[TUHS] Porting AIX / Was Amdahl UTS use by 386 designers

Years ago I worked on a project to port AIX to a couple of I860 microchannel add in cards. The first was the Intel “Wizard” card and the second was a four processor card with integral framebuffer coded the W4. We were running the AIX for the PS/2 on the host machine. AIX had a feature lifted from UCLA they called the Transparent Computing Facility. This allowed each executable to exist in the filesystem for multiple processor types. If you attempted to run an executable you didn’t have for your local machine, it would remote execute one of the ones you did have. This came in handy for the porting process. Amusingly, the i860 kernel I wrote bore more resemblance to the AIX/370 code than it did to the PS/2 (x86) code. We did have some laughs at IBM’s expense. The PS/2’s had this feature called the “High Function Terminal” that allowed you to switch the console between different virtual environments. We didn’t really have a console on the W4 so we referred to its virtual console as the “Low Function Terminal.”