I think binary configuration files requiring specialized editors weren't all that popular. We had a RS6000 box in the lab, originally acquired to assure compatibility of our enterprise NAS appliance with AIX. Nobody liked that box and as Linux won the Unix wars, we were relieved that we didn't have to deal with it.

(and yes, while Linux was then the (much) preferred choice, we had prior experience with other *nixes)

i remember every error message from every unix tool spitting out some unique identifier code... i presume some ibm documentation standard.

i also remember a weird gui for administering everything. i assume that was the result of ibm's big investments.

Perhaps you are remembering the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) GUI? https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/txseries/8.2?topic=SSAL2T_8.2.0/...

I used to get a kick out of how the lil 'running man' in SMIT would fall over if a command failed :-P More sense of humour then I gave IBM credit for :-D

> the lil 'running man' in SMIT would fall over if a command failed

To anyone wondering: https://youtu.be/YMWSD69BWqI?t=114

Heh - I can't believe someone actually filmed it :-) Thanks!

IBM GUIs were always pretty interesting. The cursor in early ThinkPad BIOS was a bird that flapped its wings.

Smit happens(tm)

Though I always preferred it from the command line (appropriately, the binary is named smitty: see, IBM does have a sense of humour).

yeah it was actually a TUI. the screenshot looks right but the name "smit" doesn't sound familiar. i want to say it had a three letter name (this was circa 1996).

motif... lol

IBM sells (sold?) a thing called the HMC that manages multiple AIX machines, and their LPAR/WPARs. It was a web interface, maybe that is what you remember?

It had a dedicated 1U server you had to buy too lol, what a grift

Yeah, that's what started turning me off modern systems. None of my earlier hardware required it, but my POWER6 did. You can do some things in ASMI but if you want to reconfigure an LPAR or (horrors) add one, then you're digging out the HMC. It was just an off the shelf IBM x86 system running Linux, so I should image it and see if I can make a VM out of it instead of lugging it out of storage now and then.

The real grift was Capacity on Demand, which requires access keys to unlock hardware only IBM provides. That was a lot of "fun" when the system planar died and the new one didn't give me all my processors back. It took nearly a week to iron it out with IBM directly; even the VAR couldn't fix it.

I run my HMC in a VM running in libvirtd. IIRC, IBM provided the image as a VMware appliance, but it was quite simple to convert to something open source (at the cost of being an unsupported configuration, but it's not as if I could afford an IBM sorry contact to start with), and the result works great with my single POWER7 machine (8233-E8B)