On Feb 28, 2017, at 10:15 PM, Gregg Levine
<gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello!
We (well most of us) all of us know about AIX. Well what about AIX/370?
——
AIX/370 was a real product. One of the ones that I don’t ever think saw the light of
day was the i860 AIX port. IBM made two i860 add-in cards for the PS/2. The single
processor version was called the Wizard and there was a 4 processor version with an
integral frame buffer called the W4. We ported AIX to both. The i860 version
actually had more in common with the 370 version than it did with the 386. All of
these AIX versions came from the same source code and used the IBM TCF to allow you to
transparently run executables across nodes in the cluster. The only AIX that didn’t
play was the completely independent (and in my opinion somewhat brain damaged) IBM/RT
UNIX. If there was a TCF-based RT kernel, I never saw it, even inside the IBM labs.
Speaking of odd job control mechanisms. The 386 side had a device that multiplexed the
PS/2 console into multiple streams called the “High Function Terminal.” When we wrote
the virtual console for the Wizard/W4 add in card, we called it the “Low Function
Terminal."