I've just returned from a trip to Embedded World Germany in Nuremberg, which is probably the biggest show for the embedded market.  You see a lot of the familiar faces in the embedded space from all around the world there.  Where else could you be talking to German, Norwegian, French, American, Canadian, and Japanese business people all within the span of ten minutes?  

Originally developed in 1983 for the Ontario Ministry of Education, the Unisys ICON educational microcomputer was the first large-scale project based on the QNX operating system. Because networking was an essential requirement, the project provided the incentive for QNX Software Systems to develop its transparent distributed processing, which, 27 years later, remains a distinctive feature of the QNX Neutrino operating system.

These systems had a surprisingly long shelf life...

In the Fall of 1984, QNX Software Systems published its first newsletter. By today's standards, the headlines, which announce support for local area networks and IBM ATs, sound ho-hum. But in 1984, these announcements fell into the wow category. The AT, in particular, had just arrived on the market, boasting a "supercharged" 6MHz processor...  Continue Reading >>

Back in early 1980s I came across an IBM XT equipped with a "whopping" 10MB hard drive. The drive alone cost $3000, which at the time amounted to one-tenth the average salary of an electrical engineer. I remember thinking, "Who the hell would need a hard drive that big?". Some people are born futurologists; I'm not one of them.

The XT in question used MS-DOS, but DOS wasn't the first OS to support a hard drive on a PC. That honor belongs to QNX, which in 1982 introduced support for a 5MB Davong. If that sounds small, you're right: it's just enough to store a single photo from one of today's low-end digital cameras.

Supporting a hard drive wasn't the only first for QNX. It also became the first realtime OS to...

You gotta love automated newsfeeds. Case in point: Yesterday, QNX Software Systems unveiled a new reference design for smart-home energy management systems, and the news was picked up by renew grid (makes sense), ITSforhome, (makes sense), and Pharmacy Choice News (what the... ?

March 2010 marks QNX Software Systems' 30th anniversary in the embedded business. To celebrate the occasion, I've decided to launch an anniversary countdown: 30 blog posts that trace the history of QNX and the computing industry, from 1980 to the present.

After rummaging around the QNX corporate attic, I found just the thing for kicking off this series: photos of the first QNX-based computer.

I don't have any data on the processor -- an 8-bitter, no doubt -- but check out the handwired circuit boards and the converted keypunch keyboard. Note especially the hand-drawn labels on the keys...