Who's who?

      It seems that the Canadian Education Mircoprocessor Corporation (CEMCORP) employed two firms to create its computer system.

      Microtel was in charge of producing the hardware and Quantum Software Systems produced the operating system.

      The "ICON" as produced by CEMCORP and by Burroughs Corporation are essentially the same with some cosmetic differences. The two versions (stand-alone and network models) are frequent in CEMCORP version. In the Burroughs version, the stand-alone type seems to be very rare. (see The Machine for more details)

      The program development was left to professional programmers, in a sort of consortium in the boards of education in the province of Ontario, to produce valuable learning experiences for the children.

      In 1986, the Burroughs Corporation and Sperry Rand Corporation joined to be Unisys Corporation. They abandoned the stand-alone machines for what they called the "ICON II", a purely workstation environment. This was two components, a monitor and a keyboard/trackball combination. It was much lighter and easier to move about. Their server was a more robust unit using the Intel processors. They also took the operating system and privately developed it into "Iconix" which was basically the original "QNX" system with enhancements.

      The "ICON II" was acceptable in those schools that could arrange a computer-lab type environment but this was not always practical for many schools and Unisys relented with the next generation machine the "ICON III" by adding a desktop unit which could either be networked or be stand-alone.

      Unisys found itself bucking the tide and in the mid-nineties came out with two new generations of the machinery one based on the Intel 486 cpu and the Intel Pentium chip before it ceased being a hardware supplier and became a strictly service based industry. These machines ran the Microsoft Windows operating system but seem never to have been introduced to Win95 and subsequent versions of the Windows environment.

      Unisys did continue to develop the "Iconix" operating system up to 1995 (Version 5) before they stopped its development.