IBM

Hey I was just wondering if there were any people here on nekochan that were familiar with programing in AIX, and programing for IBM mainframes.

In 1986 I did some RPG-II on a System/34 ... I have played with the Hercules mainframe emulator (which I ported to IRIX in a previous thread)

I have done AIX device drivers (1997) and a fair amount of AIX work.
I once was in a team of 6 programmers who ported more than a Gb of source code from Tru64 to AIX at a Telco.
Early AIX was woeful. A real nightmare. Modern stuff is alright.

What version is the cutoff for "early"?

I dunno... maybe 3.x or 4.x ...?

I was doing device driver maintenance in 1997 on AIX, HP-UX, WindowsNT, Tru64, I completed the Solaris version... There was a group of about 20 application programmers whining about AIX probably before 4.x...Lack of POSIX compliance, system calls didn't work properly, non standard this, non standard that.. whinge bitch moan... They all did. Thinking back, remember this English guy complaining that some system call failed when called from his code, didn't return an error indication and didn't set errno and he had no way of determining if it succeeded or not...

I spent a few months on a single driver bug on AIX and it was my least favourite UNIX at the time.. There was some real weirdness in the driver code and working on the driver everything seemed primitive and painful to work with on AIX... The other UNIXes seemed so much easier at the time..

Recently, in the last few years I have been messing about with AIX 5.3-003 and like it on my 7025-F80.

AIX is about the only UNIX I think might have any kind of future.


These are only my recollections of the work I did in the past and the 2nd hand accounts of people I worked with....

I've got AIX 1.3, 4.3.2, 5.1 and 5.3 running here. I've coded for them all. I also used to code for 3.2. I even use 5.3 in my current job.

The closest I got to a mainframe was programming an AS/400 using ASNA-C and ILE-C.

i had the 'pleasure' of working with aix once. a few years back. the box had one of these 604e cpus and aix 4.3.x. hasn't been a pleasure at all
haven't touched ibm since then tho

i did a bus and tag controller. went all the way up to 4.5mb/sec. woohoo!

AIX v3 (and before, I suppose) was the "AIX is not quite UNIX (from either a user or programmer standpoint) and we really don't care, we're IBM" release. v4.3 (haven't used any v4 before 4.3) was better, and with v5 IBM started making a concerted effort to play well with everyone else.


AIX does have some technical features that were ahead of its time when introduced - JFS and the systemwide use of logical volumes, almost everything being done dynamically without rebuilding a kernel/rebooting, and the sysadmin hand-holding in AIX is about the best of the lot (smitty and msmit), only possibly matched by HP-UX's SAM (though to be fair AIX has it because it needs it - the admin setup is still (as of v5.1) drastically different from any other UNIX).

I was starting to think there wasn't anything you hadn't coded on.

Cobol ,right?

My dad used to do MVS ESA/390 assembler, so I read his books and learned a little about it. However, I've never used it in real life (I have goofed around with writing some stuff and running it in Hercules). It's quite the trip - a lot of macros where you'd expect system or function calls to live on other platforms.