In order to quash gossip that it was scaling back development of its AIX Unix (CI No 2,196), IBM Corp has presented a road map of its future plans for the operating system, US PC Week reports but the paper says that the company plans to phase out AIX-PS/2 – not very controversial, and also the AIX/ESA mainframe version – which would seem to leave the mainframe Unix field clear for Amdahl Corp. The company says it will offer five new variants of AIX over the next two years, each aimed at a different market segment. First up, AIX Classic will be a repackaged version of AIX/6000. For PowerPC users and low-end RS/6000 workstation users, AIX Lite will provide a simplified alternative until Taligent Inc’s Taligent operating system is ready. There will also be an AIX Run-Time, to run on PowerPC chips for embedded applications, and on PowerPC-based systems, and AIX Cluster, which will drive clusters of five or more RS/6000 systems, and a symmetric multiprocessing version of AIX. AIX Classic is set for next month, AIX Lite is expected to follow in October, and to be based on the PowerPC application binary interface; it is geared to run on the forthcoming PowerPC laptops that Tadpole Technology Pld is developing for IBM here in the UK: they are due to ship next year, and the target is that the software should run on a 4Mb system with 80Mb disk. AIX Run-Time will be based on an even smaller subset of AIX Lite, using the Mach microkernel, and will include more and more of OSF/1 over time. Users with PS/2s will be encouraged to migrate to IBM’s planned WorkPlace OS for OS/2, running AIX as a personality. The fate of AIX/ESA, which must have cost a fair bit to develop, was not discussed.
