AIX for IBM system 370

Phil Budne phil at ultimate.com
Tue Feb 2 00:21:28 CST 2016


My favorite quote (by my one-time boss at BU, Barry Shein):
"AIX, it will remind you of Unix"

Eric Smith wrote:
> Am I misremembering, or doesn't AIX use substantially different
> commands for managing things, rather than the commands typically found
> in /sbin and/or /usr/sbin on "normal" Unix systems?

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
from the mistake of ever running it.

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.


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