Do you recall which specific PS/2 hardware? You're talking AIX 1.3 for PS/2, right? I thought you might even be able to run it on an LX40... There are at least reports of people getting it to run in older versions of VirtualPC. Thanks! -Ben ________________________________________ From: cctalk [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] on behalf of Guy Sotomayor [ggs at shiresoft.com] Sent: Monday, February 01, 2016 3:16 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: AIX for IBM system 370 I?ve never seen a set. It would have been released on 9-track tapes. I used to work on AIX PS/2 which was a required companion product to AIX/370. Good luck in finding media for AIX PS/2. As far as I know, it was never released on CDROM and the last version I had was ~53 3.5? floppies (long gone now unfortunately) and *only* worked on specific PS/2 hardware (no BIOS ? all drivers went straight to the ?metal?). TTFN - Guy

I can confirm much of Guy's comments. I want to keep this as short as possible and not get booted from the mailing list. The Intel/CISC version of AIX is easily available out on the Internet via floppy disc images. Along with AIX's predecessor, RT. The IBM RT software was developed for IBM by Interactive Systems Corp. AIX for PS/2 & PC's was developed by Locus Computing Corp. Lower end model PS/2's came with ISA expansion slots. Higher end models were MCA (Micro Channel Architecture). Also, regarding the PS/2 BIOS, is something I was completely unaware of, or at least forgot a long time ago, concerning dual BIOS's. Quoting the Wikipedia PS/2 page::: ................ IBM's PS/2 was designed to remain software compatible with their PC/AT/XT line of computers upon which the large PC clone market was built, but the hardware was quite different. PS/2 had two BIOSes; one was named ABIOS (Advanced BIOS) which provided a new protected mode interface and was used by OS/2, and the other was named CBIOS (Compatible BIOS) which was included in order for the PS/2 to be software compatible with the PC/AT/XT. CBIOS was so compatible that it even included Cassette BASIC. ................ As I review the AIX 1.3 software, I see both ISA and MCA devices in the drivers section. Good times..... :) Jerry On 02/ 1/16 05:16 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote:

[IBM PC ROM BASIC] .> .. it checks for the Basic ROMS and won't run on a clone... Not so much 'checks for them' as 'uses large numbers of routines from them'. The BASIC on an IBM PC-DOS disk is a much smaller file than the one on a normal MS-DOS disk as a result. -tony

Darn. I figured as much as far as being licenced, but figured I would ask. I really wanted to take a look at the AIX version of unix. I don't have any of the original hardware, I assume there was a straight unix port for the system 370, but i have enough native hardware that runs unix i might as well not bother with it in emulation. There are a bunch of software kits for the emulator online, ill take a look at some of the ibm specific software to see what it is like. Thanks --Devin On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 3:28 PM, Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com> wrote:

What machine would you recommend for the Linux route. The idea being to run the oldest machine possible. I was looking at AIX because it ran on one of the oldest ibm machines i could find. I see the big S/390 machines have pretty good linux support, but god, ill never find one around here. Pretty interesting big machines though. --Devin On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 10:39 PM, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:

On Mon, 1 Feb 2016, devin davison wrote: Way back, circa 1980, Unix V6 was ported to the 370, a bit later Amdahl marketed UTS, and a bit more later IBM marketed IX/370. All of this was prior to 1986 I think. As far as I know, all of them ran under the VM hypervisor way back when Linus Torvald was still wearing diapers and decades before some linux weenie thought he invented the vm hypervisor. -- Richard Loken VE6BSV, Systems Programmer - VMS : "...underneath those Athabasca University : tuques we wear, our Athabasca, Alberta Canada : heads are naked!" ** rlloken at telus.net ** : - Arthur Black

Actually I really think it?s the other way round. The OS is nobbled so it won't run. For many bits of software IBM will un-nobble them but the cost means its generally not worth while... Dave G4UGM

On 2/1/16 8:11 PM, Eric Smith wrote: You have to remember that IBM called all of it's UNIX products AIX regardless of where they came from. IX/370 was prior to the AIX naming and if I recall, that was done by Interactive. AIX/370 and AIX PS/2 actually were the same code base (as opposed to AIX RT and AIX 3...RS/6000). Those code bases were from Locus Computer Corporation. The AIX in the quote was regarding AIX for the RS/6000. The kernel for AIX on the RS/6000 bore no real resemblance to any other Unix kernel. That was mainly due to the size of the virtual address space of the Power processors. At the time (32-bits) the Power CPU supported a 52-bit virtual address space and with 256MB segments, it was possible to map the 4GB address with 16 segment registers also because Power used "inverted page tables", there was no real notion of reloading the page tables. The page table described the full 52-bit address space. So to do an address space switch, you just needed to reload a significant set of the segment registers (actually quite fast). What the kernel did was to allocate each data structure as an array and pointed a segment register at it. Since at that point, virtual addresses were "free", it was just point a segment register at the array and away you go. Pretty much everything in the kernel was an index into an array. Which array, was determined by the segment register. Yes, it was alien (vs traditional Unix kernels) but it was simple and quite fast. TTFN - Guy

My favorite quote (by my one-time boss at BU, Barry Shein): "AIX, it will remind you of Unix" Eric Smith wrote: Configuration was stored in a "Object Database" (so forget anything you ever knew about the /etc directory). System administration for mortals was done with a GUI called "SMIT". It showed an animation of a person running. If the command failed, they fell down face first. But, SMIT *DID* show you the commands it was using, so you could learn Everything was reworded in IBM standard english, ie; DASD instead of Disk. No doubt there are other horrors I've put out of my mind. Here's a memory I couldn't suppress: Device drivers couldn't have persistent mapping of devices into the kernel address space: you had to remap the device each time you entered the driver! ISTR the kernel was SVR3 based. The streams implementation was.... different, but not as bad as the one I remember on HP-UX.

On 2/1/16 10:05 PM, Eric Smith wrote: Yea, all of the management was done through smit (I think that's the command). Menu driven and everything was kept in a database. I think in later versions IBM relented and allowed things to be managed through "normal" Unix commands and files. I used AIX (I think it was 3.2.5) for quite a while as a build environment for other systems (since it tended to be the fastest thing around...at IBM anyway). TTFN - Guy

m?n 2016-02-01 klockan 20:37 -0800 skrev Guy Sotomayor: The memory translation is reversed in comparison with how it is done on the SPARC and the x86, essentially the current loaded tables describes what IS in memory (RAM), not what could be there which means that you suddenly have a cap (?) on how much silicon is needed to handle a large virtual address space. A pretty nice little example of good engineering. Which also reminds me a little about how page faults is handled in the MIPS architecture. Another difference (today at least) between AIX 5 and the current crop of commercial server Linux (RedHat EL and Suse) is how user software and operating system packages is installed and kept current/updated. installp has a far more refined (but complex) way of treating failed updates/installations which is a bit of trouble for cross-platform system configuration systems (cfengine for example.) What is good enough on Linux isn't good enough on AIX.