QNX - History

History

Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge, students at the University of Waterloo in 1980, both took a standard computer science course in operating system design, in which the students constructed a basic real-time kernel. Both were convinced there was a commercial need for such a system, and moved to the high-tech planned community Kanata, Ontario to start Quantum Software Systems that year. In 1982 the first version of QNX was released for the Intel 8088 CPU.

One of first widespread uses of the QNX real-time OS (RTOS) was in the non-embedded world, when it was selected as the operating system for the Ontario education system's own computer design, the Unisys ICON. Over the years QNX was used mostly for "larger" projects, as its 44k kernel was too large to fit inside the single-chip computers of the era. The system garnered a reputation for reliability and found itself in use running machinery in a number of industrial applications.

In the late-1980s, Quantum realized that the market was rapidly moving towards the POSIX model and decided to rewrite the kernel to be much more compatible at a lower level. The result was QNX 4. During this time Patrick Hayden, while working as an intern, along with Robin Burgener (a full-time employee at the time), developed a new concept for a windowing system. This patented concept was developed into the embeddable GUI named the QNX Photon microGUI. QNX also provided a version of the X Window System. Due to the POSIX interface, porting Unix and BSD packages to QNX became much easier.

Toward the end of the 1990s, the company (now called QNX Software Systems) began work on a completely new version of the QNX RTOS, designed from the ground up to be SMP capable, and to support all current POSIX APIs and any new POSIX APIs that could be anticipated while still retaining the microkernel architecture. This resulted in the QNX Neutrino RTOS, which was released in 2001.

Along with the Neutrino kernel, QNX Software Systems made a serious commitment to tooling, and became a founding member of the Eclipse consortium. The company released a suite of Eclipse plug-ins packaged with the Eclipse workbench in 2002 under the name QNX Momentics Tool Suite.

In 2004 the company announced it had been sold to Harman International Industries. Prior to this acquisition, QNX software was already widely used in the automotive industry for telematics systems. Since the purchase by Harman, QNX software has been designed into over 200 different automobile makes and models — not only in telematics systems but in infotainment and navigation units as well. The QNX CAR Application Platform is running in over 20 million vehicles as of mid-2011. The company has since released several middleware products including the QNX Aviage Multimedia Suite, the QNX Aviage Acoustic Processing Suite and the QNX HMI Suite.

In September 2007 QNX Software Systems announced the availability of some of its source code.

On April 9, 2010, Research In Motion announced they would acquire QNX Software Systems from Harman International Industries. On the same day, QNX source code access was restricted. In September, 2010, the company announced a tablet computer, the BlackBerry PlayBook, and a new operating system BlackBerry Tablet OS based on QNX to run on the tablet.

Cisco's IOS-XR (ultra high availability IOS) built about 2004-2005 is based on QNX software, as is IOS Software Modularity introduced in 2006.