QNX Neutrino RTOS

“QNX is still a thing, but closed source yadda yadda.”

“it was an amazing feat to have a whole graphical desktop with apps all fit on a 1.44mb floppy disc”

“QNX was equally fast too on the same machine, if not faster.”

“There are good reasons for QNX becoming viable again in the automotive world.”

“The floppy disk was pretty impressive, fitting an OS and programs including a browser in 1.44mb.”

“my main car run QNX for its infotainment/phone system and phonecalls and reading message over Bluetooth works just fine”

“While very impressive, it seemed impractical for my use-cases.”

“There exist several microkernels that don't suffer much from overhead”

“people can pass through hoops to view source”

“There have been some very nice OSes in the past (e.g. AmigaOS, BeOS, QNX, Plan 9)”

“QNX is to this day the biggest "floppy" thing I ever saw.”

“it wasn't really compatible with anything else”

“way more performant and stable compared to Linux or anything else back in the day”

“QNX independently pioneered many of the concepts that define successful microkernels.”

“QNX is also a good example of an RTOS that can be used as a desktop”

“Rip Blackberry Phone + QNX, you were so promising for such a short time.”

“It booted straight into a full blown window manager and had a basic web browser.”

“one of the reasons QNX is so well behaved about jitter”

“The reduction in scope is really gold, it makes it so much easier just to have a small defined interface per program.”

“it run qt and does everything else so it is often an easy choice”

“Initially the actual implementation didn't match the conceptual framework”

“There are costs associated with using something like QNX.”

“plus a reputation of being rock-solid like nothing else”

“come crawling back to QNX many expensive months later to start over with a viable solution”

“In general QnX was commercially mismanaged and technically excellent.”

“QnX is expensive for commercial use”

“Hard real time (so latency guarantees), microkernel (and they actually mean it, so your device drivers can't hose your system)”

“QnX stands heads and shoulders above the competition. The consistency of the implementation is extremely impressive.”

“I'm not just optimistic of the return of the cross-platform and secure os, I'm rooting for it”

“QNX has been around since the 90s (or 80s?) as a very solid embedded GUI platform”

“QNX is hard realtime. At one point, its kernel had O(1) guarantees for message passing and process switching.”

“One of its fabulous features was a C message passing library allowing you to send arbitrary binary structs”

“They were expensive too. You had to pay for each device driver you used.”

“pretty exciting being real time and with a microkernel and such”

“Ran super responsively in 386 machines with 8MB of RAM.”

“Licensing, and QNX missed a consumer launch window by around 17 years.”

“you could install a graphical desktop that was a 40KB distribution”

“it was pretty wild to boot into a fully functional system from a floppy”

“apparently good but mainly focused on real-time stuff, and cost more than the casual could afford”

“It's the same philosophy that systems like seL4 and QNX goes by.”