[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:57 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, the AIX code looks nothing like SYS V. It's been 20+ years since I
> did a lot of work in AIX, and most of my work was in networking, external
> pagers, and NFS, and even there you could see it was different (although
> much of the NFS was clearly the Sun reference code, one giveaway being the
> Sun copyrights in it :-) I always thought it was an interesting code base
> -- they seemed to get preemptability right from the start, for example. As
> it was explained to me, IBM did a full implementation from manuals of both
> the kernel and the commands.
>
> There were lots of little weirdnesses in the commands. mkdir -p, for
> example, would give you an error if the directory existed -- they got the
> creation of the tree right, but the error wrong. There were tons of these
> little gotchas in the commands and it's one thing that made NTP and Condor,
> for just two examples, a real chore on AIX.
>
> I visited the now-closed IBM Palo Alto center in 1991, and they told me an
> interesting AIX story. Seems to that point, on the mainframes, AIX had run
> under VM. The native port was either starting or soon to start, and there
> was some question about channel programming -- mainly, if the people who
> really knew how it worked were still at IBM, or even still alive. I guess
> they worked it out, however ;-)
>

I once heard that some version of AIX was actually implemented in PL/I. I
strongly doubted that, and no one's mentioned it so I assume that's
apocryphal? It would be so distinctive that I can't imagine someone NOT
mentioning it if it were the case.

        - Dan C.
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