Wind River

Jerry Fiddler and David Wilner started Wind River Systems in California in 1981 as a consultancy, and in 1987 launched VxWorks, a commercial real-time OS for embedded systems. Where a general-purpose OS optimises for throughput, a real-time one promises an answer within a fixed deadline — which is what brakes and autopilots actually care about.

Its most famous moment was Mars Pathfinder in 1997: the lander kept resetting itself on the Martian surface because of a priority inversion, and engineers fixed it by flipping a VxWorks setting and uploading it across interplanetary distance. Intel bought the company in 2009 and sold it in 2018; since 2022 it has belonged to automotive supplier Aptiv. These days Wind River sells embedded Linux too.