[HN Gopher] IBM RISC System/6000 Family
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IBM RISC System/6000 Family
Author : rbanffy
Score : 22 points
Date : 2024-12-01 19:42 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (computeradsfromthepast.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (computeradsfromthepast.substack.com)
| sillywalk wrote:
| There are a ton more old computer ads/brochures here:
|
| https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/brochures.asp
| rbanffy wrote:
| I love these time capsules. They tell a lot about how we
| perceived computers back then.
| NaOH wrote:
| >If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out,
| because the site name will be displayed after the link.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Felger wrote:
| I believe the Oracle 8 SQL Server we used at school in the
| starting of the '2000 was running on a RS/6000 system on AIX.
|
| Nice system, had a good memory from it performance-wise. MySQL
| was not a serious competitor at that time.
|
| The machine had often overheating issues starting from the
| beginning of june when ambiant temp rose above 24/25deg. We did
| not have CVAC in the building.
| semessier wrote:
| amazing pieces of machinery the IBM RS/6000
| guerrilla wrote:
| Those things were always so expensive, even used for years after,
| and now hard to even find. I remember wanting one back in the day
| when I was running Gentoo on my old 500Mhz PowerBook G3. So loud
| though...
|
| Today we have Raptor Computing's stuff instead.
|
| https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html
| rwmj wrote:
| clabretro did an interesting video on the hardware of a 1997
| PowerPC RS/6000 machine:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8IFtnD5oOM
| st_goliath wrote:
| There is also a 1h video from NCommander, where he ports Doom
| to AIX on an RS/6000:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzhCGSE7KKw
|
| At the time also posted on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31485616
|
| It provides a few details on the software stack, particularly
| also the set of compat-APIs for porting Linux applications.
| ataylor284_ wrote:
| Did some development for a server application that supported
| RS/6000 among other platforms. AIX on RS/6000 was a nice enough
| Unix but, being used to Solaris, everything seems just slightly
| off. I think it performed slightly worse for the same price as
| Sparc hardware for our purposes, but some customers wanted an all
| IBM solution (we also supported an OS/2 client).
|
| The main thing that stands out was a tool (smitty?) that could do
| system configuration and IIRC it could show you the steps to do
| it manually as well.
| neverartful wrote:
| Yes, the sysadmin tool was awesome. There were 2 versions: one
| graphical (smit) and the other text/console based (smitty).
| Both versions had the same capabilities.
| pjmlp wrote:
| One of the big differences is that it is also COFF based like
| Windows, and Aix shared objects have similar capabilities, with
| private by default, import files, and having the capability to
| let the compiler handle delay loading of specific symbols.
|
| I used Aix 5 series quite a bit, and looking at docs it seems
| to still have the same capabilities.
| netbsdusers wrote:
| They have even cooler capabilities - A single XCOFF library
| can act as both shared and static libraries
| sillywalk wrote:
| I think the other thing is the Object Data Manager (ODM)-
| configuration data about devices, networking configuration,
| etc. is stored as objects, as opposed (or in addition to?) to
| text files.
|
| I also believe the AIX software package manager uses ODM.
| neverartful wrote:
| One of the interesting things about these systems is that the
| early versions (like shown in the ads), didn't have a single CPU
| chip package. The CPU was on a card and was comprised of various
| chips and circuitry that you could see (not all hidden on the
| inside of a single CPU package). It was not until the P2SC
| (Power2 Super Chip) that everything made its way onto a neat and
| compact CPU form factor that we typically think of. This P2SC was
| first made available IIRC on the 7013 Model 595.
| gregw2 wrote:
| The finest contribution of AIX to Unix, copied (with varying
| attempts at improvements) by its 90s competitors and eventually
| into Linux, was its jounal filesystem.
|
| The order of magnitude improvements to fsck on bootup and overall
| filesytem reliability were non trivial.
|
| SMIT was abit too non-unixy to catch on but I've always wondered
| in the back of my mind whether it influenced systemd...
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