IBM Corp’s Personal Software Products division has apparently picked up the pieces of the wrecked AIX personality for Workplace initiative, but our sister papers Unigram.X and PowerPC News spent much of Friday trying to pin down exactly what the the new strategy involves without ending up with anything coherent. The whole strategy seems to be doomed to commercial failure even if it can be made to work technically. IBM says it does intend to develop a Unix personality for Workplace for PowerPC and iAPX-86 systems by providing independent software vendors with whatever AIX and other Unix application programming interfaces it can muster to help them get their applications across to the desktop machines. The PowerPC chips are bi-endian, and the operating system sets the working mode – RS/6000s under AIX are big-endian (bits are ordered most significant first), Power Personals under OS/2 for PowerPC are little-endian (least significant bit first). Miles Barel, worldwide brand manager for OS/2 said it became clear early on in the original project to get an AIX personality up and running on the little-endian microkernel alongside OS/2, that customers would not stand for the kind of performance hits applications would take in the mode-switching proc ess. But independent software vendors and Personal Software folk are apparently still keen to get as many AIX applications up on the Workplace desktop microkernel as they can, and after going back to the drawing board IBM decided to begin moving a selection of AIX application programming interfaces, plus bi-endian Spec 1170 and Motif work, on to the Workplace microkernel piece by piece. The company is studiously vague about whether this is really a Unix personality for Workplace or a Unix mood for the OS/2 personality, but Barel eventually insisted that the Unix features would be built directly onto the microkernel rather than being laid over OS/2 – but could not finally say whether OS/2 would be required to run the Unix mood – or should that be personality? – or not. At any rate, the idea is to create the widest set of Unix application programming interfaces as possible for independent software vendors to work towards. IBM’s target is to make conversion of AIX applications to Workplace feasible with just a couple of days’ work. The Unix personality or mood will not be binary or source code compatible with AIX. But it looks like a new Unix product. However, being guided by what is undoubtedly the unseen hand of its besieged RS/6000 team, IBM is stamping hard on that notion. Barel could not say which group even owns the project, because, he claimed, of the ongoing effect of the IBM reorganisation, but it is not an independent OS/2 team effort. There is no time-scale, no name for it, and no indication of how far the work has progressed. The only thing for sure, said Barel, is that the technology will not make it into the first OS/2 Workplace personality release.
