Shoutout to the 4Front Technologies employee who went '...They need the license file for AIX? Alright, let me figure out how to make that' with no question as to why you needed it
One of my coworkers described aix such: "Aix is what you get if an alien came to earth, saw what Unix is through Google translate, then went home and described to another alien what he thought it was though another translator, and _that_ alien implemented what they thought Unix was"
@@rogerwilco99 Yeah, I came from an SGI IRIX (SVR4) software development background (with some SunOS, Solaris, and Linux pre-1.0 experience) to an AIX project in 1995, and I was not a happy camper. Luckily, I was still doing SGI development for a while longer, eventually switched to Linux, and never had to use AIX again. I don't recall what they changed though, anymore. And, I can't say with certainty that IRIX did things in a Unix standard way.
i love old hardware, but this video is a perfect example of why, whenever I want to actually do anything such as work or games on that old hardware, I beeline directly to getting modern GNU/Linux booted on it with the most efficient drivers possible, and just headless serial if no drivers exist. using any old device on the real internet isn't secure at all without the robust code of modern OS and browsers.
As usual Michael, you really deliver. What an adventure! You have amazing tenacity that is rarely found these days, especially when unravelling poorly documented lost to time old tech.
Michael's extensive drive has to be why i regularly watch NCommander. So much of the things gone threw in the videos are mind-boggling and tells me I still have absolute hoards of research to be competent in Linux the way I would like to be. An inspiration to me and many others, I'm sure.
Honestly, I think the older stuff was often much better documented at the time than modern stuff is today. Of course, lots of that old documentation gets lost to time. (*cough* Apple Tech Info Library *cough*)
Hey Michael … Adrian said you need need a C64 and I have one with the floppy drive in the original boxes (with the price tags from Hills Department Store) it does work, I do not have a psu but you dont want to use the nasty old brick anyway, The only problem is the power led does not light and needs to be replaced and I want to mail it to you please contact me over at ua-cam.com/users/unmanaged I ran a game called imposable mission off a floppy and it worked. I want to pass this along to you... I hate to do this in the comments but this is legit 100% free
NOTES AND CORRECTIONS: - The tablet port was used by the Spaceball 3D Mouse, used for IBM's own CAD software - Past me, it was Ko-fi, not Ko-fo in the credits >.
The problem with your Doom crashing has happened to me in Windows when testing multiple versions of GZdoom to find a very good stable version that wasn't chopping on my weird Dell Optiplex slim client, it's a thing with certain versions of either GZ or Chocolate doom and etc, and also using "wrong" wads, so your issue may be a really really bad combination of ports and wads, hope this information can help. (It usually would crash at the exact moment levels would change, this is not a problem with your system.)
Likely thin clients talking to a backend server. I've seen that with a few other venders, AutoZone's registers were on Unixware for a really long time, don't know if they still are.
When I worked for Walmart circa 2008, they switched to AIX for the Telxon scanner gun things. IIRC it was HP-UX before that. I remember it being quite a bit snappier once the switch was made too.
@@nicco1690 They really sell everything at Walmart, even medical advice. But to add to the outdated systems still in use: the german Telekom still operates a MVS/OS/390 mainframe for their database
Back when I did AIX support for IBM in the late '90s and early '00s, Walmart was a huge customer. I had no idea they are *still* using AIX systems even at the store level.
@@EmperorLjas Yeah, just the fact it took this much work to get this working is probably a factor that will make more attempts at running DOOM on old AIX very unlikely. It would be pretty cool to archive it!
Found a bug at 57:03. Seeing that version of KDE gave me flashbacks of running Yellow Dog Linux on a Power Mac. The behavior of the original DOOM port with the palette switching was normal for mid-90s X software. Tons of stuff would only work at 8bpp as well. Caldera's port of WABI was one of them until they finally patched it.
25:46 The VisualAge prices were meant for corporate costumers. You could register for free to the IBM's Partner World for Developers program and you would get the developer tools for free for education, tests and development. Only if you sold the software that you made with whose tools then you would have to have you costumer to pay for licences.
Nobody ever bought IBM hardware and software at list price anyway, or any enterprise stuff for that matter. You contacted your salesman for a quote which would invariably a good chunk off list. Even today, go to Dell or Lenovo's website, and it will be 30% off list.
@@rogerwilco99 So.. somewhat like how you typically pay for setup and usage when getting a dedicated environment at some cloud provider nowadays... Yes, IBM was rather early with that idea. I doubt the customer really owned the hardware in such cases.
56:54 For anyone curious about the song used, SDL uses a clip from ~10 seconds in to "The Living Proof" by Will Provost, an obscure band that released it in February of 2000.
We used to run AIX at work and going home to linux just made me sad when I wanted to do admin stuff. 4.3 isn't just old, it is ancient. I had this weird hope IBM would release AIX for the PS3...
"Was it worth the price?" When I started my career in 2000 with a CAD System Integrator there were few options to get working for the "big fish". You had HP, Silicon Graphics, IBM and Sun if you wanted to do automotive or aerospace work. All priced in that range. OpenGL was a "new fangled" thing back then and CAD programs where using the commercial Motif library. And the software would set you back sometimes double the hardware cost (but the hourly rates even for freelancers made it feasible). AutoCAD Inventor and SolidWorks were in their infancy and nowhere near capable of doing what CATIA, UGS, ideas, Euclid etc could do on the unix machines. That started to change with the appearance of 3d capable (gaming) PCs. You talked about the netboot in the beginning, questioning it. I remember freelancers bringing their machine clean and whiped to the IT department (or us) of e.g. a automotive supplier together with their license code for the software (you always bought man with machine and license for development work) and two hours later it was installed to company standards. At the end it would be whiped again before it left the premises. For reinstalling there was an option to boot from an DDS4 SCSI tape ... oh well memory lane ;-). And under 5L Quake was no problem ...
This! Similar career path but as an IT specialist over the same period. CATIA v4 & v5, Alias Wavefront, UGS, Pro/Engineer, and many, many others. Everything from the concept & design to the manufacturing phase. There was no alternative. And at what designers and modellers were being paid, and customers writing checks for, price of the hardware and software was not at the top of our worries. We did start using Intel and Alpha based workstations by the 2000s but it took many years until the software reached the same quality and stability as their Irix/Aix/Solaris versions.
I concur. I was an IBMer back before there was an RS/6000. The initial software strategy for RS/6000 was all about CAD software. It was what was called 'the five Cs'. Can't remember what the last two were, but CATIA, CADAM and CADDS were three of the five Cs. The main competition was the HP 'snakes' and the SPARC. These machines all had far better floating point performance and far better memory and I/O bandwidth than any of the PCs of the era. He says the 43p cost $12k or so, but it was not unusual for a full-blown CAD desktop to cost $40k back then.
@@davetronics license costs for Microstation for a year is a fair bit more than the cost for the computer itself.... a HP laptop and the large screen - something 3000 $ but the perpetual license for Microstation Connect edition is something like 6300 $ .....
And this is why the inferior autocad and SOLIDWORKS won! It was 1/10th the cost and required 1/10th the hardware. It was cheap and extra development time paid itself with the cost savings
I wrote FORTRAN-based simulations on a rather earlier beige RS/6000 that sat on my desk in the early 90’s and a quick glance looked it like a PS/2 tower. 25MHz and a very respectable for the time 64 mb of RAM. I got it back in 1993 when over the air updates weren’t exactly common, so I used to get a box of 125 mb tapes with the latest software revs mailed to me by IBM automatically every 3 months, which certainly accounted for some of the rather painful price of the system.
One of my favourite videos on UA-cam. DOS has a lot of attention on retro scene here, it’s nice to see someone working with those old UNIX systems. And on top of that, it’s a fantastic entertainment. Thanks for your work!
My first experience of Unix was essentially a box with Start and Stop buttons which was a printer controller. My second and real introduction was being sat down in front of an RS/6000 server with AIX AIX 4.1.3 and being told "Type in r, o, o, t and press enter…" On what I subsequently discovered was a production box. Late 1996 we received a batch of new machines which it turned out had been used for sales presentations fro AIX 4.2 and still had all the funky sound and video files on disk. Unfortunately the required add-on accelerator card had been removed so my experience of the audiovisual tools was pretty much what yours was. I don't know about the desktop workstations but with the servers the SCSI card was included by default, so a factory install. One thing I really liked is that on any other machine changing a SCSI chain, adding or removing a device, would definitely need a reboot but with these it was plug and play - something we did twice nightly with a tape drive to run backups. To this day I have no idea if it was supposed to be PNP but it was absolutely rock solid. That compiler cost? Oh yes. The same numbers but this side of the Atlantic it was in £. All of IBM's software was extortionate. In another department we ran Lotus Notes and Lord knows how much they scalped us for that, I've erased the memory. You're dead right about cross-systems interoperability, for business purposes if you were running IBM-anything it was beautiful. But try not-IBM and you were in for a world of pain. Those new machines mentioned above we ended up downgrading to 4.1.3 because there was no upgrade path to 4.2 that would work for our non-IBM software, everything had to be re-installed at new versions. Thus 2 years later, circa 1998 we were going through the pain of transferring all the operations our RS/6000 estate handled to Windows NT 4 and an entirely new suite of applications for which at least the availability of commodity hardware gave us a massive saving. Running Doom? Nah, don't try that. 😀
I think my heart skipped a beat at 54:20 when you said it was failing due to semaphore issues. Resolving that on such a relic of a platform sounds like my personal hell
I was immensely unamused when I found the comment in semaphore.h. One of the big tipoffs on how to fix this iwas SDL actually uses the old SysV SHM interface on IRIX, vs. POSIX interfaces, which, after I found the root cause, at least made it clear how to go forward.
Epic, epic video. I think we pool our resources and get you a VAX for the next project! 🤣 also would love to see this box again on the channel maybe running a more modern Linux or BSD so we can compare performance and stability
We ran AS/400s and iSeries machines. These were just awesome. An IBM engineer was waiting for us on Monday morning saying that our machine had notified them that a disk had failed. He came in, took the cover off, pulled the disk and put in a new one. The machine basically said "thanks, I'll rebuild now". All this while it was running the entire company. We were biting our nails! It all worked fine. All we ever did with it was swap backup tapes lol. It was never switched off, sometimes years at a time. If it did go down, they'd bring another one on a lorry, connect it via sockets in our shipping department, set it to boot off of a backup tape and voila, everything back and running. No fuss. This is what you pay for.
I remember those ridiculous workstation prices. In ‘98 the place I worked for sold software that ran on various UNIXes, but our office couldn’t afford an AIX machine to practice installing there, and I never ended up having to wing it. Very glad to finally get a little bit of a look into one of the ones I never was able to use, but was interested in.
I used to work for "The World's Favorite Travel Company" (rhymes with Harriet). Their in-house Property Management System (think front desk, billing, etc for a hotel) was designed in 1987ish, and originally ran on RS/6000 hardware in the back office of each hotel. Nowadays, the properties still running that PMS software and not some abomination from Oracle run IBM hardware that emulates the RS/6000. Yes, employees use all Windows machines, but run a terminal emulator program to SSH into the PMS server. The whole thing is text based, interacted with much like AIX (all numbers/letters to select options), incredibly fast, almost zero down time, and one of the steepest learning curves I've run into in entry-level service industry jobs. I loved that software...
I love this format - the ups and downs of development/debugging hell make for great stories that I'm surprised aren't told more considering how popular speedrunning videos have gotten (taking a seemingly mundane subject and making a story out of it).
The graphical corruption in their official Quake port is probably due to having 24 bit colour enabled. The exact same thing happens if you run SGI's official Quake on IRIX in 24 bit mode. If you change back to 256 colours it should work OK.
First video from this channel that I stumbled upon - really great content. It really takes a lot of knowledge and determination to try and fix all the problems you had along the way. 99% of people would just give up with no easy to follow tutorial on everything. I like the kind of vids that attempt (and succeed!) at achieving something cool but on the way there show off and share knowledge about an old platform that most of us would probably never experience. It's fun and informative.
A friend of mine in college had one of these. We were freshman in ‘01. Let me tell you, we thought he was the coolest kid in the dorm. The girls, on the other hand, could not care less if they tried. Lol
AIX uses XCOFF vs. ELF which leads to a lot of exciting moments. If you look carefully when I do the dlopen() in SDL, you can see that I have to specify the GL path as libGL.a(shr.o). So much "fun".
Lord you are patient, I'm not a programmer but familiar keywords had me saying "Oh no, that is going to be a pain.". That project must have been hard and having to document that journey on top too yikes. ;) Excellent video, it's hard to make a dry subject matter engaging but you found a good balance of code specifics, functions, and visuals all while not leaving the layman in the dark.
I am a programmer and this makes me want to stay well clear of AIX. This is a journey of pain and suffering. I honestly don't think I would have been able to do this, because of sheer frustration. And I've spent 2 weeks debugging errors in code that I wrote 6 years ago, only to realize that there's a hardware problem, which was a single solder joint in one of the buses that was somehow missed... (Embedded dev for anyone wondering)
I have successfully ran Doom (id demo version) on an SGI Octane with specialised hardware for Flint (high end post-production software+hardware by SGI, now withAutodesk). The viewport did not scale, but I was able to place the small doom window over the running Flint environment and have the output come up on the broadcast Sony monitor. The sound was perfect, coming out of the broadcast-quality monitors.A glorious gaming experience for 1995. Does this help?
It must have been a modified port. The id source code has an incomplete sound engine, although I didn't look at it for that long. I know they have something called sndserv, but the documentation makes it pretty clear its incomplete.
Doom is installed standard / included with SGI Irix 6.5.x, with a full install (including the demos) you can launch it from the "demos" application group...
Again, your dedication to get deep into stuff and accomplish the goal no matter how many curveballs are thrown is something to be admired! Also, 15:35 was a bit scary, as I was actually playing the Windows 95/98 version of Freecell at that moment :P
In the 90s I was in a group that ported a gigantic application to various Unixes in order to get vendors to bid against each other and keep the platform prices down. Although AIX was one of the Unixes, porting to any Unix was always a head banging nightmare back then. Our application used semaphores, message passing, and shared memory and of course libraries didn't work right, compilers didn't work right, vendors lied to us regularly, and we had to single step through assembly code to prove they were lying and fix it. We always felt like we were the first people to have ever ported anything to any platform.
Great video! I cannot begin to imagine the time and effort that went into making this. The 90s style 3D scenes / infographics are great! That price tag on the IBM machine, sheesh!
The entire PowerPC platform was rock solid enough where it was used in the embedded space for quite a while. From industrial automation, medical, test equipment, telecom, to networking. It could've been soldered directly to manufacturer's boards or used a common board type like MVME or CompactPCI.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 I always wondered if someone had written a Linux or BSD port that would run on the Gamecube. The used hardware is pretty close to a G3 Mac
@@HappyBeezerStudios Yes, there are various methods of getting Linux onto the Gamecube, Wii, and Wii-U. gc-linux is really out of date, though. It's based around Debian 5 and kernel 2.6.26 or thereabouts, 2009 era. The more modern wii-linux-ngx might work on Gamecube but it's not officially supported.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 Current Xerox workgroup printers have an ARM front-end with a embedded NEC 80186 or similar for the print engine. They're buying chipsets and the software stack from Qualcomm (who bought CSR, who bought Zoran, who bought Oak). HP is a major Oak customer too. The full-size copiers are Intel Atom with a similar software stack.
FWIW - Yes, XL C is easily as fast as they claim compared to gcc. Also, I have run into code that gcc simply will not compile. I have been working with AIX for almost 30 years now, so reach out if you have any questions or would like some recommendations. I'd be happy to help.
OK I must be missing something here, but I'm going to ask anyway: 1) Why would someone bother to buy a 375 MHz machine in 2001? (severely outdated) What was the main selling point on this machine? 2) Installing XP on it would probably fix all the problems. Would people use these machines for Unix software specifically? Or was Windows an option?
@@FeelingShred These machines were used either as development systems for applications that would run on larger Power AIX servers or they were themselves a server for small businesses, for which it was plenty powerful. Typically when used as a server it would sit in a back room or closet and have a serial multiplexing device attached with many dumb terminals connected. Windows was never an option. In fact, back then AIX was the only real option to run on these systems. The “problems” discussed in this video never affected anyone using these systems as compiling games or Linux software was not something that was done very often. Software was either coded in-house for the platform or bought from IBM or third party vendors, like Oracle or SAS for the sole purpose of running it in AIX. While the 43P was not special, the larger servers were built much more robustly and were much better at providing uptime and high throughput than the PC counterparts in the day (and still today).
@@FeelingShred Running a UNIX with support contracts from a company like IBM. You may not remember, but there was a good 40 years or so when IBM was king of business/financial markets. These UNIX machines also didn't need as much CPU horsepower: I/O was much more important.
@@FeelingShred Yes they would use it for UNIX specifically.. all the servers were IBM and your desktop workstation needed to be interoperable. Mounting NFS volumes, using services like NIS, talking to various UNIX servers using various software... These are business machines, not personal PCs.
6:56 Interesting that the graphics card caused issues with installing using the serial console. I've never had this issue on the MCA based systems, so it must be an issue with the PCI-era firmware. That said, AIX will by default not install X (or at the very least not configure it in any way) if you install over serial (in my experience). 8:08 I believe the final x86 version of AIX will run on non-PS/2 PC compatibles. I've gotten it to at least boot in 86Box and I've heard of people getting it to work reasonably well in QEMU. 11:00 Yeah, found the volume sizes *way* too small as well. What was the thinking there on IBM's part? Makes no sense to me. This whole video is a great how-to for when I setup my 7044 again, and I thank you for it!
You're supposed to grow the volume sizes as you go (installp has a switch that does it on the fly), and on AIX 5L, you can shrink them as well which helps alot. As for the graphics card, I didn't bother testing it by yanking it, but it won't surprise me if it basically tries to serial as a console, but run dtlogin and causes the hanged state.
@@NCommander Ah, good to know for future reference. Just finished watching the entire thing. I think this may be my favorite of your videos. Both because I found the topic extremely interesting, and because I think it's probably your best made video from a production standpoint. 10/10
This journey is fantastic. I used to work on RS6000 as a server OS and seeing the PC come to life and all the compiler nuances is quite the treat. Thanks for documenting this!
I used to be an AIX administrator, and one thing I'll say is IBM made a name on solid hardware. Like mentioned in the video, we had RS/6000 machines running for a decade and IBM continued to service them for a loooong time. As far as Unix goes I think SMIT is one of THE best configuration tools. Also while AIX did get better in later versions it was still a nightmare to compile many things. You are an absolute legend for wading through that hell.
34:00 Original doom used so called mode 13h in DOS which is 256 color 320x200 mode where the application can specify the color palette. It was the best graphics model with linear memory space available before standard VESA graphics modes came to be with later introduced hardware. My first PC from year 1995 had a display adapter that was able to run Doom and Quake but the hardware didn't support many of the better VESA modes. I'd expect the original code didn't support better graphics modes but 320x200 pixels with 256 colors. Even original Quake used mode 13h but it also supported VESA modes if your PC hardware was good enough. Most hardware wasn't. In 1997, Quake was ported to OpenGL and GLQuake was introduced.
58:20 i like how the gun sound is the only one sounding mostly correct, because sounds like you’re shooting at the poor computer to release it from its misery
57:02 a bug just passing by to say hi Great video! It was a nice ride learning about AIX and all of your misadventures. Looking forward to the next one!
My trust in HP-UX increased after watching this video, knowing it builds SDL out of the box, unlike AIX. Maybe I should try Doom on HP Visualize C3750 to replicate the suffering...
I remember walking into a job where the previous IT people left and we had to figure out an AIX RS/6000 with little guidance or docs. AIX was close enough to what I’d encountered with Unix before to save our butts on a system crash and restore from tape. Figuring out the custom apps done in what I recall was “business basic” was certainly an adventure I will never forget.
really impressive how much effort you spent on this project. Not leaving "the road to Doom", dispite all those pain and suffering. This is real passion! 🙂Hats off!
Nothing like spelunking in old machines, OS', and apps... trying to get them to run. If I were you I would e very satisified... you did a great job...and kept me on the edge of my seat. I have to admit, that you kept pushing... I don't know... I probably don't have the reasoning skills like you do... LOL... but I was there the whole way with you. Great job!!!!
Networking booting was very common in some environments. It made installation and updates easier. Commercial Unix vendors thought charging for compilers was a good idea. Unfortunately gcc was often much slower, producing less optimized binaries or even having bugs. Lastly AIX was weird but smit was cool
Yes, netboot was pretty common in corporate IT environments at the time. I've built dozens of server environments to fascilitate that for large IBM customers during the 1990s. Ideally, IT staff would also rip any drives supporting removable media from the machine, and even internal HDDs, so everything 'storage' was network based. Besides the easy installations and upgrades, this also gave control over storage, backups, distribution of data etc, in other words, lifetime management on data, and a locked down end-user environment with easily replaced workstations because there was no user data on those.
Fun! I have a copy of VisualAge C for AIX 4.3.3 and a beta version of StarOffice 3 for AIX which never saw a commercial release. My 233Mhz 43P has long since died. I can stick them on an FTP somewhere if you like
The AIX adventure is truly beyond amazing. The non (*that*) portable POSIX implementation, documentation/header/library inconsistencies, and the libc incompatibilities which is still affecting modern day Linux binary compatibility... really gave me a vision on the messiness in the Unix (-like) world. Sound on Linux is still a bit of an issue to my experience... No matter how hard I try JACK just won't start on my laptop. Apparently I will not be able to debug it to this extent, let alone working with an IBM RISC businesse machine. Great content as always :3
@@tomaszgasior772 Jeez, yet another new standard competing with others as xkcd said. Also I'm not at all interested in trying a distro for a new sound system that doesn't seem to boost current experiences. If it is messy to convert to from pulseaudio I'd call it a failure.
@@rigoligorlc4795 pipewire isn't "yet another competing standard", it's primarily a *video* server that also comes with compatibility layers for pulseaudio, jack, and even alsa, making it a drop-in replacement for all three. it doesn't really do anything new in the audio department - apps are expected to just continue using the pulse and jack APIs, and pipewire also improves on some shortcomings in both jack and *especially* pulseaudio, such as pulse's horrible latency. ubuntu are fully adopting it in 22.10 (they've already been using it as a video server for a while, as has debian), and fedora's used it as the default audio server since fedora 34.
6:33 in the 17 years I have worked as an AIX professional I have only ever installed AIX while connected over serial. Modern systems still virtualize the serial port for each VM, you would manage using a hardware management console to access the virtual machines console. It didn't hang on the first reboot, it was likely waiting for you to select the serial connection. I've never seen AIX hang in my entire career, but admittedly I'm not that old.
I had serial hooked up on that first reboot, (you can see it on the laptop), it prints messages, and dies. In discussion, it appears the install scripts get confused if you're installing over serial while a GPU is installed, which causes it to try to start the graphical install without X running and just falls over.
The title is misleading and also it isn't misleading. xD I came here to learn more about this computer and this video delivered. Excellent work sir! Sub'd!
Thank you for making this video, it makes me very happy I can run doom on my 10.5 inch tab s6 at 2600x1440 at 60 fps with a tap. Much kudos for making this video, technology has gotten so far since then. And great job on debugging aswell. Awesome.
That KDE loading screen... I had forgotten it, but the nostalgia hit like a truck. EDIT: I wonder how hard it would be to bring it back to modern KDE. There is theming support for the loading screen after all... Maybe it is time for my own cursed project!
So I went digging further. This is entirely possible: Sources for old KDE are still easily available, and it should be possible to extract the graphics. Some major caveats though: 1) Modern KDE/Plasma starts way too fast to realistically be able to see any of the animations (at least on my system). 2) I don't know if doing a non-full screen thing and showing the desktop in the background would be at all possible. 3) I don't think you could get it to play a sound. EDIT: You can, in the notification settings So given that the "experience" would be quite compromised, I don't think I'll do it.
This is actually cursed! There is (on Arch Linux) /usr/share/ksplash, part of plasma-workspace. I thought that was how it worked. However that directory, with two themes in it, appear to be dead code. Instead /usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel//contents/splash is actually what is available in system settings. This is also based on QML and it seems to have a similar concept of numeric "stages" (range 1-5 I believe?) to drive the animation. So there is hope for this still.
Was wondering if you were going to mention that a decent part of the "IBM Price" was IBM support/service, which back in those days was second to none. In the early 90's a publishing company I was working for, which was built around IBM systems, had a purchase contract that included 24/7 on-site service. We had an IBM tech there so much, maintaining the servers and workstations that I thought he was an employee.
I only used AIX on the command line only , still my worst Unix I every used, with HP/UX a close second. Solaris was the best for me. Well done for all your work here, brought back memories like OS/2 Warp, BE OS, Xenix/SCO, Next STEP etc.
I am actually gonna use your video as a reference guide to try Doom on my 43p-140 machine (which pretty much is a bit older revision, but the experience should be pretty much identical) that I've recently quite randomly obtained, thanks a lot for your work!
This is one of the most engrossing videos I've ever watched on UA-cam regarding tech adventures - and misadventures for that matter. I salute you and I've subscribed! 😁
What an amazing mishmash of old UIs, completely and utterly foreign to me. Seeing you go through all those configurations actually knowing what you're doing created a real sense of *intimidation* in me. Excellent content
You certainly seems to be the most patient person I have every seen online. Next, you'd probably be stacking US quaters on edge in a moving train, and continue until you have 24 in a stack. Your experience here is what made Apple great. Point, click, work. Not infinite amounts of C file editing and compiling. You earned a subscription and a like. Great job!
Memories!!!! I remember when the RS6000 first came out. I was given the 'enviable' task of porting the company software suite to AIX on a bottom end RS6000. IBM were not going to let us 'borrow' the machine for us to do the work 'in house', so I had to throw all the source onto QIC tapes. The only 'problems' I encountered were actually bugs in our own source! (Specifically, our code back then ASSUMED that a pid, uid and gid were 16 bit values and AIX used 32 bit values. It took me a couple hours to find and apply fixes and then a couple DAYS of compile time to generate the binaries. (The sheer SIZE of the resultant binaries was a bit of a shock... RISC truly DOES use a lot more instructions!!! Same finding as I had on the first port to the MIPS based DEC machines)
OK I must be missing something here, but I'm going to ask anyway: 1) Why would someone bother to buy a 375 MHz machine in 2001? (severely outdated) What was the main selling point on this machine? 2) Installing XP on it would probably fix all the problems. Would people use these machines for Unix software specifically? Or was Windows an option?
I do remember running a desktop environment back in my college days on AIX 4.3.x. There was a good word processor available for it as I leveraged it for various assignments. WordPerfect comes to mind. There was also a spread sheet application from that same era whose name is escaping me. The monitor issue might be addressed by a EDID minder to restrict what resolutions/modes that the graphics adapter can be seen. Almost a requirement to leverage newer displays on older, arcane hardware. XLC does have an advantage over GCC though how much varies by project as mentioned. The big advantage of using XLC (or say ICC on Intel x86 hardware) is the finer tuning levels with the ability to leverage unique hardware attributes. For example, XLC produced better vector code than gcc as gcc's original implementation was targeted for the various G4 class chips. On that note, it is the compiler it'd recommend for building software that requires supervisor or hypervisor only instructions as IBM supports them better in their own compiler. If I had to guess, modern versions of GCC can likely produce faster code than XLC from that era. Since you were having semaphore problems, how many were actually available when you were running the game? Increasing this limit often resolved some oddities, though as arcane as these problems are, I can only guess if it'd help at all. The performance of the RS/6000 is generally found in its superior double precision FPU performance at the time. The G3 and G4 lines had great integer performance but lacked the high performance FPU of the 604e. In addition the G3 was only implemented in a single processor configuration while the 604e supported quad CPU configuration. Against the G4, the 604e's stronger FPU gets out done by the G4's vector unit able to four single precision values at once. However, the 604e still reigns supreme when it came to double precision as the vector unit on the G4's didn't support the 64 bit data type. There were dual G4 options and this chips did support a quad configuration but Apple never shipped them like that and IBM never adopted them. One other difference with IBM hardware is that they had a higher clocked system bus than what Apple was using at the time. I think the 375 MHz model had its bus running at 125 MHz and used 133 MHz SDRAM memory that was underclocked to match it. On the flip side, Apple of that era only had a 100 MHz bus speed but did include 64 bit PCI slots + 2x AGP where as this RS/6000 was stuck with 32 bit PCI.
I had one of these machines (actually a 43p-140 rather than 150) at my desk at one time. Eventually got a 44p (tower case) around 2007 (it was collecting duct in someone else's office). I actually had Thunderbird running on it, for the very brief time IBM enabled IMAP support on their Notes Mail servers. There were a bunch of 43p machines on the server floor, as it was the only machine that would run the debug/firmware/test software for our big Power4 systems and the switch adapters in them. Not even a slightly newer 44p would work. The problem with X on AIX was it was based on an *ancient* version of X11 (might have even been X11 v5.x). The color pallets on AIX reminded me more of the old CGA days, although I think AIX could handle more than 16 colours at a time (maybe). I briefly tried re-compiling X.Org 6.x under AIX, but I knew even less programming than I do now (and that ain't much). There had also been someone on the AIX team in Austin pushing to get X.Org ported, nothing came of that either. I think the *only* reason there were updated X packages (or updated packages of many other utilities) was they had to update C libraries for 3rd-party and customer applications that evolved far faster than AIX. Documentation? AIX is the only Unix system I know of that *didn't* install the man pages by default. But expanding/growing disk volumes was far better than what Linux & such were capable of at the time. AIX was pretty advanced in it's time, but it stagnated while everyone else kept advancing and ultimately passing AIX.
Road to Doom indeed. "M" for sure. :) I've used AIX and we even have a few (SunOS) systems still running CDE at work so I feel some of your pain. Thanks for the entertaining lunch break.
6:15 Funnily enough network booting is one of the most common reasons to enter SMS mode even on modern machines. Network booting isn't just for thin clients, it allows the system to be booted over bootp protocol to a AIX NIM master, where you can do things like a bare metal restore from a mksysb backup or even maintenance boot from boot files located on the NIM master.
Very interesting and well done. This is a blast from the past since I worked as a developer writing software for AIX on Power systems from about 1995 to 2012, transitioning to more Linux around 2007. SMIT was a joy, and much fun was had dealing with IBM's shared and static libraries, where both were .a file extensions, getting threading to work, and moving from 32 bit to 64 bit. I also spend a couple years in compiler development for AIX on IBM's mainframe 3090 systems, where AIX was even more entertaining. Linux and X11 were also an adventure in the mid 90's where one could easily literally burn out an expensive monitor if one wasn't careful with their X configuration files.
Your name sounds familiar. If you know about AIX/390, chances are we crossed paths in the early 90s. I worked on the TCP/IP stack for it at Kingston. Before that, I worked on AIX/RT and AIX/PS2 in Danbury, CT. This all seems like a lifetime ago now.
@@davetronics I worked briefly on Aix/370 - sent out to Santa Monica for 4 months to learn it for software support. That got moved to Austin so I came home. Couple years later I got moved to AIX/ESA in Kingston where I probably made a nuisance of myself as the lead on system installation software. That group morphed into a HPC development group with SP/1 and SP/2 and AIX, eventually morphed again to the land of HPC on Linux. Stayed until 2013, early retirement incentive, contracted with Intel for a year and a half part time then contracted back to my old group part time until last December.
I used to use VisualAge on OS/2 for work. It was an entire development environment, including editor, compiler and centralized source control. It had features that no other system had then, and I haven't seen even up to today. It was a real pleasure to use in a team.
Shoutout to the 4Front Technologies employee who went '...They need the license file for AIX? Alright, let me figure out how to make that' with no question as to why you needed it
Ikr. Amazing.
I know they probably won't, but they sure as hell deserve to get a raise.
One of my coworkers described aix such:
"Aix is what you get if an alien came to earth, saw what Unix is through Google translate, then went home and described to another alien what he thought it was though another translator, and _that_ alien implemented what they thought Unix was"
AIX: Alien-Implemented UNIX
_Explains why the Aliens wipe us out_
Advanced Interactive eXecutive ...been working with it and loving it for 23 years.
@@rogerwilco99 Yeah, I came from an SGI IRIX (SVR4) software development background (with some SunOS, Solaris, and Linux pre-1.0 experience) to an AIX project in 1995, and I was not a happy camper. Luckily, I was still doing SGI development for a while longer, eventually switched to Linux, and never had to use AIX again. I don't recall what they changed though, anymore. And, I can't say with certainty that IRIX did things in a Unix standard way.
i love old hardware, but this video is a perfect example of why, whenever I want to actually do anything such as work or games on that old hardware, I beeline directly to getting modern GNU/Linux booted on it with the most efficient drivers possible, and just headless serial if no drivers exist. using any old device on the real internet isn't secure at all without the robust code of modern OS and browsers.
As usual Michael, you really deliver. What an adventure! You have amazing tenacity that is rarely found these days, especially when unravelling poorly documented lost to time old tech.
3 days ago, is Adrian a patron?!? Word!
Michael's extensive drive has to be why i regularly watch NCommander. So much of the things gone threw in the videos are mind-boggling and tells me I still have absolute hoards of research to be competent in Linux the way I would like to be. An inspiration to me and many others, I'm sure.
The tenacity to run the system like a tower and blocking all air vents xD
Honestly, I think the older stuff was often much better documented at the time than modern stuff is today. Of course, lots of that old documentation gets lost to time. (*cough* Apple Tech Info Library *cough*)
Hey Michael … Adrian said you need need a C64 and I have one with the floppy drive in the original boxes (with the price tags from Hills Department Store) it does work, I do not have a psu but you dont want to use the nasty old brick anyway, The only problem is the power led does not light and needs to be replaced and I want to mail it to you please contact me over at ua-cam.com/users/unmanaged I ran a game called imposable mission off a floppy and it worked. I want to pass this along to you... I hate to do this in the comments but this is legit 100% free
You took a huge RISC doing this.
Take my upvote ...
NOTES AND CORRECTIONS:
- The tablet port was used by the Spaceball 3D Mouse, used for IBM's own CAD software
- Past me, it was Ko-fi, not Ko-fo in the credits >.
Did Doom continue to hang even after you changed OSS to use your manually configured Crystal Audio driver?
You are a fucking hero 😎
The problem with your Doom crashing has happened to me in Windows when testing multiple versions of GZdoom to find a very good stable version that wasn't chopping on my weird Dell Optiplex slim client, it's a thing with certain versions of either GZ or Chocolate doom and etc, and also using "wrong" wads, so your issue may be a really really bad combination of ports and wads, hope this information can help. (It usually would crash at the exact moment levels would change, this is not a problem with your system.)
Yes, unfortunately.
The spaceballs are serial or USB. The tablet port is for a 6093 tablet.
Upon seeing the intro, I realized from the login screen that some of the machines at my local Walmart actually still run AIX, which is pretty cool.
Likely thin clients talking to a backend server. I've seen that with a few other venders, AutoZone's registers were on Unixware for a really long time, don't know if they still are.
When I worked for Walmart circa 2008, they switched to AIX for the Telxon scanner gun things. IIRC it was HP-UX before that. I remember it being quite a bit snappier once the switch was made too.
@@kadlerio For our local Walmart, it was the optometrist's desk that had it, I had seen it because the cleric had used it to look up my prescription
@@nicco1690 They really sell everything at Walmart, even medical advice.
But to add to the outdated systems still in use: the german Telekom still operates a MVS/OS/390 mainframe for their database
Back when I did AIX support for IBM in the late '90s and early '00s, Walmart was a huge customer. I had no idea they are *still* using AIX systems even at the store level.
Wow. Now that you've got this thing magically working, I hope you'll contribute it to the DOOM ports archive!
That's a thing?
@@NCommander Can you add timestamps to track names?
@@NCommander I'm sure Doomworld would be interested in it, even if nobody will ever use it.
@@EmperorLjas Nobody will ever use it? Now there's a perverse incentive.
@@EmperorLjas Yeah, just the fact it took this much work to get this working is probably a factor that will make more attempts at running DOOM on old AIX very unlikely. It would be pretty cool to archive it!
me: knows zero about coding, code, or command line witchcraft
also me: absolutely loves these types of videos
Found a bug at 57:03.
Seeing that version of KDE gave me flashbacks of running Yellow Dog Linux on a Power Mac. The behavior of the original DOOM port with the palette switching was normal for mid-90s X software. Tons of stuff would only work at 8bpp as well. Caldera's port of WABI was one of them until they finally patched it.
The bug is proof I live in New Jersey.
@@NCommander How's living there?
That's gnome??
You know, I'm mighty impressed that someone at 4Front not only saw your email, they also generated a license for AIX and sent it to you!
Indeed, you could say they were are the forefront there :)
This is a gorgeous wet dream of old UIs all wrapped up in a fantastically made video, 3D renders and everything! I do love this channel.
25:46 The VisualAge prices were meant for corporate costumers. You could register for free to the IBM's Partner World for Developers program and you would get the developer tools for free for education, tests and development. Only if you sold the software that you made with whose tools then you would have to have you costumer to pay for licences.
@@rogerwilco99 dell made a ibm clone and i own one it's a model 333d
@@rogerwilco99 IBM deserves to burn, especially for what they did during the war.
Nobody ever bought IBM hardware and software at list price anyway, or any enterprise stuff for that matter. You contacted your salesman for a quote which would invariably a good chunk off list. Even today, go to Dell or Lenovo's website, and it will be 30% off list.
@@rogerwilco99 So.. somewhat like how you typically pay for setup and usage when getting a dedicated environment at some cloud provider nowadays... Yes, IBM was rather early with that idea. I doubt the customer really owned the hardware in such cases.
56:54 For anyone curious about the song used, SDL uses a clip from ~10 seconds in to "The Living Proof" by Will Provost, an obscure band that released it in February of 2000.
We used to run AIX at work and going home to linux just made me sad when I wanted to do admin stuff. 4.3 isn't just old, it is ancient. I had this weird hope IBM would release AIX for the PS3...
"Was it worth the price?" When I started my career in 2000 with a CAD System Integrator there were few options to get working for the "big fish". You had HP, Silicon Graphics, IBM and Sun if you wanted to do automotive or aerospace work. All priced in that range. OpenGL was a "new fangled" thing back then and CAD programs where using the commercial Motif library. And the software would set you back sometimes double the hardware cost (but the hourly rates even for freelancers made it feasible). AutoCAD Inventor and SolidWorks were in their infancy and nowhere near capable of doing what CATIA, UGS, ideas, Euclid etc could do on the unix machines. That started to change with the appearance of 3d capable (gaming) PCs. You talked about the netboot in the beginning, questioning it. I remember freelancers bringing their machine clean and whiped to the IT department (or us) of e.g. a automotive supplier together with their license code for the software (you always bought man with machine and license for development work) and two hours later it was installed to company standards. At the end it would be whiped again before it left the premises. For reinstalling there was an option to boot from an DDS4 SCSI tape ... oh well memory lane ;-). And under 5L Quake was no problem ...
This! Similar career path but as an IT specialist over the same period. CATIA v4 & v5, Alias Wavefront, UGS, Pro/Engineer, and many, many others. Everything from the concept & design to the manufacturing phase. There was no alternative. And at what designers and modellers were being paid, and customers writing checks for, price of the hardware and software was not at the top of our worries. We did start using Intel and Alpha based workstations by the 2000s but it took many years until the software reached the same quality and stability as their Irix/Aix/Solaris versions.
I concur. I was an IBMer back before there was an RS/6000. The initial software strategy for RS/6000 was all about CAD software. It was what was called 'the five Cs'. Can't remember what the last two were, but CATIA, CADAM and CADDS were three of the five Cs. The main competition was the HP 'snakes' and the SPARC. These machines all had far better floating point performance and far better memory and I/O bandwidth than any of the PCs of the era. He says the 43p cost $12k or so, but it was not unusual for a full-blown CAD desktop to cost $40k back then.
@@davetronics license costs for Microstation for a year is a fair bit more than the cost for the computer itself.... a HP laptop and the large screen - something 3000 $ but the perpetual license for Microstation Connect edition is something like 6300 $ .....
And this is why the inferior autocad and SOLIDWORKS won! It was 1/10th the cost and required 1/10th the hardware. It was cheap and extra development time paid itself with the cost savings
I wrote FORTRAN-based simulations on a rather earlier beige RS/6000 that sat on my desk in the early 90’s and a quick glance looked it like a PS/2 tower. 25MHz and a very respectable for the time 64 mb of RAM. I got it back in 1993 when over the air updates weren’t exactly common, so I used to get a box of 125 mb tapes with the latest software revs mailed to me by IBM automatically every 3 months, which certainly accounted for some of the rather painful price of the system.
One of my favourite videos on UA-cam. DOS has a lot of attention on retro scene here, it’s nice to see someone working with those old UNIX systems. And on top of that, it’s a fantastic entertainment. Thanks for your work!
My first experience of Unix was essentially a box with Start and Stop buttons which was a printer controller. My second and real introduction was being sat down in front of an RS/6000 server with AIX AIX 4.1.3 and being told "Type in r, o, o, t and press enter…"
On what I subsequently discovered was a production box.
Late 1996 we received a batch of new machines which it turned out had been used for sales presentations fro AIX 4.2 and still had all the funky sound and video files on disk. Unfortunately the required add-on accelerator card had been removed so my experience of the audiovisual tools was pretty much what yours was.
I don't know about the desktop workstations but with the servers the SCSI card was included by default, so a factory install. One thing I really liked is that on any other machine changing a SCSI chain, adding or removing a device, would definitely need a reboot but with these it was plug and play - something we did twice nightly with a tape drive to run backups. To this day I have no idea if it was supposed to be PNP but it was absolutely rock solid.
That compiler cost? Oh yes. The same numbers but this side of the Atlantic it was in £. All of IBM's software was extortionate. In another department we ran Lotus Notes and Lord knows how much they scalped us for that, I've erased the memory.
You're dead right about cross-systems interoperability, for business purposes if you were running IBM-anything it was beautiful. But try not-IBM and you were in for a world of pain. Those new machines mentioned above we ended up downgrading to 4.1.3 because there was no upgrade path to 4.2 that would work for our non-IBM software, everything had to be re-installed at new versions. Thus 2 years later, circa 1998 we were going through the pain of transferring all the operations our RS/6000 estate handled to Windows NT 4 and an entirely new suite of applications for which at least the availability of commodity hardware gave us a massive saving.
Running Doom? Nah, don't try that. 😀
I think my heart skipped a beat at 54:20 when you said it was failing due to semaphore issues. Resolving that on such a relic of a platform sounds like my personal hell
I was immensely unamused when I found the comment in semaphore.h. One of the big tipoffs on how to fix this iwas SDL actually uses the old SysV SHM interface on IRIX, vs. POSIX interfaces, which, after I found the root cause, at least made it clear how to go forward.
Epic, epic video. I think we pool our resources and get you a VAX for the next project! 🤣 also would love to see this box again on the channel maybe running a more modern Linux or BSD so we can compare performance and stability
Minicomputers need more coverage in general. NCommander does a PDP-11 when? :p
We ran AS/400s and iSeries machines. These were just awesome. An IBM engineer was waiting for us on Monday morning saying that our machine had notified them that a disk had failed. He came in, took the cover off, pulled the disk and put in a new one. The machine basically said "thanks, I'll rebuild now". All this while it was running the entire company. We were biting our nails! It all worked fine. All we ever did with it was swap backup tapes lol. It was never switched off, sometimes years at a time. If it did go down, they'd bring another one on a lorry, connect it via sockets in our shipping department, set it to boot off of a backup tape and voila, everything back and running. No fuss. This is what you pay for.
Mainframe tech is so insane in so many ways.
I was surprised you didn't use a community made Linux for this thing and did everything yourself, well played and very impressive
I remember those ridiculous workstation prices. In ‘98 the place I worked for sold software that ran on various UNIXes, but our office couldn’t afford an AIX machine to practice installing there, and I never ended up having to wing it. Very glad to finally get a little bit of a look into one of the ones I never was able to use, but was interested in.
I used to work for "The World's Favorite Travel Company" (rhymes with Harriet). Their in-house Property Management System (think front desk, billing, etc for a hotel) was designed in 1987ish, and originally ran on RS/6000 hardware in the back office of each hotel. Nowadays, the properties still running that PMS software and not some abomination from Oracle run IBM hardware that emulates the RS/6000. Yes, employees use all Windows machines, but run a terminal emulator program to SSH into the PMS server. The whole thing is text based, interacted with much like AIX (all numbers/letters to select options), incredibly fast, almost zero down time, and one of the steepest learning curves I've run into in entry-level service industry jobs. I loved that software...
I am seriously in love with this new editing style.
great video, wasnt expecting much when i clicked tbh, but i was glued to the screen the whole way through
I love this format - the ups and downs of development/debugging hell make for great stories that I'm surprised aren't told more considering how popular speedrunning videos have gotten (taking a seemingly mundane subject and making a story out of it).
The graphical corruption in their official Quake port is probably due to having 24 bit colour enabled. The exact same thing happens if you run SGI's official Quake on IRIX in 24 bit mode. If you change back to 256 colours it should work OK.
First video from this channel that I stumbled upon - really great content. It really takes a lot of knowledge and determination to try and fix all the problems you had along the way. 99% of people would just give up with no easy to follow tutorial on everything.
I like the kind of vids that attempt (and succeed!) at achieving something cool but on the way there show off and share knowledge about an old platform that most of us would probably never experience. It's fun and informative.
A friend of mine in college had one of these. We were freshman in ‘01. Let me tell you, we thought he was the coolest kid in the dorm.
The girls, on the other hand, could not care less if they tried. Lol
Those gold diggers might have cared if y’all turned out to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
It is kind of cursed to see a shared library with the .a extension. That would confuse the hell out of me for a bit.
AIX uses XCOFF vs. ELF which leads to a lot of exciting moments. If you look carefully when I do the dlopen() in SDL, you can see that I have to specify the GL path as libGL.a(shr.o).
So much "fun".
".a" ... Also known as the holy Gawr Gura extension.
@@MyAmazingUsername Ayyyyyy lmao
that really just shows the age of AIX
Linux once used the COFF format before they transitioned to ELF. Seeing .so for the first time freaked me out. :-)
Lord you are patient, I'm not a programmer but familiar keywords had me saying "Oh no, that is going to be a pain.". That project must have been hard and having to document that journey on top too yikes. ;)
Excellent video, it's hard to make a dry subject matter engaging but you found a good balance of code specifics, functions, and visuals all while not leaving the layman in the dark.
I am a programmer and this makes me want to stay well clear of AIX. This is a journey of pain and suffering. I honestly don't think I would have been able to do this, because of sheer frustration. And I've spent 2 weeks debugging errors in code that I wrote 6 years ago, only to realize that there's a hardware problem, which was a single solder joint in one of the buses that was somehow missed... (Embedded dev for anyone wondering)
@@nikkiofthevalley Oh man that does sound frustrating. :S Trying to get into hardware repairs even though I know it will probably be frustrating lol.
I have successfully ran Doom (id demo version) on an SGI Octane with specialised hardware for Flint (high end post-production software+hardware by SGI, now withAutodesk). The viewport did not scale, but I was able to place the small doom window over the running Flint environment and have the output come up on the broadcast Sony monitor. The sound was perfect, coming out of the broadcast-quality monitors.A glorious gaming experience for 1995.
Does this help?
It must have been a modified port. The id source code has an incomplete sound engine, although I didn't look at it for that long. I know they have something called sndserv, but the documentation makes it pretty clear its incomplete.
@@NCommander It was an official port from id, it actually was in a cd with various freeware
Doom is installed standard / included with SGI Irix 6.5.x, with a full install (including the demos) you can launch it from the "demos" application group...
I am sure it was quite superior and painless compared to aix. Solaris and Irix were the least crappy versions of Unix with SCO and aix just awful
Again, your dedication to get deep into stuff and accomplish the goal no matter how many curveballs are thrown is something to be admired!
Also, 15:35 was a bit scary, as I was actually playing the Windows 95/98 version of Freecell at that moment :P
In the 90s I was in a group that ported a gigantic application to various Unixes in order to get vendors to bid against each other and keep the platform prices down. Although AIX was one of the Unixes, porting to any Unix was always a head banging nightmare back then. Our application used semaphores, message passing, and shared memory and of course libraries didn't work right, compilers didn't work right, vendors lied to us regularly, and we had to single step through assembly code to prove they were lying and fix it. We always felt like we were the first people to have ever ported anything to any platform.
This was an amazing journey to get Doom running! (And so the legend of porting Doom to everything continues...)
Absolutely a thrill to watch you speak so passionately on the subject (as always!)
Great video! I cannot begin to imagine the time and effort that went into making this. The 90s style 3D scenes / infographics are great! That price tag on the IBM machine, sheesh!
Hooray! Congrats on getting it out!
I desperately want to see you get quake 1 working and release a write up so we can follow along
The entire PowerPC platform was rock solid enough where it was used in the embedded space for quite a while. From industrial automation, medical, test equipment, telecom, to networking. It could've been soldered directly to manufacturer's boards or used a common board type like MVME or CompactPCI.
I don't know if it's still the case, but Xerox copiers and printers are or were powered by PowerPC. GameCube, Wii, and Wii U, too, of course.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 I always wondered if someone had written a Linux or BSD port that would run on the Gamecube. The used hardware is pretty close to a G3 Mac
@@HappyBeezerStudios Yes, there are various methods of getting Linux onto the Gamecube, Wii, and Wii-U. gc-linux is really out of date, though. It's based around Debian 5 and kernel 2.6.26 or thereabouts, 2009 era. The more modern wii-linux-ngx might work on Gamecube but it's not officially supported.
They are still used in space applications.
Also the F-35 uses PPC and is projected to serve until 2070!!!!
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 Current Xerox workgroup printers have an ARM front-end with a embedded NEC 80186 or similar for the print engine. They're buying chipsets and the software stack from Qualcomm (who bought CSR, who bought Zoran, who bought Oak). HP is a major Oak customer too. The full-size copiers are Intel Atom with a similar software stack.
FWIW - Yes, XL C is easily as fast as they claim compared to gcc. Also, I have run into code that gcc simply will not compile. I have been working with AIX for almost 30 years now, so reach out if you have any questions or would like some recommendations. I'd be happy to help.
OK I must be missing something here, but I'm going to ask anyway:
1) Why would someone bother to buy a 375 MHz machine in 2001? (severely outdated) What was the main selling point on this machine?
2) Installing XP on it would probably fix all the problems. Would people use these machines for Unix software specifically? Or was Windows an option?
@@FeelingShred These machines were used either as development systems for applications that would run on larger Power AIX servers or they were themselves a server for small businesses, for which it was plenty powerful. Typically when used as a server it would sit in a back room or closet and have a serial multiplexing device attached with many dumb terminals connected. Windows was never an option. In fact, back then AIX was the only real option to run on these systems. The “problems” discussed in this video never affected anyone using these systems as compiling games or Linux software was not something that was done very often. Software was either coded in-house for the platform or bought from IBM or third party vendors, like Oracle or SAS for the sole purpose of running it in AIX. While the 43P was not special, the larger servers were built much more robustly and were much better at providing uptime and high throughput than the PC counterparts in the day (and still today).
@@FeelingShred Running a UNIX with support contracts from a company like IBM. You may not remember, but there was a good 40 years or so when IBM was king of business/financial markets. These UNIX machines also didn't need as much CPU horsepower: I/O was much more important.
@@FeelingShred Yes they would use it for UNIX specifically.. all the servers were IBM and your desktop workstation needed to be interoperable. Mounting NFS volumes, using services like NIS, talking to various UNIX servers using various software... These are business machines, not personal PCs.
very cool, appreciate the effort in making a video on weird and esoteric hardware with the quality and length this has.
6:56 Interesting that the graphics card caused issues with installing using the serial console. I've never had this issue on the MCA based systems, so it must be an issue with the PCI-era firmware. That said, AIX will by default not install X (or at the very least not configure it in any way) if you install over serial (in my experience).
8:08 I believe the final x86 version of AIX will run on non-PS/2 PC compatibles. I've gotten it to at least boot in 86Box and I've heard of people getting it to work reasonably well in QEMU.
11:00 Yeah, found the volume sizes *way* too small as well. What was the thinking there on IBM's part? Makes no sense to me.
This whole video is a great how-to for when I setup my 7044 again, and I thank you for it!
You're supposed to grow the volume sizes as you go (installp has a switch that does it on the fly), and on AIX 5L, you can shrink them as well which helps alot.
As for the graphics card, I didn't bother testing it by yanking it, but it won't surprise me if it basically tries to serial as a console, but run dtlogin and causes the hanged state.
@@NCommander Ah, good to know for future reference.
Just finished watching the entire thing. I think this may be my favorite of your videos. Both because I found the topic extremely interesting, and because I think it's probably your best made video from a production standpoint. 10/10
This journey is fantastic. I used to work on RS6000 as a server OS and seeing the PC come to life and all the compiler nuances is quite the treat. Thanks for documenting this!
I used to be an AIX administrator, and one thing I'll say is IBM made a name on solid hardware. Like mentioned in the video, we had RS/6000 machines running for a decade and IBM continued to service them for a loooong time. As far as Unix goes I think SMIT is one of THE best configuration tools. Also while AIX did get better in later versions it was still a nightmare to compile many things. You are an absolute legend for wading through that hell.
if I ever get to the point that I buy a PA-RISC system, I'll have fun autopsying SAM. At least Sun gave up with admintool pretty soon.
This was well worth the wait. Thank you for going through all this AIX pain to put this together for our viewing pleasure. 😄
34:00 Original doom used so called mode 13h in DOS which is 256 color 320x200 mode where the application can specify the color palette. It was the best graphics model with linear memory space available before standard VESA graphics modes came to be with later introduced hardware. My first PC from year 1995 had a display adapter that was able to run Doom and Quake but the hardware didn't support many of the better VESA modes.
I'd expect the original code didn't support better graphics modes but 320x200 pixels with 256 colors.
Even original Quake used mode 13h but it also supported VESA modes if your PC hardware was good enough. Most hardware wasn't. In 1997, Quake was ported to OpenGL and GLQuake was introduced.
We had that box (albeit in white) running next generation firewall from checkpoint in 2001. Truly the trip into the memory lane (or how you say it).
58:20 i like how the gun sound is the only one sounding mostly correct, because sounds like you’re shooting at the poor computer to release it from its misery
After working 13 hours I needed this
Coolest movie, dude! I have the same one RS with big professional graphic card! I'm planning to install Windows NT 4.0 and also start DOOM!
I've always wondered about AIX and the Weird IBM Power machines of the 90s.. Thanks for the tour!
57:02 a bug just passing by to say hi
Great video! It was a nice ride learning about AIX and all of your misadventures. Looking forward to the next one!
Good old Abuse. The game that signalled my future love for twin-stick shooters.
My trust in HP-UX increased after watching this video, knowing it builds SDL out of the box, unlike AIX. Maybe I should try Doom on HP Visualize C3750 to replicate the suffering...
SDL would probably built just fine on AIX 5L. More direct comparsion would be to HP-UX 10, or possibly 11.00
I should too, and beat you too it as I also own a C3750.. Engarde
HAAHAH ! XLC !! Happy to share this pain with you :) It was good with P4 and P5. GCC could match the performance with a few days of hand tuning.
This is one of the most underrated channels in UA-cam. Top notch video !
Really loving the Jon Bois style interstitial graphics
What an amazing project and so much effort.
A RISCy project which many thought was Doom-ed to fail I'm sure...
58:25 I've actually heard this before.
I remember walking into a job where the previous IT people left and we had to figure out an AIX RS/6000 with little guidance or docs. AIX was close enough to what I’d encountered with Unix before to save our butts on a system crash and restore from tape. Figuring out the custom apps done in what I recall was “business basic” was certainly an adventure I will never forget.
really impressive how much effort you spent on this project. Not leaving "the road to Doom", dispite all those pain and suffering. This is real passion! 🙂Hats off!
Nothing like spelunking in old machines, OS', and apps... trying to get them to run. If I were you I would e very satisified... you did a great job...and kept me on the edge of my seat. I have to admit, that you kept pushing... I don't know... I probably don't have the reasoning skills like you do... LOL... but I was there the whole way with you. Great job!!!!
Networking booting was very common in some environments. It made installation and updates easier. Commercial Unix vendors thought charging for compilers was a good idea. Unfortunately gcc was often much slower, producing less optimized binaries or even having bugs. Lastly AIX was weird but smit was cool
Yes, netboot was pretty common in corporate IT environments at the time. I've built dozens of server environments to fascilitate that for large IBM customers during the 1990s. Ideally, IT staff would also rip any drives supporting removable media from the machine, and even internal HDDs, so everything 'storage' was network based.
Besides the easy installations and upgrades, this also gave control over storage, backups, distribution of data etc, in other words, lifetime management on data, and a locked down end-user environment with easily replaced workstations because there was no user data on those.
One of the reasons why two SunOS admins could support many hundreds of users.
Fun! I have a copy of VisualAge C for AIX 4.3.3 and a beta version of StarOffice 3 for AIX which never saw a commercial release. My 233Mhz 43P has long since died. I can stick them on an FTP somewhere if you like
Archive it! The Internet Archive is definitely the place to put prototypes for abandonware like that.
Doom came out in the 90's so it'll probably run JUST fine.
When You bought the license I pressed like button, enjoyed this vid much, thanks!
Hooooooooooly crap the production quality went WAAAAAAAY up. Duuuude this is GOLD!
34:57 type defaults to 'int' in declaration of 'fuck'
nice
The AIX adventure is truly beyond amazing. The non (*that*) portable POSIX implementation, documentation/header/library inconsistencies, and the libc incompatibilities which is still affecting modern day Linux binary compatibility... really gave me a vision on the messiness in the Unix (-like) world. Sound on Linux is still a bit of an issue to my experience... No matter how hard I try JACK just won't start on my laptop. Apparently I will not be able to debug it to this extent, let alone working with an IBM RISC businesse machine. Great content as always :3
Currently there is Pipewire as drop in replacement for both Pulseaudio and JACK. Check it out on modern distros like Fedora.
@@tomaszgasior772 Jeez, yet another new standard competing with others as xkcd said. Also I'm not at all interested in trying a distro for a new sound system that doesn't seem to boost current experiences. If it is messy to convert to from pulseaudio I'd call it a failure.
POSIX was always like that until Linux's own POSIX flavour started becoming the norm
@@rigoligorlc4795 pipewire isn't "yet another competing standard", it's primarily a *video* server that also comes with compatibility layers for pulseaudio, jack, and even alsa, making it a drop-in replacement for all three. it doesn't really do anything new in the audio department - apps are expected to just continue using the pulse and jack APIs, and pipewire also improves on some shortcomings in both jack and *especially* pulseaudio, such as pulse's horrible latency. ubuntu are fully adopting it in 22.10 (they've already been using it as a video server for a while, as has debian), and fedora's used it as the default audio server since fedora 34.
You're a hero for patching Bash's source code to solve that issue.
6:33 in the 17 years I have worked as an AIX professional I have only ever installed AIX while connected over serial. Modern systems still virtualize the serial port for each VM, you would manage using a hardware management console to access the virtual machines console. It didn't hang on the first reboot, it was likely waiting for you to select the serial connection. I've never seen AIX hang in my entire career, but admittedly I'm not that old.
I had serial hooked up on that first reboot, (you can see it on the laptop), it prints messages, and dies. In discussion, it appears the install scripts get confused if you're installing over serial while a GPU is installed, which causes it to try to start the graphical install without X running and just falls over.
Wow, kudos for sticking with it!
The title is misleading and also it isn't misleading. xD I came here to learn more about this computer and this video delivered. Excellent work sir! Sub'd!
Thank you for making this video, it makes me very happy I can run doom on my 10.5 inch tab s6 at 2600x1440 at 60 fps with a tap. Much kudos for making this video, technology has gotten so far since then. And great job on debugging aswell. Awesome.
That KDE loading screen... I had forgotten it, but the nostalgia hit like a truck.
EDIT: I wonder how hard it would be to bring it back to modern KDE. There is theming support for the loading screen after all... Maybe it is time for my own cursed project!
I had a quick look. The themes uses qml. This should in theory be perfectly doable. But I consider qml cursed, so yeah.
So I went digging further. This is entirely possible: Sources for old KDE are still easily available, and it should be possible to extract the graphics.
Some major caveats though: 1) Modern KDE/Plasma starts way too fast to realistically be able to see any of the animations (at least on my system). 2) I don't know if doing a non-full screen thing and showing the desktop in the background would be at all possible. 3) I don't think you could get it to play a sound. EDIT: You can, in the notification settings
So given that the "experience" would be quite compromised, I don't think I'll do it.
This is actually cursed! There is (on Arch Linux) /usr/share/ksplash, part of plasma-workspace. I thought that was how it worked. However that directory, with two themes in it, appear to be dead code. Instead /usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel//contents/splash is actually what is available in system settings. This is also based on QML and it seems to have a similar concept of numeric "stages" (range 1-5 I believe?) to drive the animation. So there is hope for this still.
@@priyapepsi Didn't end up having time for it.
Was wondering if you were going to mention that a decent part of the "IBM Price" was IBM support/service, which back in those days was second to none. In the early 90's a publishing company I was working for, which was built around IBM systems, had a purchase contract that included 24/7 on-site service. We had an IBM tech there so much, maintaining the servers and workstations that I thought he was an employee.
I only used AIX on the command line only , still my worst Unix I every used, with HP/UX a close second. Solaris was the best for me.
Well done for all your work here, brought back memories like OS/2 Warp, BE OS, Xenix/SCO, Next STEP etc.
What didn't you like about it?
@10:33 Tombs (tooms) are things that store dead people. Tomes (tOHMs - as in Oleander) are large books.
I am actually gonna use your video as a reference guide to try Doom on my 43p-140 machine (which pretty much is a bit older revision, but the experience should be pretty much identical) that I've recently quite randomly obtained, thanks a lot for your work!
You're like the AVGN of old Unix machines.
This is one of the most engrossing videos I've ever watched on UA-cam regarding tech adventures - and misadventures for that matter. I salute you and I've subscribed! 😁
What an amazing mishmash of old UIs, completely and utterly foreign to me. Seeing you go through all those configurations actually knowing what you're doing created a real sense of *intimidation* in me. Excellent content
You certainly seems to be the most patient person I have every seen online. Next, you'd probably be stacking US quaters on edge in a moving train, and continue until you have 24 in a stack. Your experience here is what made Apple great. Point, click, work. Not infinite amounts of C file editing and compiling. You earned a subscription and a like. Great job!
Appreciated
Memories!!!!
I remember when the RS6000 first came out. I was given the 'enviable' task of porting the company software suite to AIX on a bottom end RS6000.
IBM were not going to let us 'borrow' the machine for us to do the work 'in house', so I had to throw all the source onto QIC tapes.
The only 'problems' I encountered were actually bugs in our own source! (Specifically, our code back then ASSUMED that a pid, uid and gid were 16 bit values and AIX used 32 bit values.
It took me a couple hours to find and apply fixes and then a couple DAYS of compile time to generate the binaries.
(The sheer SIZE of the resultant binaries was a bit of a shock... RISC truly DOES use a lot more instructions!!! Same finding as I had on the first port to the MIPS based DEC machines)
OK I must be missing something here, but I'm going to ask anyway:
1) Why would someone bother to buy a 375 MHz machine in 2001? (severely outdated) What was the main selling point on this machine?
2) Installing XP on it would probably fix all the problems. Would people use these machines for Unix software specifically? Or was Windows an option?
You know that a gui irredeemably sucks when they can't figure that left justifying the icon to the label looks awful.
As soon as I heard the stuttering at 58:12 I knew the Nuked OPL3 emulator that Chocolate Doom uses was the cause.
Old kde and Gnome give me memories about my first try on Linux.
"In an attempt to make myself look competent. . . ." Oh, I'm more than convinced you're competent--truly!
Thank you for yet another fantastic video. Well done!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I do remember running a desktop environment back in my college days on AIX 4.3.x. There was a good word processor available for it as I leveraged it for various assignments. WordPerfect comes to mind. There was also a spread sheet application from that same era whose name is escaping me.
The monitor issue might be addressed by a EDID minder to restrict what resolutions/modes that the graphics adapter can be seen. Almost a requirement to leverage newer displays on older, arcane hardware.
XLC does have an advantage over GCC though how much varies by project as mentioned. The big advantage of using XLC (or say ICC on Intel x86 hardware) is the finer tuning levels with the ability to leverage unique hardware attributes. For example, XLC produced better vector code than gcc as gcc's original implementation was targeted for the various G4 class chips. On that note, it is the compiler it'd recommend for building software that requires supervisor or hypervisor only instructions as IBM supports them better in their own compiler. If I had to guess, modern versions of GCC can likely produce faster code than XLC from that era.
Since you were having semaphore problems, how many were actually available when you were running the game? Increasing this limit often resolved some oddities, though as arcane as these problems are, I can only guess if it'd help at all.
The performance of the RS/6000 is generally found in its superior double precision FPU performance at the time. The G3 and G4 lines had great integer performance but lacked the high performance FPU of the 604e. In addition the G3 was only implemented in a single processor configuration while the 604e supported quad CPU configuration. Against the G4, the 604e's stronger FPU gets out done by the G4's vector unit able to four single precision values at once. However, the 604e still reigns supreme when it came to double precision as the vector unit on the G4's didn't support the 64 bit data type. There were dual G4 options and this chips did support a quad configuration but Apple never shipped them like that and IBM never adopted them. One other difference with IBM hardware is that they had a higher clocked system bus than what Apple was using at the time. I think the 375 MHz model had its bus running at 125 MHz and used 133 MHz SDRAM memory that was underclocked to match it. On the flip side, Apple of that era only had a 100 MHz bus speed but did include 64 bit PCI slots + 2x AGP where as this RS/6000 was stuck with 32 bit PCI.
I had one of these machines (actually a 43p-140 rather than 150) at my desk at one time. Eventually got a 44p (tower case) around 2007 (it was collecting duct in someone else's office). I actually had Thunderbird running on it, for the very brief time IBM enabled IMAP support on their Notes Mail servers. There were a bunch of 43p machines on the server floor, as it was the only machine that would run the debug/firmware/test software for our big Power4 systems and the switch adapters in them. Not even a slightly newer 44p would work.
The problem with X on AIX was it was based on an *ancient* version of X11 (might have even been X11 v5.x). The color pallets on AIX reminded me more of the old CGA days, although I think AIX could handle more than 16 colours at a time (maybe). I briefly tried re-compiling X.Org 6.x under AIX, but I knew even less programming than I do now (and that ain't much). There had also been someone on the AIX team in Austin pushing to get X.Org ported, nothing came of that either. I think the *only* reason there were updated X packages (or updated packages of many other utilities) was they had to update C libraries for 3rd-party and customer applications that evolved far faster than AIX.
Documentation? AIX is the only Unix system I know of that *didn't* install the man pages by default. But expanding/growing disk volumes was far better than what Linux & such were capable of at the time. AIX was pretty advanced in it's time, but it stagnated while everyone else kept advancing and ultimately passing AIX.
I've actually gotten a 43p-140 since releasing this, it runs WIndows NT/powerpc :). I should do a livestream on that, but we'll see.
Oh your a pro.... Just stumbled onto this channel. Great stuff
I am amazed at your knowledge, talent and perseverance.
Road to Doom indeed. "M" for sure. :) I've used AIX and we even have a few (SunOS) systems still running CDE at work so I feel some of your pain. Thanks for the entertaining lunch break.
6:15 Funnily enough network booting is one of the most common reasons to enter SMS mode even on modern machines. Network booting isn't just for thin clients, it allows the system to be booted over bootp protocol to a AIX NIM master, where you can do things like a bare metal restore from a mksysb backup or even maintenance boot from boot files located on the NIM master.
The absolute *spite* in his voice during when he was talking about changing the color modes is fantastic. I got whiplash from it lol
Very interesting and well done. This is a blast from the past since I worked as a developer writing software for AIX on Power systems from about 1995 to 2012, transitioning to more Linux around 2007. SMIT was a joy, and much fun was had dealing with IBM's shared and static libraries, where both were .a file extensions, getting threading to work, and moving from 32 bit to 64 bit. I also spend a couple years in compiler development for AIX on IBM's mainframe 3090 systems, where AIX was even more entertaining. Linux and X11 were also an adventure in the mid 90's where one could easily literally burn out an expensive monitor if one wasn't careful with their X configuration files.
Your name sounds familiar. If you know about AIX/390, chances are we crossed paths in the early 90s. I worked on the TCP/IP stack for it at Kingston. Before that, I worked on AIX/RT and AIX/PS2 in Danbury, CT. This all seems like a lifetime ago now.
@@davetronics I worked briefly on Aix/370 - sent out to Santa Monica for 4 months to learn it for software support. That got moved to Austin so I came home. Couple years later I got moved to AIX/ESA in Kingston where I probably made a nuisance of myself as the lead on system installation software. That group morphed into a HPC development group with SP/1 and SP/2 and AIX, eventually morphed again to the land of HPC on Linux. Stayed until 2013, early retirement incentive, contracted with Intel for a year and a half part time then contracted back to my old group part time until last December.
I used to use VisualAge on OS/2 for work. It was an entire development environment, including editor, compiler and centralized source control. It had features that no other system had then, and I haven't seen even up to today. It was a real pleasure to use in a team.
I would have given up at the first setback! Well done!