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Now imagine that all of our computers would run an OS like the one underlying the BlackBerry (QnX), the responsiveness was to a very large degree a direct effect of having a soft real time OS as the basis to build the rest of the applications on.

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Unlike Java, QNX has no warning against using it to control a nuclear reactor in the EULA.

That says something ;-)

It's rock solid. We ran a pretty large installation of these to control a sizeable fraction of the worlds flow of container shipping. Over the course of the project there wasn't a single outage attributable to the OS or the application itself.

I remember an ad where they mentioned a computer running QNX that was booted once and turned off once, when it was decommissioned 10+ years or so later.

Totally believable, in fact, that would be the expectation. Other than hardware failure it should just work.

In fact, QNX really is used in nuclear power plants https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/nuclear-plant-powers-up-on-re...

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