Gordon Bell and
Dan Dodge, both students at the
University of Waterloo in 1980, took a course in real-time operating systems, in which the students constructed a basic real-time microkernel and user programs. 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 QUNIX was released for the
Intel 8088 CPU. In 1984, Quantum Software Systems renamed QUNIX to QNX in an effort to avoid any trademark infringement challenges.
One of the first widespread uses of the QNX real-time OS (RTOS) was in the nonembedded 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 one-chip computers of the era. The system garnered a reputation for reliability[
citation needed] and became used in running machinery in many industrial applications.
In the late-1980s, Quantum realized that the market was rapidly moving towards the Portable Operating System Interface (
POSIX) model and decided to rewrite the kernel to be much more compatible at a low 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 windowing system. This patented
[2] concept was developed into the embeddable
graphical user interface (GUI) named the QNX Photon microGUI. QNX also provided a version of the
X Window System.
To demonstrate the OS's capability and relatively small size, in the late 1990s QNX released a demo image that included the POSIX-compliant QNX 4 OS, a full graphical user interface, graphical text editor, TCP/IP networking, web browser and web server that all fit on a bootable 1.44
MB floppy disk for the 386 PC.
[3][4]
