[rescue] AIX on PS/2 (was: What to do with an orphan DEC Professional 350?)

[BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak]

> > I only run AIX on my PS/2 crates.....slooooooooooooow.
> 
> Oh, yeah?  How much of a PS/2 does it take, and what sort of AIX can you run
> on it?  Hmmm.  Lemme rephrase that.  I know AIX will take the whole PS/2,
> and AIX is not sorted....
> 
> What model PS/2 is required to run AIX, and what versions of AIX will run on
> PS/2s?
> 
> -Shel

Shel.... I been running AIX on IBM PS/2 Model 80's as servers since 1989,
when we got the first available copy hot off the press from IBM, after
waiting 6 months, and having the tech rep hand carry it.

There are 3 versions of AIX for the PS/2 line, mostly the MCA boxes.

1.  AIX 1.1   (first version, no manpages, spartan.  It supports ONLY
               an unobtainium Ungermann-Bass ethernet card, although
               you can get the AIX 1.2.1 3com drivers to work with some
               thumb-twiddles.)

2.  AIX 1.2.1 (second version, much improved, has manpages and a lot of
               extra goodies, rock solid, stable, unbreakable.  This was
               the version I preferred, and still use on the home box.
               This one seems to have the best compiler.)

3.  AIX 1.3   (third version, somewhat more improved, has some support for
               non MCA boxes, fair-to-maybe-good compiler, not the version
               I prefer, although it seems to work in my hands, relatively
               well. The compiler has a few problems.)


In my hands, 1.2.1, set up for 3com ethernet cards, is by far the best.

I use mostly Model 70/80 machines, but it works on 95's and maybe some
later non-mca machines.  Anything mca with a 386 or better will work.

Minimum ram requirement is 2mb!!!!!  Minimum HD is 100mb, although I
feel cramped without a pair of 1 gig scsi drives and 14-16mb of ram.
It runs fine in 300mb or so and 4mb for most things, although 8mb is
recommended for X (X11R2 if memory is correct....I rarely ran X).

It installs from floppy, although I once had a tape version in my hands,
but it never worked right (IBM's mini 2000 series tape drives were horrid
things and I always use the 1/4 inch streamers of the 6157 variety).
Supposedly there were 1/4 inch streamer loads around, but I never ran
across one, and neither did the tech that used to be our rep.  Nowadays,
when I last called IBM about AIX 1.... about Jan 2000, I only drew dumb
duhs from them.  Oh, well.....it seems to have been totally forgotten.

All in all, it is not a half bad little system, SysV, with more than
a few IBMisms thrown in for good measure.  Our server in the department
had 150 users, averaging maybe 10, and never seemed to burp except for
one time that an esdi drive died after 5 years of service.  The thing
was Y2K ready, except for the troff macros (easily fixed), with a strange
but working date.  I have never seen any major bugs evidenced in them,
aside from some compiler burps in the 1.3 suite.  But, at 16/20/25mhz
on 386 boxes, they can be slow.  On faster 486 boxes with scsi, they
are much better.  I retired the departmental box in 2000 after the
rollover, bought it surplus for 5 bucks, and it still trucks along
on the home net.....(:+}}....

Bob