History of IBM AIX
IBM AIX was created during the rise of UNIX systems.
In 1985, IBM introduced the IBM RT PC, its first RISC workstation.
The OS for this system was AIX 1.0, based on UNIX System V Release 2 with some 4.2BSD extensions.
This was a serious moment in the UNIX world.
In 1990, IBM launched the RS/6000 line of RISC workstations and servers, powered by the new POWER architecture.
To support it, IBM released AIX 3, which was a major redesign, built specifically for the POWER CPU.
AIX 3.x became popular in engineering, research, and large enterprise environments.
Around 1996, IBM, Apple, and Motorola collaborated on a hardware standard called CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform).
AIX 4 included portability to POWER and PowerPC systems, JFS (Journaled File System), enhanced networking, and scalability.
AIX grew significantly in telecom, banking, and government sectors during this time.
In 2001, IBM released AIX 5L, where “L” stood for Linux affinity.
Key milestones included improved Linux compatibility, support for LPARs (Logical Partitions) on Power4 hardware, introduction of PowerVM (then called Advanced POWER Virtualization) and integration with clustering (HACMP).
This is the era when AIX became a cornerstone of IBM’s enterprise server strategy.
AIX 6 was released alongside Power6 systems.
Major features included Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Live Partition Mobility (move running AIX systems between servers) and Workload partitions (WPARs) that were OS-level containers.
This placed AIX ahead of many other UNIX systems in virtualization technology.
AIX 7 introduced support for POWER7 through POWER10 hardware generations, enhanced scalability, stronger security and reliability features and JFS2 as the standard filesystem.
AIX 7.2, released in 2015 introduced OS live updates (apply kernel patches without rebooting).
AIX continues to be developed and supported, especially for industries requiring extremely high reliability.
Although Linux dominates the general server world, AIX retains a strong presence in industries where uptime and long-term stability are critical.
Enjoy #UNIX
User Comments
May I suggest to you a post about the rise and fall of Silicon Graphics?
Actually AIX is full developed bussines UNIX, with all needed tips and tricks for safe, reliable bussines developement and use ...
all what was so badly missing from other UNIX flavours and still is
Speaking of CDE, the latest of it came out only a couple of weeks ago.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/
When the likes of the "modern desktop environments" (like KDE Plasma) declare that the next version onwards will be a Wayland exclusive, the revival of software like this suddenly starts to make more sense.
I always disliked AIX (and I worked at IBM). I hate systems that you need to use native configuratin tools to edit configs. For example resolve.conf because if you edit it by hand the next reboot the config is overwritten by what is in some configuration database. So instead you use smitty - this and that.
You see that crap now also happening in MacOS and Linux's Network Manager, annoys the hell out of me! Just let me edit the config file, and keep your hands off, system!
I was happier working on Tru64/TruCluster and Irix but alas they no longer exist and AIX survived. It's like V2000, BetaMax and VHS the worst always survives, the best drowns.
Reminds me of what I think was called GEM on my Atari STE.
At work I operated/ran some IBM AIX servers, to me AIX Unix was ok but I liked Solaris Unix more.
CDE is so beautiful :-)
Great post. I remember my first job, back in 1998, when the OS of the machine I was using was IBM AIX (on a RISC workstation). The CDE desktop - in your 2nd picture - is still available now under certain (if not all) Linux distributions (you know that, of course, but perhaps not all the readers might know), allowing us to taste a little bit of UNIX world in its original look and feel. Great post, thank you! Your passion for Linux and UNIX is great, thank you for all your posts!
you mean the OSF/Motif look and feel, probably
Yes, Motif and the CDE (Common Desktop Environment). Thank you Holger B. A. Rauch for the remark. If I am not fundamentally wrong, I think Motif was a core component of the CDE desktop environment.
the non-OSF variant is lesstif - but I don't know whether CDE could be built against that...
AIX, Iris, Solaris. Three dragons. Unfortunately Sun and Silicon Graphics gone. O tempora!
Good post. Touched AIX frequently throughout my career. Its a robust, resilient OS.
I found AIX to be quite an awkwad UNIX with the way it fell between BSD and SVR2, But I was a SunOS and Solrais professional at the time so maybe it was just coming from that side that made it awkward!
I enjoyed managing my AIX systems. Rock solid and reliable.
Well, that was exciting. See you in the next one!