Re: [TUHS] cat -v and other complaints

if you staid inside the reservation (so to speak) I think AIX made huge sense. I ran the BSD/RT stuff, it was very fine. The documentation was rigorous. If you stuck to the docs, you couldn't go wrong. But it was a frozen moment in time and as X10/X11 moved on, the RT port got older and older. the uni I worked at had a dying IBM mainframe. I think if we'd committed more to the IBM model and dived in, AIX would have worked well. But psych, compsci, engineering, arts/liberal-arts all went to Suns and the computer centre (where I was) had been DEC10/Vax as well as IBM) We were half-pregnant. Its a difficult state to be in. I don't really want to knock AIX, I think compared to the choices HPUX made, or Apollo Domain/OS made, the AIX choices were more self consistent. The unit I ran briefly in the research centre was rock solid and most of my complaints are 'principle of least surprise broken' coming from non-AIX world. I think if you were in it, it was fine. But really, thats the same thing about Solaris. I personally preferred SunOS but the company backed this other model, and if you were in it, the kickstart mechanism to do canned machine deployment, and disk config, and all that goodness, It was fine. I jumped ship well before Sun moved into the 'mainframe' world but I knew people who ran huge non-stop high transactional services on the E1000 series, and were very very happy. Tandem (to riff on that) had its niche. I love the story about sales engineers in the east coast pulling cards on the demo machine to show "look it works" live and the West coast maintenance people tearing their hair out at automatic supply-chain logistics shipping parts over to fix the borked node.. (this is an Aussie story) But I never had to handle the OS. SCO, I did have to work on. As long as you stayed inside the reservation.. No I can't go there. SCO was just awful.