The QNX Operating System

Summary

Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge were finishing their time at the University of Waterloo in Ontario in 1979. In pursuit of their masters degrees, they’d worked on a system called Thoth in their real-time operating systems course. Thoth was interesting not only for having been real-time and having featured synchronous message passing, but also for originally having been written in the B programming langue. It was then rewritten in the UW-native Eh language (fitting for a Canadian university), and then finally rewritten in Zed. It is this last, Zed-written, version of Thoth to which Bell and Dodge would have been exposed. Having always been written in a high-level language, the system was portable, and programs were the same regardless of the underlying hardware. Both by convention and by design, Thoth strongly encouraged programs to be structured as networks of communicating processes. As the final project for the RTOS course, students were expected to implement a real-time system of their own. This experience was likely pivotal to their next adventure.first QNX system found in QNX corporate’s attic, from Paul LerouxThe duo’s first year after graduation was a busy one. They moved to Kanata, went to work for Bell-Northern Research (now Nortel), and on the 30th of March in 1980, they founded Quantum Software Systems. To continue their research and experimentation with operating systems, they assembled a microcomputer built around a Motorola 6809. With the release of the IBM PC in September of 1981, Quantum’s efforts shifted to that target. Their goal was to produce a real-time operating system that would enable the PC’s use in factories, communication systems, and anywhere else that emphasized reliability.The first version of Bell and Dodge’s operating system was QUNIX 0.1 (the Q could have been for Quantum, or for Quick, I’ve seen both from former Quantum employees), and it was running on that early, hand-assembled, 8bit microcomputer. This earliest creation was never releas...