Comment by kragen

9 days ago

> Don't misunderstand us. We at Quantum have a great deal of respect for Unix. It was a major force in moving operating systems out of the 60's and into the 70's. QNX however, was designed in the 80's and will be a driving force of the 90's. Over 20,000 systems have been sold since 1982.

Things they weren't anticipating included GNU, the internet, Microsoft Windows, third-party development, the Windows applications barrier to entry, the World-Wide Web, shareware, BBSes, VARs, and the free-software movement. They didn't understand how operating systems were a winner-take-all game, so pricing your OS at hundreds of dollars was a losing strategy.

But it was 01986, so who could blame them? Their 01987 ad does try to reach out to VARs.

Still, they were certainly aware of Unix, and you'd think that would mean they were aware of uucp. They just didn't anticipate its significance. Again, though, who did?

They also don't seem to have appreciated the importance of GUIs until version 2.0 in 01987, despite the popularity of the Macintosh, the "Jackintosh" Atari ST, and GEOS on the C64. The article says that the "Photon" GUI everyone remembers wasn't until QNX 4.1 in 01994.

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kragen

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ndiddy  9 days ago

Their OS was fairly unique in that it was a POSIX OS that could scale up to being used on desktop/servers, was extremely stable, and could handle real-time control. From a desktop perspective, the real-time aspect also meant that using the system was a joy, everything was super snappy. They never managed to become mainstream, but in the 001980s through the 002000s that was a good enough niche that the company managed to stick around. The 1.44 MB demo QNX put together in 001999 with a full GUI, networking stack, web browser, file browser, utilities, demo programs, etc. was super impressive and I've never seen anything with that level of functionality squeezed into anything close to that size.

Of course most of this advantage has gone away, both because real-time Linux has become good enough to compete with QNX for a lot of use cases, and because QNX stopped supporting self-hosted development with QNX 6.6 in 002014. From a business standpoint of course it makes sense to focus on the automotive and other embedded markets where all the paying customers are, but from a tech enthusiast standpoint it makes me a little sad. Given the licensing cost and competition from real-time Linux on the high end, and Zephyr/FreeRTOS on the low end, I'm not sure why anyone would choose QNX for a new project today. If anyone reading this has chosen QNX for a new project relatively recently, I'd love to hear your perspective.

  • kragen  9 days ago

    It wasn't a POSIX OS until much later, at which point they did appreciate the importance of most of those things.

    Have you checked out Oberon? It has a full GUI, networking stack, web browser, file browser, utilities, demo programs, etc., in a similar size. It isn't suitable for real-time control at all.

    I'm also interested to hear from people choosing QNX for new projects.