On Halloween at last week’s Unix Expo show in New York, IBM’s Donna Van Fleet, Director of AIX Systems out in Austin, Texas, treated our sister paper Unigram.X – without a trick – to a vision of the company’s plans for its AIX operating system environment. Despite the declaration of Frank Kales, the director of AIX and Personal Systems for IBM Europe, in London last week that AIX will always exist, and his inability to say whether IBM’s AIX version of OSF/1 will be compatible at a binary level with any other vendor’s OSF/1 implementation (CI No 1,544), Ms Fleet confirmed that all of the company’s AIX systems will converge around the OSF/1 operating system over time. The AIX kernel will gradually be replaced by the OSF/1 kernel, although the operating system itself will continue to be called AIX, and surrounding software subsystems will remain intact. The initial implementation – involving 1m lines of code and euphemistically described as a non-trivial job – is now being undertaken for AIX 390, and the work will be used as the basis for the other environments – but the time IBM has taken not to bring out a native implementation of Unix for 370 – there still isn’t one unless you go to Amdahl Corp, suggests that it will be a long wait for AIX/390. A PS/2 version of OSF/1 is however being demonstrated now, and an RS/6000 edition will follow, when it makes sense. That, of course, will be when the RS/6000 line is extended to include multi-processors, which the OSF/1 kernel supports – the reason why work on the 390 version has now taken precedence. Of course IBM may soon experience conflict between the 390s and the RS/6000s, but meantime maintains that the 390’s input-output capabilities are a major advance over the RS/6000, even as the gap in compute performance narrows fast.
