With the frightening speed of events nowadays in the Unix industry, all that we can hope to offer subscribers is a snapshot of the industry that was correct at the time of publishing – but snapshots fade like old film, and so we now have to report the IBM’s promised Rios workstation, which was to have made its debut at the UniForum trade show in Washington next month, has again been delayed, and is now unlikely to see the official light of day until towards the end of February probably! The alleged delays on IBM’s successor to the RT Unix workstation are commonly attributed to a number of factors, including continuing and fairly serious bugs in the AIX operating system and compiler that have caused difficulties for software developers, and also to the inevitable internal arguments over pricing and distribution. But one of the reasons may simply be that pulling a system like Rios together is very hard. Observers are expecting its AIX 3 operating system to have impressive capabilities such as mirrored disk partitioning not found in AT&T’s Unix System V.4. However, industry watchers such as UBS Securities vice-president Marc Schulman are dubious that IBM will add the multi-processing expected in some quarters much before 1991, because of the self-impact such power could have on IBM’s bigger boxes. In that regard, some feel that IBM could be postponing Rios to buy more time for assessing the immediate impact it will have on machines like the AS/400. Another reason for the delay is thought to be a lack of applications software. Unusually, IBM appears to be paying out large sums of money to software developers in a move to encourage them to put applications up under AIX Unix, and not only for the new Rios box: Alsys Inc, for instance, has reportedly been funded by IBM to the tune of $1m to develop an Ada release for AIX/370, without IBM receiving any sales rights to the resulting product.
