AIX

From: Colin Eby <ceby2_at_csc.com>
Date: Thu Apr 1 17:40:55 2004

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
from scratch. In the upcoming version, they are doing it again to
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
Received on Thu Apr 01 2004 - 17:40:55 BST