AIX IN THE UNIX WORLD

Twenty five years ago on January 21, 1986, IBM Austin launched a new operating system called IBM RT Personal Computer Advanced Interactive eXecutive -- better known as AIX -- with a new system called the IBM RT PC. The system ran on a RISC processor codenamed “ROMP” (for Research Office Products Division MultiProcessor) and was originally marketed as an engineering workstation.

This new AIX operating system was based on UNIX operating system, but it included significant IBM enhancements such as a virtualization to allow multiple operating systems to run on a single machine, support for high resolution displays, and a simple user interface.

Over the ensuing years we have seen significant advances in the evolution of AIX:
- 1990, AIX V3 on the RS/6000 on the first POWER processor
- 1994, AIX V4 with support for symmetric multiprocessing
- 2001, AIX 5L provides logical partitioning virtualization on POWER4
- 2007, AIX 6 contains workload partitions
- 2010, AIX 7 has built in clustering and the ability to host an earlier version of AIX

Of course AIX was not evolving alone – since that original release on the RT PC in 1986, the capabilities of Power processor and hardware grew from a single processor running at 5.9 MHz to today’s Power 795 running up to 256 POWER7 cores at 4.25 GHz..

Throughout this evolution, the AIX and Power Systems market position has grown from a small fraction of the engineering workstation market to the market leader of the $16 billion enterprise UNIX server market. Leadership performance has long been key part of this success, but AIX and Power Systems also lead the market in reliability and availability.