[H-GEN] Wanted: parts and help to get Unix box working

[David Makepeace]

Robert Brockway wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 12 Mar 1998, Martin Pool wrote:
> 
> > Not necessarily: using AIX would probably be a pretty interesting
> > experience (no sarcasm intended), and I think it hasn't been represented
> > at a humbug meeting before. (Rob?)
> 
> AIX has never made an appearance, afaik - and I for one would not be
> worried if it never did :)

AIX 3 (which is what RS6000's ran, circa 1992) is not too bad, it even
has a bit of a BSD flavour to it.  I think it is preferable to SCO or
HP/UX.  IBM completely rewrote it from scratch - rumour has it - by
sticking about 1000 Unix hackers in a building and letting them "play"
for about 12 months.  Everything is there - X11, NFS, etc.  The only
problem with it was "smit".

The RIOS (i.e. RS/6000) hardware was pretty up-to-date for the time also
and included SCSI and (optionally) ethernet.  The video board was an
8-bit per pixel accelerated board with a resolution of 1280x1024.

AIX 1 & 2 (which is what the IBM RT's ran, circa 1988) are based on
System V release 1 (yes, that's right, release 1 - *no* *paging*).  IBM
provided paging by running AIX in a virtual machine of a tiny operating
system called the VRM (which stood for Virtual Resource Manager).  This
allowed AIX to be multitasked with other IBM (non-Unix) operating
systems on the same machine at the same time.  This all sounds very nice
in theory, but the end result was horrible.

> > You probably _are_ lucky it's already installed: I hear it's a bit hairy
> > to install it.

AIX 3 was not too difficult to install (from QIC150 tape) as long as you
remembered that /bin/csh was in an optional fileset.  On the other
hand... I can remember spending an entire day installing AIX 2 from
about fifty 5 1/4" floppies.

Cheers,
David.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
David Makepeace   Ph:  +61 7 3378 4299   http://www.keays.com.au/
KEAYS Software    Fax: +61 7 3378 7922   D.Makepeace at mailbox.uq.edu.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------- HUMBUG General List --------------------------------
echo "unsubscribe general" | mail majordomo at humbug.org.au # To Unsubscribe