>What was/is it like?
It's the worst IBM-branded OS. I can't believe that the same company that made the S/370 and AS/400 could make something that sucked that much. Even PC-DOS was better. When they called AIX the "Advanced Interactive Executive" they were probably talking about the OOM killer. They invented the hostile "AI" years ahead of its time.
Yes, Virginia, there *is* something worse than Unix - it is
called "AIX" and is currently being pushed on an unwary
public by IBM. But I digress. In case you don't read
abUsenet, here's a post I just made to
alt.folklore.computers:
From: RS
Subject: Hardware Architectures and I/O (was: Re: Jargon file...) **FLAME!!**
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 90 15:43:03 GMT
Lines: 53
In some previous article PT writes:
> Back when there were REAL(tm) computers like 780, a lot of
> time and energy went into designing efficient I/O from the
> CPU bus to the electrons going to the disk or tty. >
Damn right, but even the 780 was a step down. Get your
KL-10 documentation set out and read about *them*.
- Front-end PDP-11s that did Tops-20's command completion.
- Separate I/O and memory buses.
- 8-ported (that's eight, son) memory that talked to the
I/O front-end machines for *real* DMA, not cycle stealing!
> Sure OS's and apps have gotten bloated, but when you put a
> chip like the MIPS R3000 on a machine barely more advanced
> than an IBM-AT you end up with a toy that can think fast
> but can't do anything. I can't really blame companies
> like DEC and Sun for producing mismatched hardware,
> because their marketing drones are constantly trying to
> undercut each other in price. It's a hell of a lot more
> expensive to ship a product with a well designed I/O
> system than to drop in a "killer bitchen" CPU chip;
> occasionally someone makes the attempt do design a great
> piece of hardware, and you end up with something not half
> bad (like the DECstation 5000, which is only crippled by
> Ultrix
You left out the worst offender of them all - IBM. The
RS-6000 may crank out 27 MIPS, but it can't context switch
or handle interrupts worth sh*t. You can lower machine
performance to the point of unusability by FTPing a file
from another machine on the same ethernet segment!
Next time get a chance to play with an RS-6000, try
this: Pop about a dozen xterms, iconify them, put the icons
in a row, and wave the pointer back and forth over them as
fast as you can. Astounding, no? The highlighting on the
icons will keep bouncing back and forth long after you stop
waving the pointer. My personal record is 20 seconds.
Makes a Sun-2 running display Postscript seem astoundingly
fast.
RS-6000s also have an annoying tendency to "lock up" for
a few seconds (5 < x < 15) and then return to normal - I'm
told that this is normal and due to paging activity. The
microchannel card cage design is pretty bad too - sure, you
can put cards in, but God help you if you have to take them
back out! And you better tighten down the retaining screws
all the way... or the first time you look at the card funny
it will pop out.
To its credit, I must say it compiles GNU Emacs faster
than any other machine I've used, but I do more with a
workstation than just run compiles. And, if you think
Ultrix is bad, it's only because you haven't tried AIX.
My IBM RS/6000 has an annoying habit. When it runs out
of swap space, it looks around for large processes to kill.
Of course, since most of the time I am running several
lisps, it typically picks one of them (the one with the most
state, naturally.) This is a big pain.
I did not realize it could get worse.
Today it chose to kill my X server in its quest for more
free swap space. I had to *reboot the machine* in order to
regain access to my console. Fortunately it still allowed
me to login through the network or I would have needed to
powercycle!
I guess that's one way to get more swap space! A better
solution, of course, would be to not let those nasty space
hogging users log on again. Perhaps it could record the
names of the programs it killed and delete those files, so
they couldn't be a problem anymore. Free up some diskspace
while it was at it. Let's hear it for TEAM IBM: user
hostile to the end!