A personal blog on operating systems, covering QNX, Amiga, OS/2, OpenBSD and FreeBSD, with strong opinions and community commentary.
HN commenters discuss its QNX and Amiga story, with others adding that QNX was widely deployed and nearly became the base of a new Amiga.
I'd argue QNX was more widespread than any of those.
It's been a significant embedded OS since the late 1980s, with many millions of deployed systems.
It is also used in roles with a customer-facing UI and indeed GUI. It's in several car media players, for instance, including from Toshiba I believe.
And of course it was the basis of Blackberry 10.
https://crackberry.com/blackberry-10
It was in the Playbook, the cancelled Folio, and a lot of smartphones, such as the Passport I used to own. (A lovely device, sadly crippled as messaging app vendors removed support. I could use Android apps on it, but they didn't integrate into the Blackberry Hub.)
It was also very nearly the next-gen Amiga, which I suspect is why it has a GUI and multimedia support.
https://www.trollaxor.com/2005/06/how-qnx-failed-amiga.html
I suspect that between routers, switches, engine control units, traffic signals, smartphones, car entertainment units, and doubtless many other things we don't hear about, it's in more devices in production than all of seL4, Fiasco, etc. put together.
Minix 3 is arguably also a true microkernel, and it's present in industry, embedded in millions of Intel Xeon and Core iX CPUs' management units, but it never reached a state of much completeness. No SMP support, for instance, and a lot of missing functionality.
And it now seems to be dead:
https://www.osnews.com/story/136174/minix-is-dead/
There was a time 20 years ago when QNX was to be the foundation of the next-generation Amiga.
Gateway, a PC clone vendor, had acquired the rights to the Amiga brand and technology in early 1997. The company wanted to expand outside the Wintel space, and Amiga still had major brand recognition in Europe. The new Amiga would be a PowerPC-based consumer computer built by Gateway and equipped with the QNX operating system.
It didn't work out, of course -- such was the curse of the Amiga. Here's an account with some more details of what happened:
http://www.trollaxor.com/2005/06/how-qnx-failed-amiga.html
I read it on mailing list yearrss ago, and repeated on my blogs and sites over the years, I'm obvious not helping if it is just an urban-myth, hence the "story-air-quotes". I still get a kick out of just the idea though :)
If one googles "theo de raadt and keyboard remap" there a numerous reports - but I agree it's not credible enough. Lol if one google "LochNess Monster" you also get lots of hits and sites reporting it to be so.
Just a "maybe-urban-myth" to lighten the Monday-Bluezz :)
[0] https://www.trollaxor.com/2010/06/why-i-left-openbsd.html
Who upvoted this? Trollaxor is a well-known troll and the original 4chan. The "group" has been around since 1999, and has various offshoots, including GNAA. The bunch were responsible for making slashdot mildly charming, circa 2003, but never since. They were the ones responsible for the "BSD is Dying" meme as well
[Edit:
They never said anything good about BSD or Open Source in general:
http://www.trollaxor.com/search/label/*BSD
]
There were rumours of Amiga doing a QNX based OS after demise of Commodore. I wrote an email to QNX to ask what they were about and they mailed this to my home in Turkey - imagine my surprise, my first original software (beyond Amiga Workbench disks) was QNX!
https://www.trollaxor.com/2005/06/how-qnx-failed-amiga.html
> Besides the domain name there's not a lot to suggest that this is a 'parody' site
I think it's just a trolling site based on stuff like this[0]. "amd64 only ~ no 64-bit intel". :p
Joking aside, I can't even understand why this was posted here.
[0]: http://www.trollaxor.com/2013/12/openbsd-why-do-not-use.html