AIX and AIXL

INTRODUCTION

AIX short for Advanced Interactive eXecutive was first entered into the market by IBM in February 1990. AIX is an implementation of Unix derived from both AT&T Unix System V and 4.3 BSD. AIX offers the Korn (ksh) shell, Bourne (sh) and C (csh) shells however defaults to the Korn shell.

AIXL (AIX 5L) is IBM's key element to IBM's AIX / Linux affinity strategy, IBM is working to implement Linux API compatibility within AIX and deliver a common set of application development tools and utilities across AIX and Linux.

OVERVIEW

Computer
AIX primarily designed for medium to large scale servers and mainframes. However, can also be used in workstations.
Supported hardware
Supports standard peripherals: PCI Slots, SCSI, PS/2 keyboard and mouse, Ethernet.
Platform
Power1, Power2, Power3, PowerPC, RS64, P2SC
Address Space
64-bit
Multiple CPU's
SMP and MPP available.
Maximum memory
16GB
Memory protection
yes
Maximum file size
Maximum file size = Unknown
Maximum file system size = Unknown
Other

*The above overview is based on the latest version of AIX unless otherwise stated, previous versions my not have the same overview.

AIX VERSIONS

Version	Brief information
AIX/ESA	Runs native on S/370 and S/390 mainframes and is based on OSF/1.
1.x	For 386 PS/2
2.x	For PS RTs
3.x	AIX 3.1 originally released in 1990 For RS/6000 includes paging kernel, logical volume manager.
3.2	Adds TLI/STREAMS. SV-based with many enhancements.
4.1x	Includes support for PowerPC
4.2x	AIX 4.3.2 originally released October 5, 1998
4.3x	The original release of AIX 4.3 was released in 1997 and AIX 4.3.3 release in October 1999. New features include 3D-OpenGL, Phigs, 64-bit support, Java implementation and up to 16GB of RAM support