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Comment by ataylor284_ | Hacker News Reader

Did some development for a server application that supported RS/6000 among other platforms. AIX on RS/6000 was a nice enough Unix but, being used to Solaris, everything seems just slightly off. I think it performed slightly worse for the same price as Sparc hardware for our purposes, but some customers wanted an all IBM solution (we also supported an OS/2 client).

The main thing that stands out was a tool (smitty?) that could do system configuration and IIRC it could show you the steps to do it manually as well.

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Don't forget the other cool feature of smit: the running man.

When you started an operation, there was animated icon of a man running. If your command succeeded, he'd stop and cheer. If you got an error, he'd trip and fall on his face.

Also, another advantage of AIX was that it included a volume manager and it was enabled by default. Back in the early 1990s, this was fairly unique. Some other operating systems offered, but only as an expensive add-on, so in practice you did without it. Being able to add a disk and just tell the system to move a filesystem over to it was pretty amazing.

Where I worked we got an early system as we made graphical desktops for workstations. IBM required that we have a separate locked room for the system!

Despite having over 20 different brands/Unix systems, AIX was the only one we had to pay a 3rd party consultant to come in and do installations and upgrades. That was back in the days of tapes. It used some convoluted volume management system where the tape contents got spooled into the disk and then the installation absorbed that.

smitty always felt so slow. There was a release where it was sped up. They didn't actually make it do the work any quicker - they just doubled the animation speed of the running man that was shown.

One of the big differences is that it is also COFF based like Windows, and Aix shared objects have similar capabilities, with private by default, import files, and having the capability to let the compiler handle delay loading of specific symbols.

I used Aix 5 series quite a bit, and looking at docs it seems to still have the same capabilities.

They have even cooler capabilities - A single XCOFF library can act as both shared and static libraries

Yes, the sysadmin tool was awesome. There were 2 versions: one graphical (smit) and the other text/console based (smitty). Both versions had the same capabilities.

I think the other thing is the Object Data Manager (ODM)- configuration data about devices, networking configuration, etc. is stored as objects, as opposed (or in addition to?) to text files.

I also believe the AIX software package manager uses ODM.

`smit`, IIRC. Most workstation platforms, you mainly just had to know whether they were based on BSD or System V (or Apollo Domain, or the VMS of the VAXstations), but AIX had this interactive UI thing that was different.

Three other things nice about the RS/6000 and AIX:

* When it first came out, it was noticeably faster than the SPARCstations at the time.

* The hypertext documentation browser was nice. (This was slightly before the Web.)

* IBM would send two field technicians, in suits. (Which was funny, when they were meeting with frumpy nerdy teenager me.)

(We developed workstation software engineering tools for mil/aerospace/datacomm, which seemed to be wanted on everything except SGI. So, every time there was a new architecture, or a major OS change like SunOS 4 to Solaris 2, we'd get it immediately for porting.)

HPUX had a similar thing, called SAM.

Eh, smitty could be irritating because it persisted some changes but not others. So it was unclear if things you did outside it would get undone at boot time.

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