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Comment by coredog64 | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell if that's sarcastic.

It used to be said [...] that AIX looks like one space alien discovered Unix, and described it to another different space alien who then implemented AIX. But their universal translators were broken and they'd had to gesture a lot.

-- Paul Tomblin

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I think they both are being sarcastic. I am migrating from Solaris to AIX (stupid government) at work and AIX sucks.

Well, I know I was being sarcastic.

Although I suppose that if you held a gun to my head and forced me to select a commercial Unix for a project, and if my stunned perplexity didn't get me killed, HPUX would be an admirable choice.

Wow, I didn't realize Intel still made Itaniums and that HP still sold box built around them. Or that HP-UX 11i was, like a Zombie, still alive somehow.

Grrr. Smit[1]. A non-optional (in many cases) tool to accomplish administrative tasks on AIX boxes. Making it nigh impossible to script common stuff that was easy on any other unixish OS.

[1]https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-smit/

I've always used smit (or smitty) to do an initial configuration, then hit F6 to get the actual commands that get executed, and script the rest from there.

When you're IBM, you want everything to look like AS/400.... or clunky Java Swing apps.

I know IBM is weird...but AS/400 or whatever they call it now is still just an amazing platform. it's one of those things that ends up doing things that are super critical. in some ways it doesn't have real competitors. OpenVMS? If there's a infinite amount of money Non-Stop?

AS/400 was a multi language VM environment long before Java. It really was/is amazing. I wish there was a way for newer generations to learn about things like this. I'm not sure how that would look. Maybe a History of Systems book or something?

There are many retro computing enthusiast groups around (depending where you live - none here around Dublin, it seems) but I'm yet to see one dedicated to midrange or mainframe systems.

It is a shame. Many challenges we find today happen to have been solved in the 60s. Then in the 70s, then in the 80s...

Exactly – everyone does know their retro consoles and home computers, I can't find anyone who would have some interest in the systems you mentioned. Bummers.

Worst - even platforms that are still in use, such as IBM zSeries and iSeries are very poorly represented in tutorial space.

I'd love me some IBM i hands on day.

Is there a Hercules for iSeries?

It's not exactly retro either. I have a friend that works at an absurdly large financial institution...all of their credit card transactions clear through iseries/os400/?they_call_it...

EDIT: One thing that I love is the fact that they distributed apps in intermediate form and then compiled at installation time. (Sounds familiar, right?)

Heck I work on a AS400/iSeries/IBM i or whatever they are called.

The terminal font used to be beautiful...

I imagine many UNIX folks that never touched Aix aren't aware that around 2000 time-frame, the .so model used in Aix was similar to the Windows one.

There were import libraries and symbols to be exported needed to be defined in export files.

Of course, eventually they converged into the standard UNIX model for shared objects.

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