But I'm sure the "fun factor" in a Ferrari is much greater and of course there's a nostalgia factor as well... it was "THE" supercar when I was a kid. I would love to drive one today and it would be much cooler than a Tesla Y or Ioniq 5 :-)
This is a common feature on Windows by the way, Aix is special in many ways, one of them is being COFF land not ELF.
Another shared feature is symbols being private by default with explicit exports.
XCOFF is pretty cool, actually, e.g. it does not require for two sets of the same library to exist, i.e. one to use for static linking and another for dynamic loading – the same .a archive can be used for both.
The .loader section keeps import and export symbol tables (what the binary provides to others, and what it needs resolved), library search paths and dependencies, and relocation and fix-up details. If the .a is being used for static linking, the .loader section is simply ignored.
The guy I was supposed to prepare the system for could only install Oracle from some crappy java UI wizard so I had to request the sysadmin to install a lot of Linux libraries and programs to enable X11 over SSH.
I had some "interesting" experiences getting stuff to work on WPAR's.
But yeah, bit more like a container.
Nicely put (oof!). I believe it also enforced a minimal color depth, which none of our machines could directly support on their own hardware, forcing the use of remote X11 displays.
X Windows ran great on AIX before Linux was a thing. IBM was involved with its's inception (Project Athena).
Also AIX was a safer and better certified system back then (think DoD stuff).
Mind that this was early Windows XP era. The Windows "workstation" would probably have something like a RIVA TNT with 16MB of graphics memory. Meanwhile the Intellistation had way more powerful options (e.g. 128MB on a single card, or exotic 4 cards x 16MB configurations).
But even if you could beef your PC hardware to similar specs, the CAD software was probably just not there (yet). Not to mention that pre-SP2 Windows XP were pretty terrible on their own.
The ATi equivalent was FireGL.
> At that point Windows XP 32-bit was the most commonly used variant, and while you could run XP 64-bit (and IBM did have native support for it on the IntelliStation 9228), XP 64-bit had so many problems so most users were stuck with 3.9 GB of RAM. Therefore if we were to assume that UNIX and said UNIX hardware offered way more memory, it starts to make sense
CATIA V5 was the first version to support Windows NT. However, it was a complete rewrite, resulting in a very different UI and workflows. Even the file formats were largely incompatible with V4, so the automotive industry and their suppliers stayed with CATIA V4 for many years after the release of V5. And the only way to run CATIA V4 was on a UNIX workstation.
Windows was slow, with limited memory, a crappy scheduler and almost no professional SW written for it. Its security was also (until Win XP) nonexistent.
As the kids say: LOL.
Probably not. Apollo was a CAD vendor. Almost all CAD workstations where i worked 2002-2006 were HP-UX
Very solid boxes!
hxorr•4mo ago
tdeck•4mo ago