Comment by tengwar2
6 months ago
Back in ?1990, I was working on a collaborative project for multivariable control for heating and blowing plastic bottles. I think I was writing the back end, and a colleague in Germany was writing the front end, both to run on the same QNX system. The back end could be written in ANSI C, but the windowing system required K&R C. We didn't have email connection, so the only way to coordinate development was a write down an integration interface, develop to that, then head over to Germany holding a floppy disk. The thing was up and running in five minutes. Very nice OS to work with!
QNX powered so many success stories it is interesting how it stayed almost entirely hidden from those that weren't directly working with it. The joke went that if you removed QNX from the planet we'd die within a week. I'm not sure if that isn't still true to some degree today because so much infrastructure runs on it and that stuff lasts for decades.