IBM Corp’s AIX dominatrix Donna Van Fleet now carries pieces of paper with her to calm customers and prospects apparently perturbed over recent reports about the future of IBM Unix. Donna flourished the papers in front of us during the RS/6000 division’s AIX strategy briefing at EuroDisney last week, although we were not able to make out anything but a blur under a 1997 headline, and IBM is not saying what, if anything, there is written here. The company maintains it has an 18-month roadmap of technology deliverables scheduled until the middle of 1996 with place holders thereafter. It says it has 800 staff working on AIX, a business worth some $200m, though with symmetric multiprocessing functionality mostly cooked there will be further reductions in the development team, some of whom – those with experience from the scuttled AIX Workplace personality project – have already been moved to work on the PowerPC OS/400 microkernel. IBM is hurt that wanting to make the product profitable is being interpreted as disinvestment. Mid-year enhancements to AIX 4.1 will include eight-way scaling, further OS/2 and Windows integration, Internet access and more multimedia integration at the interface. AIX 4.2, due in a beta version by the end of the year will include support for 64-bit addressing, PowerPC 620 and some object technology. There are no details of what is beyond 4.2, though by the end of 1996 IBM says we should expect an object-based AIX borrowing heavily from Taligent with further scaling for additional processor support.
