I’ve always been taken by the QNX architecture, since I first came across it almost 15 years ago now. In those days it was very much used outside of the embedded market (often by frustrated DOS developers). Sure it was an RTOS, but many of us used it just because it was mutlitasking and extremely rebust, and didn’t have hard real time requirements. It did on a 80286 what could only at the time be done on very expensive equipment from DEC, SUN, HP and IBM.
Bill came along and messed up the desktop world. The web came along and Linux/BSD/UNIX helped keep Bill from messing up the server side too badly. So in the last 10 of the 15 years I’ve been working with QNX, QSSL has been more and more embedded system focused (albeit, what today the specs for what we call an embedded system is very close to what we called a server 10 years ago).
So is anyone still managing to find commercial success for QNX in the non-embedded space?