe. iconic? absolutely
Key Points
- •Commodore introduced the C900 in 1984 as a budget Unix workstation using the Zilog Z8000 processor.
- •The C900 project was canceled after Commodore bought the Amiga, leaving only a few dozen prototypes.
- •The author acquired a C900 prototype lacking a working PSU, monitor, and keyboard; its hard drive showed a 0xFF error.
- •Restoration steps included disassembling the Z8000 BIOS, reverse-engineering the keyboard interface, and determining the hard disk’s low-level format.
- •After restoring the system, the author helped two other C900 owners achieve fully working machines.