AIX 1.x

Bill Pechter said... | |> and don't get me started about the PS/2 AIX... | |That wasn't really AIX, though. Didn't it really start with Interactive |Unix at the root. That sounds right (I know it wasn't the AIX core). Too late, you got me started... IBM has had at kleast three , simultaneous, fairly unrelated products called AIX. The workstation version (RT, later RS series), the micro series (originally only for PS/2), and the mainframe series. None of them were very compatible at the CLI level. (There may have been a separet version for minis, I don't know.) When the PS/2 came out, we had just recently gotten away from the Gamma version of SunOS for the Roadrunner (Sun's i386 box), which was more like a middling Beta than a Gamma (although the FCS was OK). The PS/2 AIX Beta made a Sun Beta (which usually felt like a late Alpha) look like a mature product. We had all kinds of nasty problems. The rand(3) function always returned the same value. Some of the basic signal(2) functions returned random results, and a couple didn't work at all. The best part was that IBM swore up and down that there were no known bugs! Eventually someone managed to smuggle the known bug list out of IBM (one line per bug) and post it on the net or send it via email to someone on the project. Karl printed it out, and it was almost a half inch thick. IBM really wanted our software ported to the PS/2. So did our management. We told them to look for it on VMS first, and maybe even a Kaypro (which was definitely impossible). -Miles