AIX for IBM system 370

[Tapley, Mark]

On Feb 2, 2016, at 12:21 AM, Phil Budne <phil at ultimate.com> 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
> from the mistake of ever running it.

:-) The command/control workstations for IMAGE ran AIX on POWER (RS/6000) desktop stations. I got to see a lot of SMIT face-plants, but of course, that was usually because I had fouled up at some point or another. I wasn’t enough of a UNIX weenie at the time that the experience even reminded me of UNIX. 

However in fairness, if a workstation was T/U, it probably wasn’t one of the RS/6000’s, and the SMIT-inspired swearing fits by the folks that actually knew what was going on were brief compared to the swearing fits at the Tru64(?) Alphasevers that did the data logging and reduction. I gathered there was a relatively severe endian-ness disagreement between programmers and DEC hardware in that  case.
							- Mark