Installing AIX PS/2 v1.3 on a 486(hardwarehacks.org)
24 pointsby EvanAndersona day ago5 comments
  • ForOldHack4 hours ago
    AIX is a different beast. I played with it on a couple of RT/PCs. It was IBMs foray into the workstation market, that became the RS/6000. It had an educational alternative based on BSD. Trying to get it to work on a 486? It only worked on PS2/386s, and I do not remember if efforts to add accelerator boards worked, but unless you are a ATT SYS V god at debugging hardware drivers in the kernel... "It was based on UNIX System V Releases 1 and 2, incorporating source code from 4.2 and 4.3 BSD UNIX."

    https://technologists.com/sauer/Advanced%20Interactive%20Exe...

    Mee Too!

  • jamesy0unga day ago
    A gotek drive would be perfect for this. I got a clone on Aliexpress and loaded flashfloppy on it. You can then drop the 94 floppies on a usb and change them using the buttons on the device.
    • johnklosa day ago
      I've installed Windows 98 via DMF images using a FlashFloppy flashed Gotek on an Amiga 3000 running PC-Task, in part just to see if I could. The Gotek made it worlds easier than if I had been using real floppy disks, I'm sure.
      • snvzz20 hours ago
        GreaseWeazle (by same author as FlashFloppy) would have made real floppies easy as well.
    • Aldipowera day ago
      Swapping the disks is part of the fun!
      • jdswaina day ago
        For some of us it brings back bad memories of sitting watching progress bars for hours and occasionally getting asked to feed another disk into the drive. Office was probably the worst for the number of floppies, but linux was even more, and you had the extra worry of if it would actually boot after the install, or if you got a setting wrong and had to start again.

        Soon after all that we got to use CD's, which made life a lot better.

        • MisterTeaa day ago
          > bad memories of sitting watching progress bars for hours

          Bad? Nah. I would use the words "exciting or "annoying" as it was annoying to wait but exciting as you were edging closer to playing with new software.

          HOWEVER: if the act of installing software over and over again all day long was your job, then you have my condolences :-)

        • EvanAndersona day ago
          The shop I worked for, back in the day, got some of the technicians parallel ZIP drives. It was a godsend to copy the Windows 95 CAB files to the hard disk drive from the ZIP drive and run the upgrade from there, versus feeding the machine floppies.

          If you were really luck you were working in a site w/ Novell Netware and you could just copy the CAB files down from the Netware server. >smile<

        • 486sx3321 hours ago
          Probably spending 5 hours swapping diskettes and then finding out disk #48 was bad is like the worst feeling ever
  • sprior18 hours ago
    I worked in AIX PS/2 development when it was in Danbury, CT. I think ver 1.3 came out after I left the group but I thought AIX PS/2 only ran on micro channel machines though maybe that changed by ver 1.3. edit: just read the wikipedia page and indeed ver 1.3 did later introduce support for non PS/2 hardware though it wasn't in the initial 1.3 release.
    • accrual7 hours ago
      That's awesome! Any particular or interesting memories from your AIX development days you remember?

      I've never worked with Microchannel in person (yet), but it's a pretty cool technology. Kind of like a pre-PCI interface.

  • accruala day ago
    Neat project! Will be cool to see once it's up and running

    Lately I installed NT 4.0 on my i486DX4-100 system. With 64MB of RAM and a CF card it runs very well, it actually feels quite modern and NT 4.0 is slowly growing on me. I've experimented with service packs and found SP4 was the right balance of supporting later software without slowing it down much.

    Just installed Visual Basic 5 and Python 2.3 and it's approaching 24 hours of uptime. The system clock is synced to my router as well!

    • EvanAndersona day ago
      For me the frustrations with NT 4.0 are all the reboots associated with changing settings, and the lack of plug 'n play (for USB devices). Those things aside it runs well.

      Windows 2000 gets you a lot of quality-of-life improvements w/ a tremendous amount of bloat.

      re: uptime - I've seen NT 4.0 machines w/ multi-year uptimes. I actually saw one running Microsoft Exchange w/ a >2 year uptime. I was shocked.

  • a day ago
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