Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!kolding
From: kolding@june.cs.washington.edu (Eric Koldinger)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: IBM & AIX (was OS/2 obituary?)
Message-ID: <8627@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 30 Jun 89 22:42:44 GMT
References: <14774@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <600@pegasus.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: kolding@uw-june.cs.washington.edu (Eric Koldinger)
Organization: University of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 23

In article <600@pegasus.ATT.COM> psrc@pegasus.ATT.COM (Paul S. R. Chisholm) writes:
>In article <14774@watdragon.waterloo.edu>, afscian@violet.waterloo.edu (Anthony Scian) writes:
>Um, sort of.  Yes, you can buy a version of AIX for any IBM hardware
>platform, except for (oddly enough) the AS/400.  (Maybe they decided
>the UNIX(R) operating system doesn't run on minis?-)

Well, making Unix run on the AS/400 might be a bit of a chore.  The AS/400,
like the S/38 before it, is an object-oriented machine, with ideas such as
objects, users, security, the file system, data base management, and memory
management all built into "micro-code".  To make a Unix type system work,
you would probably have to completely replace this level of "micro-code"
(it's actually more like low level OS stuff, but the machine won't run
well without it) with something that would generate a machine that Unix
would like (no hardware file system, no hardware checking of pointers, no
built-in security objects, and so on......)  Basically, it would probably be
more effort than it would be worth.  The market that they're aiming it at
really doesn't care what OS it runs, just what applications it runs.

-- 
	_   /|				Eric Koldinger
	\`o_O'				University of Washington
  	  ( )     "Gag Ack Barf"	Department of Computer Science
       	   U				kolding@cs.washington.edu