[geeks] Sun vs. SysVr4

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On , August 22, 2001 at 00:20:40 (-0700), Gregory Leblanc wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Sun vs. SysVr4
>
> What did IBM do with AIX?

Did you not ever have the pleasure of using AIX before 4.2?  :-)

I don't even know where to begin!  ;-)

One prime example was that they contracted (KEE, IIRC) to hypertext all
the manuals.  The result was great, if you had a very fast top-of-the
line workstation with X11, but it sucked majorly on ASCII, and there
were no more manual page sources, etc. -- all one big database.

Then there are the literally hundreds and hundreds of command-line
replacements for flat-file configuration files (necessary because
AIX-3.x basically has an in-kernel "registry" for almost everything).

If it weren't for the little running and dancing (and falling down) guy
in SMIT it would be nearly impossible to manage an AIX-3.x system.

They did have one of the first really nice logical volume managers
though.  You could drop in another disk (often without rebooting if you
had appropriate hot-swap hardware), and add it to any (or all) existing
filesystems on the fly (again without rebooting).  Sun's Veritas-based
ODS is similar these days, though IIRC it's not using a log-structured
filesystem like AIX does/did.

AIX-4.x took much of the crap out of the kernel again, but it was still
quite a weird thing from a Unix person's point of view.

One good thing about AIX-3.x (and 4.x I suppose) was that you could
compile pretty much any code on it without tweaking anything.  It's a
moot point in this day of common GNU Autoconf use, but back a few years
ago this made porting third-party code a breeze.  Of course it also made
writing code that had to be portable to other Unix systems a real
nightmare -- you could pretty much be sure your AIX code wouldn't
compile out of the box on *any* other system without tweaking!  ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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