On Thu, 9 Oct 2008, David Boyes wrote: > ... AIX/370 was a perverse evil mutant thing > from hell that didn't die a second too soon. Modern AIX (ie post-AIX 4) > is actually a pretty nice OS, and a lot different from AIX/370 or AIX/RT > (which spawned it). ...
Umm... To clarify what the Doctor is saying, it's true that AIX/370 was strange and kind of half-hearted. AIX/370 perverse? Perhaps, but not exactly "evil". As I put it, half-hearted. It was obvious, when one drove it from the console, that the developers learned as little about the mainframe as they had to in order to make the port. By contrast, a certain other Unix for the mainframe which was even then quite mature was fully exploitive of all mainframe hardware (EBCDIC terminals included). AIX/370 mutant? YES! It had, among other things, something called "hidden directories", which amounted to a weird attempt at multi-platform support. There was also still a lot of offload thinking to the extent that you were EXPECTED to couple AIX/370 with AIX/PS2, which many shops were simply not interested in doing. (AIX/PS2 would be the front-end handling all that blasted byte-at-a-time silliness. Turned out that even as stupid as byte-at-a-time is, even the 24-bit S/370 kept up.) Eventually, AIX/ESA came along being fully S/390 exploitive. But it was too late: Anything labelled "AIX" was doomed because the Unix customers were convinced that IBM didn't get it. (AIX/ESA was so advanced that I still cry to think of it.) Back to BSD ... There have been no less than a half dozen Unix for the mainframe, not counting the EBCDIC animals USS and OpenVM. Up to now, all have been very AT&T-esque, so a Berzerkeley port would be refreshing. -- Rick; <><
