I would love love love one of these machines to run Windows NT and some flavour or ancient Unix. I’m in Australia and desperately looking for an old PowerPC. Does anyone know where to dig these machines up? Yes I tried eBay but it is prohibitively expensive to post from overseas to Sydney.
PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#12If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system. Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2). Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a…
I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS/kernel devs, and something even Linux struggles with to this day on any non-trivial NUMA system. Meanwhile IBM has been offering extremely large NUMA SMP, gobs of I/O bandwidth, and tightly integrated virtualization since the turn of the millennium.
AIX uses a database called the ODM for kernel and userspace configuration. This can be thought of something like 'nvlist' in FreeBSD and Solaris (https://github.com/fudosecurity/nvlist) but it has a more extensive object type system that is used almost everywhere in the system. This is in turn used to pass complex typed data between the kernel, userspace commands (like say logical volume management), and even an advanced daemon manager not unlike SMF or upstart or even systemd.
None of the above probably sounds particularly ground breaking in 2020 with systemd-ified Linux, but keep in mind most of this was in place 30 years earlier in the early 1990s with AIX 3.0. This was a time when, for instance, hardware support in other UNIX and clones still might mean custom compiling a kernel or at least invoking a linker to produce a new binary kernel.
Novice AIX users see smit and think "yuck I have to use a TUI to configure the system" but it is easy to do everything from the shell or automation. smit is just a rather gentle tool inspired by other IBM projects such as OS/400 and ISPF for menu driven user interfaces. Keep in mind systems like SCO also sported TUIs like this as it was a fad at the time to make UNIX seem more familiar to PC and minicomputer users.
One thing that is super bizarre, the kernel is also fully pagable. I suppose that made sense in the early '90s for diskless workstations where RAM might also be limited but it seems like unnecessary extravagance and complexity these days.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#13This article brought back a memory of a fellow high school student who had somehow obtained a windows NT PowerPC CD that we tried and failed to boot from in a PowerMac 6100.
hahahaha. I did this on an IBM prep machine, a really straightforward install of NT 3.51. It even managed to run some x86 windows stuff - incredibly slowly (this was ~2005) And it ran the windows 2000 shell preview as well! - though I may have installed NT 4 by then. It ended up running Debian and being a mono test bench until it was retired to being an MP3 player for the home office. Alas it was accidentally recycle…
it was probably a model 850
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#14I would love love love one of these machines to run Windows NT and some flavour or ancient Unix. I’m in Australia and desperately looking for an old PowerPC. Does anyone know where to dig these machines up? Yes I tried eBay but it is prohibitively expensive to post from overseas to Sydney.
eBay sellers are often silly (I miss when it was an actual auction site instead of a shitty amalgamation of Amazon's 3rd party sellers and craigslist) although a lot of these vintage UNIX machines are now worth at least $100USD or more. Your best bet would be to find a private computer collector in AU or a mailing list like cctalk and express your interest.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#15Posts like this, projects like these, and people like Neozeed are part of why I think the GNU project fundamentally is brilliant. Getting GCC running on barely-produced prototype hardware system, on an ancient version of Solaris which itself was a particular pain to install, whilst entertaining and informing the reader about the history of the PowerPC migration circa 1994, is no mean feat. What were the desirable/sex…
The beauty of OpenFirmware is that it is extended with Forth, which is extremely compact (so could fit on small PROMs in the computer and fcode for addon cards). If you are designing a PCI card, you can write a bit of fcode that will run on SPARC and PowerPC for instance to expose opaque RAID volumes as bootable disks.
Keep in mind the PC BIOS was and is a complete tire fire, and uses something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_ROM to approximate support for the above. UEFI is a bit of improvement but massive and obtuse in comparison to OpenFirmware.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#16If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system. Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2). Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a…
I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…
I had the distinct misfortune to port an HPC & ethernet driver stack to AIX in the early 2000s. It was kinda BSD (mbufs), and kinda not (everything else), and just generally weird.
Having a test machine that took ~20 minutest to panic and reboot made the process extra fun.
It was one of the more annoying systems to develop drivers for that I've ever used. And I've done drivers for various BSDs, Linux, MacOS, ESX, Solaris, and even Tru64.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#17If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system. Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2). Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a…
In a past job one of my duties was AIX administration. My favorite part about AIX was smitty.
It gave you a menu for everything you need to do on the system, but it would also give the command that it run. That was if you forgot how to do something, just fire up smitty, and get the command for future reference. It was very handy when writing scripts.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#18If you get access to an IBM RS/6000, another thing to play around with on it is the original AIX operating system. Imagine a Unix that got an IBM working-over. When the RS/6000 workstations first came out, AIX was a big contrast to the more seat-of-pants workstation Unix of SunOS 4 (this was before Solaris 2). Some of the AIX changes weren't only enterprise-y server management OS abstractions, but fun: AIX included a…
I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…
Crazy; I didn't know the AIX kernel could be paged.
I'm wondering what kind of diskless workstations or thin clients IBM might've had in mind. Bottom-end engineering workstations would have at least a 100MB drive by the time the first RS/6000 models came out. But there were X terminals (usually diskless, sometimes with only 4MB RAM), and what I'll call "sub-workstations" that were compatible miniature engineering workstations (like the SPARCstation SLC at the time, which might've booted diskless, though hopefully you had 8MB RAM). Sun might've already been working on thin clients then (and had the slogan "the network is the computer"). IBM did have a few decades of experience inventing its own enterprise thin clients and terminals, so that theory seems plausible to me.
Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…
I had the distinct misfortune to port an HPC & ethernet driver stack to AIX in the early 2000s. It was kinda BSD (mbufs), and kinda not (everything else), and just generally weird. Having a test machine that took ~20 minutest to panic and reboot made the process extra fun. It was one of the more annoying systems to develop drivers for that I've ever used. And I've done drivers for various BSDs, Linux, MacOS, ESX, Sol…
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Re: PowerPC Solaris on the RS/6000
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am always surprised by the negativity that surrounds AIX by layperson UNIX users. AIX actually remains ultramodern when the full timeline is taken into account of remaining UNIX-like OSes like Linux, Solaris, and the BSDs. There's a reason it is one of the few remaining commercial UNIX, and that's because it is good and runs on the best hardware for vertical scaling. Scaling on large SMPs is not an easy task for OS…
Crazy; I didn't know the AIX kernel could be paged. I'm wondering what kind of diskless workstations or thin clients IBM might've had in mind. Bottom-end engineering workstations would have at least a 100MB drive by the time the first RS/6000 models came out. But there were X terminals (usually diskless, sometimes with only 4MB RAM), and what I'll call "sub-workstations" that were compatible miniature engineering wor…
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