Great video. All of my UNIX tinkering has been with SunOS/Solaris and I didn't realize how easy I had it, seeing this makes me want to go back in time and give those Sun people a hug for making a well thought out product.
A very nice video as always. Mate, even I got tired just by watching!!! Simply the way that you cannot select the complete hierarchy and need to go element by element brought to me my nightmares from the 90s, dealing with similar systems. with weird ways to make questions for the simplest "next" screen or parameter. Loved to see how you sorted this out. Just one idea for the next one: if possible, please use a linux starting a remote X11 graphical session on the AIX. My back experience in production is that we always have the "master console" in text mode and run the GUI in X sessions somewhere else + X sessions from users. Cannot wait for the next one, but please, make the next one an "easy" video..... 😆
Awesome video on the ANS 700 and Apple's AIX. I learned a lot, especially how bad things were on these things. I have quite a few Macs, and I've been intrigued by the thought of owing one of these machines. Now, not so much! LOL! I've lived the terrible experience through your video. I'll stick to Apple's A/UX 3
Soooo.. those codes on the front. That's called the BIST "B.uilt I.n S.elf T.est". Yep. It's for status. Old RS/6000's had 3 or 4 (depending) HEX LED's on the front of the case for it. 2 uses.. one you can see "where" it is upto in the pre-boot or boot. If it crashes, you can see where it was. Also once you get them running, if the system crashes, push the reset button ONCE (!) and it'll show you the last subsystem that hopefully crashed the system. Press the reset twice (!) to actually reset. Pretty useful if something craps AIX out hard. You can look up the codes. So for instance my machine doesn't boot currently (I yanked the HDD) and there's no bootable CD-ROM, and the serial ports are disabled. How do you know with no screen or serial output where the machine stopped in it's tests? Code is 262 .. look it up so it didn't detect a keyboard which it detects from the 50ohm resistance from the built-in keyboard speaker. Insert keyboard..and it cruises past 262 and about 60 codes later it starts testing the serial ports. Hopefully you get the mentality for testing stuff before using it.
also your comment on the xlC.rte ..that's just the runtime support libs for VAC, not VAC itself. You should with a bit of fiddling be able to get VAC 4.x or maaaybe 6.0 on 4.1.
I love that it deletes comments. I'll re-type it. The reason your smit was missing was that there is 2 smit's. "smit" and "smitty". Smitty is the text version, "smit" is the graphical one. Your CDROM crapped out with the x11 packages, so you don't get x11 and smit. 'smitty' should still be there. If you have smit installed and you access it without a sensible $DISPLAY .. the graphical version of smit will bomb out to the text version 'smitty'. that's how it works. Call 'smitty' directly. Fun story from a friend that passed away (Chris Scheifer): "The running man we called back in germany as Smitty. he was the IBM sales representitive for HWMA/SWMA and he runs away with your money. If at the end of the support period you did not call on it, he throws his arms in the air to shout yay! else he falls down crying." It was very funny at the time :)
The $TERM type of vt220 it probably doesn't know. I'd wager thats why your PF keys didn't work and you had to hit escape. ^s and ^q is also handy for scroll lock if you need to freeze a screen during install when it gives you commands you need to run post-install (sometimes theres a few).
On all Mac’s, including servers, if volume is turned all the way down in the OS a flag is set in PRAM to disable chime. You reset the PRAM when you changed the battery and thus have the chime.
@@pederb82Which is almost timpossible to do on an ANS. The PSU modules don't operate outside of the chassis. They're also riveted together, so getting inside one is a destructive process.
I remember my first Slackware install back in the mid 90's the X11/Gui implementation looked identical to that .. If im not mistaken the other desktop you got to i think you had to have a 2 button mouse and right click brought up the ONLY menu. also IIRC if you hit CTRL-Alt-Del it would kill the window manager without killing the underlying OS, so you could more easily troubleshoot graphics settings, because at this point Everything was CRT's still and the Linux GUI Managers where directly driving purely analog CRT's so when you had to input screen measurements, thats because DDC didnt exist, we're talking SVGA being TOP resoloution. - So, i know everything i[ve said is based on experience with linux, which is NOT, AIX, however, the two projects shared methodology and code whenever possible. So Take with a grain of salt. - Fantastic video brother!!
The 500 models had a default left power supply not hot swappable and wired in. The 700 models had the option of 2 power supplies with a power supply backplane board and hot swappable.
The little running man animation is a suggestion that you should run far away from this OS. Could the UX issues be fixed by using open firmware to set the resolution before booting the install cd?
That is an interesting question. I don't know if you can set the resolution on this system. I know it's possible on SPARC systems that use Open Firmware. I will look into this.
A lot of IBM in this Apple. This whole installation process reminded me of a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame...and the horror of Lotus Notes, which was owned by IBM around this time. They must have let the same people work on both projects. ...and Plymouth is one of the worst things to happen to Linux distros...
I watched this despite the fact I have zero intention of messing with AIX. Call it curiosity, call it schadenfruede. I do have a penchant for slightly odd OSes, however (I used Rhapsody in a production environment because AppleShare was so unstable) so I can't rule it out. Did you ever get to the bottom of the spontaneous power issue? The weirdest problem I ever discovered was a PC that was turning itself off randomly or rebooting randomly (actually, it was turning itself off and back on again). It was only after switching out everything without resolution that I narrowed it down to corrosion within the power switch itself. I'm not saying that's the case here, it just made me think of that.
I tried so many things like that... Ctrl + click, Option + click, Command + click... nothing. Some documentation says that in the fully installed system, doing left arrow or right arrow while clicking will simulate the other buttons, but that did not work here.
Overall the AIX install was pretty much identical to an install on a rs/6000. You should have been able to find a lot more information searching for AIX installation guides compared to looking for ANS specific information.
This reminds me a lot of when I tried installing the x86 version of Solaris 8/9. Its picky as hell, VERY touchy on what GPU it will work with and locks up if you don't give it the exact one that it wants. Regarding Netscape, I can't vouch for AIX but on Solaris it defaults to version 4 even though version 6 IS installed (its somewhere in /opt I think) maybe a similar setup on Apple machines? Looks nothing like the AIX I used back in my college days (2.2.1 on an RT6150), at least you have a GUI (sort of) and don't have to wrestle with Ined for all your text editing needs.
The fundamental problem is, like all IBM enterprise products, you're supposed to have an IBM Customer Engineer come and set it up for you. If you do it right, it's touchless voice command: you tell the guy you want Netscape, and Netscape is installed.
Right... you're not buying a computer. You're buying an experience! 😅 I have some additional AIX projects lined up, so we'll see if later versions improved any.
Great video. All of my UNIX tinkering has been with SunOS/Solaris and I didn't realize how easy I had it, seeing this makes me want to go back in time and give those Sun people a hug for making a well thought out product.
A very nice video as always. Mate, even I got tired just by watching!!! Simply the way that you cannot select the complete hierarchy and need to go element by element brought to me my nightmares from the 90s, dealing with similar systems. with weird ways to make questions for the simplest "next" screen or parameter. Loved to see how you sorted this out. Just one idea for the next one: if possible, please use a linux starting a remote X11 graphical session on the AIX. My back experience in production is that we always have the "master console" in text mode and run the GUI in X sessions somewhere else + X sessions from users. Cannot wait for the next one, but please, make the next one an "easy" video..... 😆
What a torture of a UX! Physically felt this video. Great job!
Awesome video on the ANS 700 and Apple's AIX. I learned a lot, especially how bad things were on these things. I have quite a few Macs, and I've been intrigued by the thought of owing one of these machines. Now, not so much! LOL! I've lived the terrible experience through your video. I'll stick to Apple's A/UX 3
Soooo.. those codes on the front. That's called the BIST "B.uilt I.n S.elf T.est". Yep. It's for status. Old RS/6000's had 3 or 4 (depending) HEX LED's on the front of the case for it. 2 uses.. one you can see "where" it is upto in the pre-boot or boot. If it crashes, you can see where it was. Also once you get them running, if the system crashes, push the reset button ONCE (!) and it'll show you the last subsystem that hopefully crashed the system. Press the reset twice (!) to actually reset. Pretty useful if something craps AIX out hard. You can look up the codes. So for instance my machine doesn't boot currently (I yanked the HDD) and there's no bootable CD-ROM, and the serial ports are disabled. How do you know with no screen or serial output where the machine stopped in it's tests? Code is 262 .. look it up so it didn't detect a keyboard which it detects from the 50ohm resistance from the built-in keyboard speaker. Insert keyboard..and it cruises past 262 and about 60 codes later it starts testing the serial ports. Hopefully you get the mentality for testing stuff before using it.
also your comment on the xlC.rte ..that's just the runtime support libs for VAC, not VAC itself. You should with a bit of fiddling be able to get VAC 4.x or maaaybe 6.0 on 4.1.
I love that it deletes comments. I'll re-type it. The reason your smit was missing was that there is 2 smit's. "smit" and "smitty". Smitty is the text version, "smit" is the graphical one. Your CDROM crapped out with the x11 packages, so you don't get x11 and smit. 'smitty' should still be there. If you have smit installed and you access it without a sensible $DISPLAY .. the graphical version of smit will bomb out to the text version 'smitty'. that's how it works. Call 'smitty' directly. Fun story from a friend that passed away (Chris Scheifer): "The running man we called back in germany as Smitty. he was the IBM sales representitive for HWMA/SWMA and he runs away with your money. If at the end of the support period you did not call on it, he throws his arms in the air to shout yay! else he falls down crying." It was very funny at the time :)
The $TERM type of vt220 it probably doesn't know. I'd wager thats why your PF keys didn't work and you had to hit escape. ^s and ^q is also handy for scroll lock if you need to freeze a screen during install when it gives you commands you need to run post-install (sometimes theres a few).
On all Mac’s, including servers, if volume is turned all the way down in the OS a flag is set in PRAM to disable chime. You reset the PRAM when you changed the battery and thus have the chime.
Also: don’t ever just plug in a system like this, or swap power supplies. Electronics law #1 is broken solidly here. Thou shall check voltages!!!
@@pederb82Which is almost timpossible to do on an ANS. The PSU modules don't operate outside of the chassis. They're also riveted together, so getting inside one is a destructive process.
@@slightlyevolved then at least unhook as much as possible while still able to run it up and check. He never ever did at all.
I remember my first Slackware install back in the mid 90's the X11/Gui implementation looked identical to that .. If im not mistaken the other desktop you got to i think you had to have a 2 button mouse and right click brought up the ONLY menu. also IIRC if you hit CTRL-Alt-Del it would kill the window manager without killing the underlying OS, so you could more easily troubleshoot graphics settings, because at this point Everything was CRT's still and the Linux GUI Managers where directly driving purely analog CRT's so when you had to input screen measurements, thats because DDC didnt exist, we're talking SVGA being TOP resoloution. - So, i know everything i[ve said is based on experience with linux, which is NOT, AIX, however, the two projects shared methodology and code whenever possible. So Take with a grain of salt. - Fantastic video brother!!
Love this channel and this kind of videos!
The 500 models had a default left power supply not hot swappable and wired in. The 700 models had the option of 2 power supplies with a power supply backplane board and hot swappable.
Been a LONG time since I've seen the old CDE UI and good old SMIT (I only ever used the command line). I don't miss them or AIX 🙂
The little running man animation is a suggestion that you should run far away from this OS.
Could the UX issues be fixed by using open firmware to set the resolution before booting the install cd?
That is an interesting question. I don't know if you can set the resolution on this system. I know it's possible on SPARC systems that use Open Firmware. I will look into this.
A lot of IBM in this Apple. This whole installation process reminded me of a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame...and the horror of Lotus Notes, which was owned by IBM around this time. They must have let the same people work on both projects.
...and Plymouth is one of the worst things to happen to Linux distros...
Thanks for reminding why it was often pronounced "aches", it's just aches and pains the whole way
I watched this despite the fact I have zero intention of messing with AIX. Call it curiosity, call it schadenfruede. I do have a penchant for slightly odd OSes, however (I used Rhapsody in a production environment because AppleShare was so unstable) so I can't rule it out. Did you ever get to the bottom of the spontaneous power issue? The weirdest problem I ever discovered was a PC that was turning itself off randomly or rebooting randomly (actually, it was turning itself off and back on again). It was only after switching out everything without resolution that I narrowed it down to corrosion within the power switch itself. I'm not saying that's the case here, it just made me think of that.
Does Ctrl+Click work as the right mouse button
I tried so many things like that... Ctrl + click, Option + click, Command + click... nothing. Some documentation says that in the fully installed system, doing left arrow or right arrow while clicking will simulate the other buttons, but that did not work here.
Overall the AIX install was pretty much identical to an install on a rs/6000. You should have been able to find a lot more information searching for AIX installation guides compared to looking for ANS specific information.
This reminds me a lot of when I tried installing the x86 version of Solaris 8/9. Its picky as hell, VERY touchy on what GPU it will work with and locks up if you don't give it the exact one that it wants. Regarding Netscape, I can't vouch for AIX but on Solaris it defaults to version 4 even though version 6 IS installed (its somewhere in /opt I think) maybe a similar setup on Apple machines?
Looks nothing like the AIX I used back in my college days (2.2.1 on an RT6150), at least you have a GUI (sort of) and don't have to wrestle with Ined for all your text editing needs.
OMG! A complete usability disaster :-( I hope RS6000 systems weren't like this..
The fundamental problem is, like all IBM enterprise products, you're supposed to have an IBM Customer Engineer come and set it up for you. If you do it right, it's touchless voice command: you tell the guy you want Netscape, and Netscape is installed.
Right... you're not buying a computer. You're buying an experience! 😅 I have some additional AIX projects lined up, so we'll see if later versions improved any.
decompression errors like that make me think bad memory
edit: well if the later version installs pretty much rules that out lol
Maybe... but I was eventually able to install 4.1.5 without any such problems. I'm suspicious that it could be disc rot.
@@TalesofWeirdStuff agreed
Give NetBSD a spin for a more modern take?
First comment!
A winner is you! 😂
If I ever come across one of those I'll just scrap it and sell the boards l o l