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Perhaps you are remembering the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) GUI? https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/txseries/8.2?topic=SSAL2T_8.2.0/...
I used to get a kick out of how the lil 'running man' in SMIT would fall over if a command failed :-P More sense of humour then I gave IBM credit for :-D
To anyone wondering: https://youtu.be/YMWSD69BWqI?t=114
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC
People would telnet in to it from DOS machines on the campus network but it was great sitting in front of the machine with a huge 17" color monitor and multiple terminals.
My first experience with Unix was when I went to a new high school in 1991 and they had an IBM RT running AIX. This used the ROMP CPU before the POWER architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC People would telnet in to it from DOS machines on the campus network but it was great sitting in front of the machine with a huge 17" color monitor and multiple terminals.
I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source) emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation. Is the CPU architecture so complicated? Is it so undocumented? I would think that projects like MAME have in the past reverse-engineered and emulated much more complicated and undocumented systems (some of which were even encrypted). So why don't we have any Itanium emulators yet?
There is actually some work on adding ia64 emulation support to qemu, see:
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IBM sells (sold?) a thing called the HMC that manages multiple AIX machines, and their LPAR/WPARs. It was a web interface, maybe that is what you remember? It had a dedicated 1U server you had to buy too lol, what a grift
Yeah, that's what started turning me off modern systems. None of my earlier hardware required it, but my POWER6 did. You can do some things in ASMI but if you want to reconfigure an LPAR or (horrors) add one, then you're digging out the HMC. It was just an off the shelf IBM x86 system running Linux, so I should image it and see if I can make a VM out of it instead of lugging it out of storage now and then. The real g…
I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source) emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation. Is the CPU architecture so complicated? Is it so undocumented? I would think that projects like MAME have in the past reverse-engineered and emulated much more complicated and undocumented systems (some of which were even encrypted). So why don't we have any Itanium emulators yet?
> I still wonder why neither qemu nor any other (open-source) emulator ever tackled Itanium emulation. There is actually some work on adding ia64 emulation support to qemu, see: > https://github.com/XVilka/qemu-ia64
Ten rendered irrelevant by their own competitor, AMD releasing "AMD64" (x86_64) a few years later
Now fast forward 20~ years into the future and we're building emulators for Intel's dead 64-bit platform to run atop effectively AMD's 64-bit answer to it
>IBM who brought it’s [ sic ] AIX This is misleading at best. AIX didn't exist for IBM to purchase. IBM collaborated with Interactive Systems Corporation under contract to develop AIX in 1985 and released AIX Version 1 in 1986. IBM collaborated with Locus Computing Corporation, again under contract, to release Version 2 in 1992. Since the mid-1980's, IBM has poured massive development into AIX, which got so stable an…
Heh, yea I was sorely disappointed when I switched from primarily admining AIX to Linux for work. While I had played with Linux long before I got started with AIX, I had only ever used it on desktop workstations and such. Lots of things like ethernet channel bonding that worked fine out of the box on AIX took endless hours of fiddling to get it to sort of work under Linux.
When AIX went multiprocessor around v.3.[45], they used a single kernel lock. Version 4 was a near complete rewrite to get rid of the single lock. I missed that fun, as I was no longer working for IBM, but I was sysadmining some AIX boxen during the 3.5-4 era.
Version 3.5 had a bug. mmap()-ing a file plus some extra space and then writing to the unbacked space would extend the file on JFS (in fact, that was how write() worked in the FS), but on NFS it would corrupt a FS-level lock so that any process that touched that FS would deadlock. Including the automounter. Which was itself single-threaded. UTCS's system programming class meant daily reboots for a while. 8-) AIX v4 fixed the problem.
AIX, like most Unixes, would happily allocate memory until you ran out of address space, completely unrelated to how much memory you had, because sparse matrices. The X server used this facility, for one thing. A process could tell the system not to kill it by handling a particular signal, but most of the system software didn't handle the signal. Including inetd. Which was usually the first thing killed when you ran out of memory, so you couldn't log into the system remotely.
Ah, memories! ;-) When AIX went multiprocessor around v.3.[45], they used a single kernel lock. Version 4 was a near complete rewrite to get rid of the single lock. I missed that fun, as I was no longer working for IBM, but I was sysadmining some AIX boxen during the 3.5-4 era. Version 3.5 had a bug. mmap()-ing a file plus some extra space and then writing to the unbacked space would extend the file on JFS (in fact,…