[rescue] Mainframe on eBay

[Patrick Finnegan]

Jonathan C. Patschke declared on Saturday 17 September 2005 12:02 am:
> On Sat, 17 Sep 2005, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> >> IBM's promotion of Linux on all of their hardware now helps to
> >> improve their cred, and makes their POWER stuff much more usable.
> >
> > I definitely prefer AIX over Linux.
>
> Seconded, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
>
> To me, AIX feels like a Mercedes and Linux feels like a Volkswagon.
> It's a sad pity IBM seems to be pushing Linux more than AIX and that
> they keep killing AIX with Java crap and Tivoli bloatware.  Never mind
> their recent position that "AIX is not a workstation operating
> system".
>
> AIX is the finest operating system I've EVER used on anything short of
> a real mainframe.  VMS comes really, really close, but I'm still
> something of a Unix bigot.

Whether or not you like AIX (I think it's ok, and I use it... but there's 
some reasons why I don't use it much, mostly having to do with its 
closed-sourceness[1], and the fact it doesn't run on non-IBM hardware) 
seems to depend on if you're expecting it to look like a UNIX or 
not.  /etc/security, smitty, src, and a host of other things are 
decidely non-UNIX-like.  I think it's a pretty good OS though for being 
what it is.

Personally, I prefer a combination of Linux and NetBSD for all the 
machines I want to use to get Real Work done on.  VMS is cool and fun 
and all, but hardly practical for most things I care about.  I haven't 
had the "joy" of using VM or OS/390 before, so I can't really comment on 
those.

[1] Why do I care about having the source to the OS?  Well, I've actually 
written a patch to fix a bug in Linux/SPARC64.  Small as it may have 
been, it really made me appreciate having the source code.

Pat
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