Comment by ndiddy
10 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.
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.
There was a super amazing one-man show of Real-Time-Oberon at ETH Zürich [0], used it for some (failed) Robocup try. I wonder what Roberto is up to these days...
[0] https://www.ifr.mavt.ethz.ch/research/xoberon/
Interesting, I'd never heard about this! "XOberon is loosely based on the Oberon System, and it is written in the Oberon-2 programming language. XOberon in its most recent incarnation takes advantage of the computational power of the PowerPC processor architecture. (...) The 68K target version of XOberon is free to download and use. The PowerPC version is available on request."
Not new in design but in assembly/integration: RMS Instruments (Canada) sells equipment for "real-time compensation" in airborne surveying. Analog-to-digital conversion of, primarily, magnetometry data.
Uses the Photon desktop environment.