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I used QNX as part of the day job in the 1990's, the reason for using it was real time scheduling and doing stuff for analog broadcast. We had a full 19" rack o

I used QNX as part of the day job in the 1990's, the reason for using it was real time scheduling and doing stuff for analog broadcast. We had a full 19" rack of 4 Compaq servers, each of them a very large box for a 75 Mhz CPU, with redundancy built in everywhere. Back then QNX was definitely targeted at real time/embedded but you could also just use it like any other UNIX. Ease of installation to a functional X Windows desktop on PCs was minimal effort (one floppy?). Somewhere along the way QNX lost this reason to exist - realtime interrupt handling etc. - and it being the easy, accessible tool for quickly putting together real time things, e.g. for broadcast, where the only coding requirement is simple scripts with the OS making it all work realtime reliably. In those days you couldn't just use a normal operating system for such things, it had to be your own EEPROM or something done higher level in QNX - a quick and dirty solution to some extent, in a good way. Having read the article it now seems that getting started or up to speed on a QNX project is no longer something that can be done in an afternoon, it is all a whole lot less accessible.

Apocryphon 10y ago
Isn't QNX's realtime features the reason why it's been integrated into a lot of automative systems?
- Animats 10y ago
  Yes. It's also used by Boston Dynamics' robots. Over the last decade, QNX management managed to piss off everybody needed to support their ecosystem - open source developers, point-of-sale systems people, robotics people, hobbyists, and even industrial real-time developers. All the money is is selling to high volume markets, and that meant automotive and Blackberry devices. But that focus cost them brand awareness and a pool of people familiar with the thing. I hope it gets open sourced when Blackberry goes bust.
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    It always seemed to me that QNX and the rise of smart cars was one of the things that's keeping Blackberry afloat.
- Theodores 10y ago
  @Animat gets it right - they slipped away from being accessible to developers and being a 'weapon in the toolchest' for tasks where a normal operating system would not cut it, even things like SGI IRIX that was tied into realtime things such as framerates. There was a time when you used QNX as tool of choice when you had a time critical task and a few 'perl scripts' to do the job. The I/O was easy to do and much like how you can put something together with a Raspberry Pi today with minimal domain expertise, back in the day you could with a QNX box. As noted, this is now just not so accessible.

Apocryphon 10y ago

Isn't QNX's realtime features the reason why it's been integrated into a lot of automative systems?

Animats 10y ago
Yes. It's also used by Boston Dynamics' robots. Over the last decade, QNX management managed to piss off everybody needed to support their ecosystem - open source developers, point-of-sale systems people, robotics people, hobbyists, and even industrial real-time developers. All the money is is selling to high volume markets, and that meant automotive and Blackberry devices. But that focus cost them brand awareness and a pool of people familiar with the thing. I hope it gets open sourced when Blackberry goes bust.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  It always seemed to me that QNX and the rise of smart cars was one of the things that's keeping Blackberry afloat.
Theodores 10y ago
@Animat gets it right - they slipped away from being accessible to developers and being a 'weapon in the toolchest' for tasks where a normal operating system would not cut it, even things like SGI IRIX that was tied into realtime things such as framerates. There was a time when you used QNX as tool of choice when you had a time critical task and a few 'perl scripts' to do the job. The I/O was easy to do and much like how you can put something together with a Raspberry Pi today with minimal domain expertise, back in the day you could with a QNX box. As noted, this is now just not so accessible.