page_title: IBM AIX
section_title: POWER ISA/PowerPC/Power ISA-based systems
hierarchical_section_title: IBM AIX / Supported hardware platforms / POWER ISA/PowerPC/Power ISA-based systems
caption_attribution_description: English: Some IBM RS/6000 AIX servers which were powering ibm.com in January 1998 (detail).
context_page_description: AIX is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms. Originally released for the IBM RT PC RISC workstation, AIX now supports or has supported a wide variety of hardware platforms, including the IBM RS/6000 series and later POWER and PowerPC-based systems, IBM System i, System/370 mainframes, PS/2 personal computers, and the Apple Network Server.
  AIX is based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions. It is one of five commercial operating systems that have versions certified to The Open Group's UNIX 03 standard.
  The AIX family of operating systems debuted in 1986, became the standard operating system for the RS/6000 series on its launch in 1990, and is still actively developed by IBM. It is currently supported on IBM Power Systems alongside IBM i and Linux.
  AIX was the first operating system to have a journaling file system, and IBM has continuously enhanced the software with features such as processor, disk and network virtualization, dynamic hardware resource allocation, and reliability engineering ported from its mainframe designs.
context_section_description: The release of AIX version 3 (sometimes called AIX/6000) coincided with the announcement of the first POWER1-based IBM RS/6000 models in 1990.
  AIX v3 innovated in several ways on the software side. It was the first operating system to introduce the idea of a journaling file system, JFS, which allowed for fast boot times by avoiding the need to ensure the consistency of the file systems on disks (see fsck) on every reboot. Another innovation was shared libraries which avoid the need for static linking from an application to the libraries it used. The resulting smaller binaries used less of the hardware RAM to run, and used less disk space to install. Besides improving performance, it was a boon to developers: executable binaries could be in the tens of kilobytes instead of a megabyte for an executable statically linked to the C library. AIX v3 also scrapped the microkernel of AIX v2, a contentious move that resulted in v3 containing no PL/I code and being somewhat more "pure" than v2.
  Other notable subsystems included:
  IRIS GL, a 3D rendering library, the progenitor of OpenGL. IRIS GL was licensed by IBM from SGI in 1987, then still a fairly small company, which had sold only a few thousand machines at the time. SGI also provided the low-end graphics card for the RS/6000, capable of drawing 20,000 gouraud-shaded triangles per second. The high-end graphics card was designed by IBM, a follow-on to the mainframe-based IBM 5080, capable of rendering 990,000 vectors per second.
  PHIGS, another 3D rendering API, popular in automotive CAD/CAM circles, and at the core of CATIA.
  Full implementation of version 11 of the X Window System, together with Motif as the recommended widget collection and window manager.
  Network file systems: NFS from Sun; AFS, the Andrew File System; and DFS, the Distributed File System.
  NCS, the Network Computing System, licensed from Apollo Computer (later acquired by HP).
  DPS on-screen display system. This was notable as a "plan B" in case the X11+Motif combination failed in the marketplace. However, it was highly proprietary, supported only by Sun, NeXT, and IBM. This cemented its failure in the marketplace in the face of the open systems challenge of X11+Motif and its lack of 3D capability.
  As of 2015, AIX runs on IBM Power, System p, System i, System p5, System i5, eServer p5, eServer pSeries and eServer i5 server product lines, as well as IBM BladeCenter blades and IBM PureFlex compute nodes.
caption: AIX RS/6000 servers running ibm.com in early 1998
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