[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Tue Dec 19 01:46:38 AEST 2017
On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 09:10:55PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> >My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It would be nice to have
> >section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
>
> One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
> colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware.
I've used it in that timeframe. It was pretty amazing on a 286, you could
have multiple people logged in via terminals and get work done.
I became friends with one of the people who did the OS:
Dan Hildebrandt (QNX) 613-591-0931 x204 (RIP 1998)
I can't remember how we crossed paths, but we both cared about design
a lot and liked bouncing ideas off of each other.
QNX was an actual microkernel, the kernel part neatly fit in a 4K
instruction cache. I remember Dan telling me that it worked because
only a few people were allowed to touch the actual kernel, they wanted
to keep it small and fast.
This was all pre-posix, it was Unix-like but porting stuff was much
harder than going from SunOS to IRIX.
I think that it lives on in cars, someone told me that QNX is the basis
for a lot of the car stuff. Anyone know?
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