Yep, I've seen that, too. There are some use cases where IBM still excels. There is a popular perception that IBM is a has-been dinosaur, especially with the System z (mainframe) stuff, but I still haven't heard that Visa International has moved even one of their three world-wide super data centers off of that platform. The Linux world could avoid reinventing a lot of wheels in the future looking to the lessons IBM has publicly published about in the mainframe world. Even POWER/AIX is scoffed at in many Linux circles.

I've certainly seen my share of underutilized System p servers, but in the right hands, they're a powerful option, with features that Linux still hasn't caught up to yet. For a cool feature that I would love to see on Linux someday, peek at checkpoint-restart, which enables some really sweet capabilities [1]. Generally, anytime I hear a business tell me uptime reliability is nearly a blank-check requirement (when downtime losses are described in 5+ figures per minute and up, and it is a 24x7x365 operation), but they must still stay on a Unixen box because that is what their IT shop knows, and it's not a parallelizable application, I start looking in AIX's direction. It can be a right PITA to work with if you grew up with Linux or BSD, but once you figure out some add-ons to use, it gets much more pleasant to use.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-l...

I find sad that many aren't aware how many cool features are available in IBM and Unisys mainframes, still not available in mainstream computing.

The AS/400 (IBM i) and ClearPath are my favourites.

One with its TIMI architecture and kernel level JIT, the other with an history going back to the 60's using an almost memory safe systems programming language, while people are still debating how to replace C.

Is there an article that compares the features present in Power vs x86 and this almost memory safe language?

If its not confidential, could I ask why? IBM has been pivoting POWER to Little-Endian and has been focusing more on Linux with Red-Hat, SUSE and now Ubuntu available.

Power is big iron reliable. if you can pay for it it likely pays off. Probably easier to manage a handful of million dollar Power/AIX setups than 1000s of servers.

I don't follow, this is the same POWER 'big iron' just running Linux instead of AIX.

To complement siblings answer, there are several types of failures where PC hardware will just crash and burn, while POWER will just work as usual.

The hardware is where the magic is not the software.

I don't touch Aix since 2003, but really enjoyed using it.

Just curious, do they still support the Windows/Symbian style of dynamic libraries, with import libraries?