[TUHS] cat -v and other complaints

[George Michaelson]

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.