I used AIX 3 & 4 on RS6000 hardware between 1995 and 2000 and really liked it. Just about all of it's quirks were positive. For example the theoretically according to the spec hot swoppable SCSI peripherals that would crash any other machine if you didn't power everything down before unplugging on these critters genuinely were and because of cheap bosses we'd move around a single SCSI DAT tape drive to back up half a dozen machines each week without a single problem. Business moved from highly specialised software at huge cost to more generic applications on commodity hardware so the workstation and server tier RS6000s were superseded by Intel type PCs. And although we tried quite hard to remain IBM customers as small-fry it seemed they really didn't want us and think the last thing that we bought was a bunch of ThinkPads a couple of weeks before they sold the desktop and laptop business to Lenovo.
When companies stop listening to their customers...they usually leave as soon as they are able to make the jump. You are quite right Intel/AMD own the enterprise market. We made the jump or Oracle/Solaris some years ago and it was surprisingly smooth
My dad worked on IBM RS/6000's in the early 90s. He said that although AIX was very quirky, it was well thought out. However, he was glad to move on to Sun boxes when he changed jobs.
AIX is extremely well designed and very consistent in command naming and tools etc. I certainly wouldn't call it "quirky", and it would be a massive downgrade moving to Solaris (or Linux) which are both very chaotic and lacking features.
I worked on engineering simulation software in the years prior to Linux coming on the scene, and we had customers on all flavors of Unix (I think we supported 22 distinct platforms at the peak). Over the years I had DEC, Sun (3 and 4), HP-UX and SGI boxes on my desk; I fondly recall the SGIs as being favorites. We had a couple of IBM AIX workstations in the shop, my only memories were that everyone hated them. Porting between all the other boxes was pretty simple and straightforward, but the damned IBM compilers and libraries always had some subtle differences that made them a total pain in the ass.
Funny, I have the exact opposite experience. AIX was generally very POSIX compliant and for example the C compilers very ANSI C compliant, and thus fairly easy to move well written code onto. Also generally when U used the GNU 'toolbox' things usually worked.
Hi found your video and had a real flash back, I worked in Austin 2000-2001 doing tpcc benchmark on AIX & Oracle had a fun time, and I remember the tn thing :-) I have worked with Aix since 1992 3.2.5 and just installed 7.3 TL 01 last month so it is still going
Around the year 2000, I had to maintain a pair of IBM RS-6000 systems. They were a mirrored pair running DB2 and BALLY SDS to run a casino slot floor. It was my first look at AIX and I really liked the system. Each month I performed database maintenance on the off-line side, rebooted and tested. Then I would flip the mirror and do the same to the other one. They ran rock solid for 5 years without ever doing updates. AIX performed flawlessly and I was so glad to have a little Linux under my belt when we got that setup installed. It was nice to go into it with some understanding of how the file system and commands were structured. It also didn't hurt that I was already managing an AS/400 sitting right there beside them, although the two OSes are really miles apart. AIX was really cutting edge at the time. I was quite impressed with it.
DB2 was pretty bad at one point before the developers scraped the code and rewrote it, at that point DB2 was pretty awesome, and worked very well. Yep same experiences with AIX here, just worked. I don't know much about AS/400's I worked with one for about 4 hours to rewrite some code for one of our customers, Once I got the compile and run syntax straightened out it seemed to run just great, and I was writing in C++, not exactly native for that machine.
@@CyberGizmo For me, I guess the biggest plus for the AS/400 was how well it handled having hundreds of users logged in and working. When busy, it might get a bit slow as users had to wait their turn for batch jobs to run, but they would complete. I have had times where a process would crash and have to be restarted, but it NEVER brought down the whole system. Solid is an understatement.
I still work on AIX today. Automotive industry uses it for a notoriously infamous DMS (Dealer Management System, an ERP with auto specific features) which only gets support on Linux with x86 of up to 100 concurrent users need to use it. If you cross that, you gotta use AIX. Oh, the fun things I’ve learned since then. Btw GLVM is also an underpinning for PowerHA (Global LVM I believe) and is used to replicate data at the file system level both synchronously and asynchronously, which is great since then I don’t need to rely on block level replication through a SAN (or if you’re a masochist like me, some NFS mount with lsyncd or other replication model like SFS on a Linux export). Can’t wait to touch another Unix in the future!
The notoriously infamous DMS wouldn't by chance be DealerTrack would it? And thanks for the correction on GLVM, I confused it with GL32, too many acronyms in IBM. Will see if I can coax another UNIX variant out of the woodwork hahaha.
Another great history lesson in to the Unix or computing world. Thank you! IBM was (is?) such a great technology company, whenever you look in to a computing technology more often than not you will find that IBM have invented it or done it 30years before you thought it was invented by someone else.
awesome (if abbreviated) synopsis! I have many years of AIX experience from 4.x through 8.x resulting in being on a first name basis with support center in Atlanta and getting middle of the night support call on systems at companies that I had left years before. I agree with other commenters that AIX was very reliable even if the hardware is extremely power hungry. I will be an AIX fanboy again after they make it open source 8^)
As much as I enjoyed working on AIX way back when, I sure wouldn't want to have one sitting here and have to pay for the electric bill. Although, it would help heat the house in the winter.🤣
@@chilleddriving1455 - sure... it's only fair that since Linux contains UNIX code and AIX contains Linux code that we get a chance to see how much convergence between all the *nix code bases exists.
Oh hearing that takes me back. We had a internal struggle where all our Sun E15K hosted apps were a thorn in the side of the IBM mainframe folks. And IBM wanted to get us to dump Solaris once and for all and migrate everything onto a single VM hosting mainframe with an AIX environment alongside the old guard CICS/Adabas/Natural apps being nursed along. Suffice to say, as you point out, Solaris (and nearly all other *nix are not the same) as AIX and (thank goodness) was the deal breaker. They migrated to CentOS on giant Dell/EMC/ESX then to Cisco VMs. So they were able to preserve all that hard won Unix knowledge. And we never adopted AIX. 😌
Wow, that Sun was an absolute beast of a machine for its time, we didnt have anything quite that big but always enjoyed working on them. LOL, IBM wanting you to use a mainframe instead of the Sun, sometimes you just want to sit them down and explain the reality of the market to them, but I am not sure they would get it.
Am a little late to the party, but great content as always! Saw a lot of comments about AS/400 systems. I still work with one today, so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the system if you have any. Cheers!
I had and still have a copy of AIX that ran on Itanium. In fact I still have the itanium server that I have not booted in well over a decade and a half. I bought the server new in a moment of insanity from HP in the late 90's - to date still the most expensive personal computer I ever bought. I never really got into AIX preferring the novelty of running x86 Windows binaries on an Itaninum version of Windows. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
I spent several years on UNIX SysV machines. One afternoon's worth of AIX convinced me to stay far away from AIX. It seemed to do everything differently. Later, I worked on an AS/400 and it was very frustrating how IBM changed the names to describe things. Boot = IPL, hard drive = DASD, etc. Sure they gave you all the documentation but it was in another "language". Don't get me wrong, The operating system actually was great, very stable, with lots of hidden features, but man, it was work to get past all those strange names.
@@chilleddriving1455 Thank you for your comment! Sadly, I fell in love with UNIX and haven't been able to give it up yet. Love me some pipes, redirection and shell scripts.
@@chilleddriving1455Thank you for pointing that out! I didn't say that the AS/400 had anything to do with UNIX. It ran OS/400, which was a very interesting operating system. Sadly, I did not have enough time with that system before the company moved to Windows which, for me, was a great disappointment. Sigh. I would have preferred to continue with the AS/400 personally, but that's life. Thank you for your comment.
Not sure I would be the right guy for that, I understand hardware to a point, but no expert in design, I just know enough to be dangerous, as they saying goes, never let an architect near hardware they will usually blow it up.
LOL, now that machine I dont have, IBM wanted to send me to school on it, I said no and walked out of the office before my manager could tell me I was going. The land of COBOL and PL/1 just wasn't my thing.
I honestly do not hear a lot about AIX these days, and I figured it was dying. Surprised it is still being developed, which I guess is more than what you can say about Solaris - since that UNIX is essentially in maintenance mode - and who knows when ORACLE will begin development again, or if ORACLE plans to quietly do away with Solaris at some point.
We stopped using Solaris at my last job because it was just getting too expensive for the hardware from Oracle, plus the T-series machines used a threading model which required quite a bit of recoding to support it properly. A shame, Solaris used to be so awesome.
They may still need Solaris for SPARC. The DBMS runs fine on Linux, but Linux on SPARC not so much. Watch for Oracle or someone else to put serious effort (and money) into the SPARC/Linux port as a predictor of Solaris demise
@@thomasdial8664 I still have an old sparc64 server in my homelab. Linux does boot, but that's about it. There are lots of problems, and I can't seem to run any kernels above 5.2 or so. I've switched to running OpenBSD on it instead, which has really great sparc support! There is a probably an Illumos (formerly Open Solaris) distro that runs on it as well, but I haven't tried any yet on real hardware.
![[037] IBM POWER Pt. 1: Hardware Reset & Disk Setup](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bz5tloUn-UQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![[037] IBM POWER Pt. 1: Hardware Reset & Disk Setup](/img/tr.png)
I used AIX 3 & 4 on RS6000 hardware between 1995 and 2000 and really liked it. Just about all of it's quirks were positive. For example the theoretically according to the spec hot swoppable SCSI peripherals that would crash any other machine if you didn't power everything down before unplugging on these critters genuinely were and because of cheap bosses we'd move around a single SCSI DAT tape drive to back up half a dozen machines each week without a single problem.
Business moved from highly specialised software at huge cost to more generic applications on commodity hardware so the workstation and server tier RS6000s were superseded by Intel type PCs. And although we tried quite hard to remain IBM customers as small-fry it seemed they really didn't want us and think the last thing that we bought was a bunch of ThinkPads a couple of weeks before they sold the desktop and laptop business to Lenovo.
When companies stop listening to their customers...they usually leave as soon as they are able to make the jump. You are quite right Intel/AMD own the enterprise market. We made the jump or Oracle/Solaris some years ago and it was surprisingly smooth
My dad worked on IBM RS/6000's in the early 90s. He said that although AIX was very quirky, it was well thought out. However, he was glad to move on to Sun boxes when he changed jobs.
AIX is for sure quirky, but yep it just works.
AIX is extremely well designed and very consistent in command naming and tools etc. I certainly wouldn't call it "quirky", and it would be a massive downgrade moving to Solaris (or Linux) which are both very chaotic and lacking features.
I worked on engineering simulation software in the years prior to Linux coming on the scene, and we had customers on all flavors of Unix (I think we supported 22 distinct platforms at the peak). Over the years I had DEC, Sun (3 and 4), HP-UX and SGI boxes on my desk; I fondly recall the SGIs as being favorites. We had a couple of IBM AIX workstations in the shop, my only memories were that everyone hated them. Porting between all the other boxes was pretty simple and straightforward, but the damned IBM compilers and libraries always had some subtle differences that made them a total pain in the ass.
I recall that same problem porting software between other flavors of UNIX to AIX.
Funny, I have the exact opposite experience. AIX was generally very POSIX compliant and for example the C compilers very ANSI C compliant, and thus fairly easy to move well written code onto. Also generally when U used the GNU 'toolbox' things usually worked.
Hi found your video and had a real flash back, I worked in Austin 2000-2001 doing tpcc benchmark on AIX & Oracle had a fun time, and I remember the tn thing :-) I have worked with Aix since 1992 3.2.5 and just installed 7.3 TL 01 last month so it is still going
Around the year 2000, I had to maintain a pair of IBM RS-6000 systems. They were a mirrored pair running DB2 and BALLY SDS to run a casino slot floor. It was my first look at AIX and I really liked the system. Each month I performed database maintenance on the off-line side, rebooted and tested. Then I would flip the mirror and do the same to the other one. They ran rock solid for 5 years without ever doing updates. AIX performed flawlessly and I was so glad to have a little Linux under my belt when we got that setup installed. It was nice to go into it with some understanding of how the file system and commands were structured. It also didn't hurt that I was already managing an AS/400 sitting right there beside them, although the two OSes are really miles apart.
AIX was really cutting edge at the time. I was quite impressed with it.
DB2 was pretty bad at one point before the developers scraped the code and rewrote it, at that point DB2 was pretty awesome, and worked very well. Yep same experiences with AIX here, just worked. I don't know much about AS/400's I worked with one for about 4 hours to rewrite some code for one of our customers, Once I got the compile and run syntax straightened out it seemed to run just great, and I was writing in C++, not exactly native for that machine.
@@CyberGizmo For me, I guess the biggest plus for the AS/400 was how well it handled having hundreds of users logged in and working. When busy, it might get a bit slow as users had to wait their turn for batch jobs to run, but they would complete. I have had times where a process would crash and have to be restarted, but it NEVER brought down the whole system. Solid is an understatement.
I still work on AIX today. Automotive industry uses it for a notoriously infamous DMS (Dealer Management System, an ERP with auto specific features) which only gets support on Linux with x86 of up to 100 concurrent users need to use it. If you cross that, you gotta use AIX. Oh, the fun things I’ve learned since then.
Btw GLVM is also an underpinning for PowerHA (Global LVM I believe) and is used to replicate data at the file system level both synchronously and asynchronously, which is great since then I don’t need to rely on block level replication through a SAN (or if you’re a masochist like me, some NFS mount with lsyncd or other replication model like SFS on a Linux export).
Can’t wait to touch another Unix in the future!
The notoriously infamous DMS wouldn't by chance be DealerTrack would it? And thanks for the correction on GLVM, I confused it with GL32, too many acronyms in IBM. Will see if I can coax another UNIX variant out of the woodwork hahaha.
Used in healthcare, as well. AIX is used to host Epic EMR.
Another great history lesson in to the Unix or computing world. Thank you!
IBM was (is?) such a great technology company, whenever you look in to a computing technology more often than not you will find that IBM have invented it or done it 30years before you thought it was invented by someone else.
Glad you enjoyed it!
awesome (if abbreviated) synopsis! I have many years of AIX experience from 4.x through 8.x resulting in being on a first name basis with support center in Atlanta and getting middle of the night support call on systems at companies that I had left years before. I agree with other commenters that AIX was very reliable even if the hardware is extremely power hungry. I will be an AIX fanboy again after they make it open source 8^)
That is awesome!
As much as I enjoyed working on AIX way back when, I sure wouldn't want to have one sitting here and have to pay for the electric bill. Although, it would help heat the house in the winter.🤣
What, you want inexperienced children messing with the code to make it as awful as Linux?
@@chilleddriving1455 - sure... it's only fair that since Linux contains UNIX code and AIX contains Linux code that we get a chance to see how much convergence between all the *nix code bases exists.
Oh hearing that takes me back. We had a internal struggle where all our Sun E15K hosted apps were a thorn in the side of the IBM mainframe folks. And IBM wanted to get us to dump Solaris once and for all and migrate everything onto a single VM hosting mainframe with an AIX environment alongside the old guard CICS/Adabas/Natural apps being nursed along. Suffice to say, as you point out, Solaris (and nearly all other *nix are not the same) as AIX and (thank goodness) was the deal breaker. They migrated to CentOS on giant Dell/EMC/ESX then to Cisco VMs. So they were able to preserve all that hard won Unix knowledge. And we never adopted AIX. 😌
Wow, that Sun was an absolute beast of a machine for its time, we didnt have anything quite that big but always enjoyed working on them. LOL, IBM wanting you to use a mainframe instead of the Sun, sometimes you just want to sit them down and explain the reality of the market to them, but I am not sure they would get it.
Am a little late to the party, but great content as always! Saw a lot of comments about AS/400 systems. I still work with one today, so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the system if you have any. Cheers!
I had and still have a copy of AIX that ran on Itanium. In fact I still have the itanium server that I have not booted in well over a decade and a half. I bought the server new in a moment of insanity from HP in the late 90's - to date still the most expensive personal computer I ever bought. I never really got into AIX preferring the novelty of running x86 Windows binaries on an Itaninum version of Windows. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Welcome @vince4252 glad it triggered some memories, I thought about getting the Itanium but yeah it was so expensive
I was always amused when SMIT little progress guy would fall flat on his face
I forgot about that, thanks for the reminder, it was funny
I spent several years on UNIX SysV machines. One afternoon's worth of AIX convinced me to stay far away from AIX. It seemed to do everything differently.
Later, I worked on an AS/400 and it was very frustrating how IBM changed the names to describe things. Boot = IPL, hard drive = DASD, etc.
Sure they gave you all the documentation but it was in another "language".
Don't get me wrong, The operating system actually was great, very stable, with lots of hidden features, but man, it was work to get past all those strange names.
Maybe you should stay away from Unix, doesn't really seem to agree with you.
P.S. IBM was first. "Boot" is a DOS thing.
P.P.S. AS/400 doesn't have anything to do with Unix.
@@chilleddriving1455 Thank you for your comment!
Sadly, I fell in love with UNIX and haven't been able to give it up yet.
Love me some pipes, redirection and shell scripts.
@@chilleddriving1455Thank you for pointing that out!
I didn't say that the AS/400 had anything to do with UNIX. It ran OS/400, which was a very interesting operating system.
Sadly, I did not have enough time with that system before the company moved to Windows which, for me, was a great disappointment. Sigh.
I would have preferred to continue with the AS/400 personally, but that's life.
Thank you for your comment.
Amdahl UTS. Wow, I'm surprised anyone still remembers it. Takes me back to 1981, Building E1, Arques Ave, Sunnyvale. Damn I was young then.
hahaha, yep we were young then
Please make a presentation about bit-slicing technology that allows anyone to design their computer.
Not sure I would be the right guy for that, I understand hardware to a point, but no expert in design, I just know enough to be dangerous, as they saying goes, never let an architect near hardware they will usually blow it up.
Please do z/os if you can. Superb content as always.
LOL, now that machine I dont have, IBM wanted to send me to school on it, I said no and walked out of the office before my manager could tell me I was going. The land of COBOL and PL/1 just wasn't my thing.
@@CyberGizmo So maybe as/400 aka ibm/i?
I honestly do not hear a lot about AIX these days, and I figured it was dying. Surprised it is still being developed, which I guess is more than what you can say about Solaris - since that UNIX is essentially in maintenance mode - and who knows when ORACLE will begin development again, or if ORACLE plans to quietly do away with Solaris at some point.
We stopped using Solaris at my last job because it was just getting too expensive for the hardware from Oracle, plus the T-series machines used a threading model which required quite a bit of recoding to support it properly. A shame, Solaris used to be so awesome.
They may still need Solaris for SPARC. The DBMS runs fine on Linux, but Linux on SPARC not so much. Watch for Oracle or someone else to put serious effort (and money) into the SPARC/Linux port as a predictor of Solaris demise
@@thomasdial8664 I still have an old sparc64 server in my homelab. Linux does boot, but that's about it. There are lots of problems, and I can't seem to run any kernels above 5.2 or so. I've switched to running OpenBSD on it instead, which has really great sparc support! There is a probably an Illumos (formerly Open Solaris) distro that runs on it as well, but I haven't tried any yet on real hardware.
I don't know anything about servers, do the latest AIX run on intel xeon chips?
Not anymore, they only support the POWER and Z machines today
👍DJ!