[TUHS] Early Clones / Rewrites for TUHS archives

[lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

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?