Installing AIX PS/2 v1.3 on a 486 | Hacker News Reader

Installing AIX PS/2 v1.3 on a 486

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24 pointsEvanAnderson14 comments

A gotek drive would be perfect for this. I got a clone on Aliexpress and loaded flashfloppy on it. You can then drop the 94 floppies on a usb and change them using the buttons on the device.

Swapping the disks is part of the fun!

For some of us it brings back bad memories of sitting watching progress bars for hours and occasionally getting asked to feed another disk into the drive. Office was probably the worst for the number of floppies, but linux was even more, and you had the extra worry of if it would actually boot after the install, or if you got a setting wrong and had to start again.

Soon after all that we got to use CD's, which made life a lot better.

> bad memories of sitting watching progress bars for hours

Bad? Nah. I would use the words "exciting or "annoying" as it was annoying to wait but exciting as you were edging closer to playing with new software.

HOWEVER: if the act of installing software over and over again all day long was your job, then you have my condolences :-)

The shop I worked for, back in the day, got some of the technicians parallel ZIP drives. It was a godsend to copy the Windows 95 CAB files to the hard disk drive from the ZIP drive and run the upgrade from there, versus feeding the machine floppies.

If you were really luck you were working in a site w/ Novell Netware and you could just copy the CAB files down from the Netware server. >smile<

Probably spending 5 hours swapping diskettes and then finding out disk #48 was bad is like the worst feeling ever

I've installed Windows 98 via DMF images using a FlashFloppy flashed Gotek on an Amiga 3000 running PC-Task, in part just to see if I could. The Gotek made it worlds easier than if I had been using real floppy disks, I'm sure.

GreaseWeazle (by same author as FlashFloppy) would have made real floppies easy as well.

Neat project! Will be cool to see once it's up and running

Lately I installed NT 4.0 on my i486DX4-100 system. With 64MB of RAM and a CF card it runs very well, it actually feels quite modern and NT 4.0 is slowly growing on me. I've experimented with service packs and found SP4 was the right balance of supporting later software without slowing it down much.

Just installed Visual Basic 5 and Python 2.3 and it's approaching 24 hours of uptime. The system clock is synced to my router as well!

For me the frustrations with NT 4.0 are all the reboots associated with changing settings, and the lack of plug 'n play (for USB devices). Those things aside it runs well.

Windows 2000 gets you a lot of quality-of-life improvements w/ a tremendous amount of bloat.

re: uptime - I've seen NT 4.0 machines w/ multi-year uptimes. I actually saw one running Microsoft Exchange w/ a >2 year uptime. I was shocked.

I worked in AIX PS/2 development when it was in Danbury, CT. I think ver 1.3 came out after I left the group but I thought AIX PS/2 only ran on micro channel machines though maybe that changed by ver 1.3. edit: just read the wikipedia page and indeed ver 1.3 did later introduce support for non PS/2 hardware though it wasn't in the initial 1.3 release.

That's awesome! Any particular or interesting memories from your AIX development days you remember?

I've never worked with Microchannel in person (yet), but it's a pretty cool technology. Kind of like a pre-PCI interface.

The C compiler was written in Pascal - I thought that was funny. The DOS compatibility window in AIX PS/2 1.1 ran in 386 mode whereas Microsoft Windows only required a 286, so you actually had better DOS compatibility in AIX than Windows back then. When I first got hired I had to fly with a PS/2 Mod 80 between JFK to SFO multiple times, and the machine case was so metal we didn't even pack it in anything, just checked it as is as baggage, got through without a scratch on it. Years later when IBM was offering surplus computers for super cheap and a friend asked me if it was ok to buy a PS/2 Mod 80 I told him it was ok on one condition, that at the same time he bought a tube of Krazy Glue and glued the cover on permanently so that he'd never be tempted to buy upgrades for it and if it ever broke he'd throw it out and not try to buy spare parts.

AIX is a different beast. I played with it on a couple of RT/PCs. It was IBMs foray into the workstation market, that became the RS/6000. It had an educational alternative based on BSD. Trying to get it to work on a 486? It only worked on PS2/386s, and I do not remember if efforts to add accelerator boards worked, but unless you are a ATT SYS V god at debugging hardware drivers in the kernel... "It was based on UNIX System V Releases 1 and 2, incorporating source code from 4.2 and 4.3 BSD UNIX."

https://technologists.com/sauer/Advanced%20Interactive%20Exe...

Mee Too!

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