From: jrh@jrh.uucp (James R. Hamilton)
Subject: Re: >PS/2 AIX article - horror story
Keywords: IBM AIX DRIVER PS/2 RS/6000
Organization: private system, Toronto, Ontario
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 00:09:04 GMT

In article <1992Oct12.134614.4940@awdprime.austin.ibm.com> pcb@gunfight.austin.ibm.com (Peter C. Bahrs) writes:
>In article <1992Oct09.203641.23259@NeoSoft.com> wcs@NeoSoft.com (Bill Simpson) writes:
>> <aknowles@expert.expert.com (Anne Knowles)> writes:
>>>I write for RS/Magazine, a magazine for RS/6000 users, and I am doing a story
>>>on PS/2 AIX. I would like to talk to any PS/2 AIX users out there about
>>>why they are using the operating system and, for users of both PS/2 AIX and
>>>AIX/6000, about the differences between the two. Please email me if
>>>you have any thoughts, comments, etc. Thanks in advance for any help.
>>
>>I have a real horror story to tell! 
>>
>
>hmmm....I don't see anything of horrow wrt. AIX PS/2 in this story.
>It seems to me like you got the driver working on the PS/2 without 
>much problem.  AIX 1.3 and 3.2 are not the same animals and the numbers
>do not signify any temporal relationship.  We have recognized the problem 
>about having two unix's and intend to fix it.  Your ibm rep should know this.
>

    Anne, to be honest, I work for IBM (on a database project rather
    than an operating system development team ) so I may be a bit biased 
    but I hope that you are not going to criticize AIX PS/2 for not being 
    RS/6k AIX.  As Peter Bahrs said, they are different products and 
    related only in name and that they are both UNIX variants. Each should 
    be judged independently using the same criteria used to evaluate HP/UX, 
    Ultrix, or Solaris.  The question should be: are they good UNIX variants?

    I run AIX 1.3 on a PS/2 at home (I have for years) and I run AIX 3.2.2 
    on an RS/6k at work.  In the past I've criticized PS/2 AIX 1.2.x for 
    not being sufficiently reliable and, for a period, it didn't get the 
    development attention that the RS/6k variant of AIX got.  However, with 
    the recently announced AIX 1.3, this has clearly changed.  For example, 
    they have recently moved from X11R3 (AIX 1.2.1) to X11R5 (AIX 1.3).  There
    is considerable development activity on PS/2 AIX (as there always has 
    been on RS/6k AIX).

    Over the years I've run many different variants of UNIX and I've spent
    considerable time porting software and making things work on different
    boxes.  On good systems, both SystemV and BSD interfaces are supported 
    and porting is not too painful.  Systems management is typically a mess; 
    different UNIXs, more often that not, offer unique and what can often 
    seem to be gratuitously different system management functions.  AIX 1.3 
    and AIX 3.2 have very compatible programming interfaces and its easy to 
    port software back and forth between them (I do it all the time) but, 
    like many UNIXs, the systems management support is quite different on 
    the two systems.  That's something the UNIX community as a whole needs
    to solve.  DME?

                         --jrh

-- 

James R. Hamilton                                   inet: jrh@jrh.gts.org
telephone: +1 416 493 4162                          uunet: ...!uunet!jrh!jrh
Toronto, Canada                                     bitnet: jrh%jrh@uunet.uu.net