I have, however, seen the OS crash on Garmin handheld
GPS units. Frequently.

I have a Garmin V mounted in my car. By now I can program anything in
there without looking and use it to drive to my nextdoor neighbor
(LA Story reference there ). anyway, yes, they do lock up but
not too frequently. In some regards they are more complicated.....it
calculates routes automatically while the Garmin aviation units only
have to calculate direct routing for the most part.

To be honest, I would prefer the more stable Windows OS.

I don't.

All operating systems have a long history of crashing and being less than
stable.

I thought Linux rarely ever crashes but that is only what I've heard.
My company has part of it hardware running off of WX Works. That has
120 motors to control in real time with motor encoders plus
mechanoelectrical secondary feedback to compare the motor counts to,
assert interlocks when any of those are not within tolerances plus
much more and I've never heard of one crashing. I have heard of
the Windows XX boxes they are connected to crashing a lot more often
and they more or less doing a LOT less work. But every application
is different.

It would be interesting to know why you think Win NT would be
unstable on something like the MX-20. The device is dedicated to running one
program. It has no peripherals. It never runs for more than a few hours.
Basically, all the issues supposedly making Win NT unstable simply do not
exist on a closed box like this.

And you never have to do processor intensive calculations like bold
facing a word.

Gerald