[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[Steve Simon]

Qnx is used in cars quite a bit , also in the telecoms sector i wad told.

we used it for control of image processing systems, however it it wad a rather foolish management decision IMHO as qnx is heavyweight for the simple user interfaces we needed

-Steve



> On 18 Dec 2017, at 15:46, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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?