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An Anonymous Coward writes:

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.

A very deep and excellent dive into the world/history of QNX:

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-qnx-operating-system [abortretry.fail]

Original Submission