AIX

All -- < RANT_MODE=1 > Sorry, I never could pass up an internecine fued of the UNIXes.... I'd like to go on the record. I love AIX. And there are a couple of bullet points we've missed in our description of it. The most important is its underlying object repository. This may have been the seed of the AIX vs. AS/400 thread. AIX invented the central system registry long before Microsoft. That's the engine behind its package and device management. It's the underlying engine most of the standard admin commands ultimately converse with. Very un-UNIX - and thank you to the IBM _wunderkinder_ for that. UNIX is a wonderful thing, but why must we live in a timewarp where anything not envisioned in the 1980s isn't "real UNIX". Let's move on shall we? Linux is a good example. It's based on a complete rewrite of Minix, itself a complete rewrite of AT&T System V. By all means, let's preserve the vintage, and don't throw the baby out with the bath water. But why should the UNIX community turn Luddite? IBM as we've all said, did a rewrite of the kernel. Rather than porting System V and glomming on some Berkely additions, IBM re-engineered the code accomodate even more robust enterprise configurations with sub-CPU LPARs and mainframe like accounting/management facilities on a rapidly advancing 64-bit CPU design. It's my own assessment they are moving AIX to the top of the tree for big iron, and moving the zOS hardware toward commodity Linux VMing. It's a move that follows the market's application development trend for enterprise systems. Thee development community writes more for big Unix, so this is perfectly sensible. Just to keep this post from being too out of thread, I might just mention my 10 year old 990 and 390 RS/6000s are still wonderful machines to work on now. I use the 390 as a graphic station (if you could believe it). It scans and GIMPs with the best of them. Only compression routines make it slow down. The I/O's faster than the laptop I'm writing this post on. Okay, < RANT_MODE=0 > Colin