IBM AIX
During the 1970s, UNIX spread through universities, but without a standardized commercial version. Each installation required adapting the source code to the local hardware. This technical constraint led to the creation of multiple variants, each reflecting the specificities of its environment.
IBM took interest in the UNIX phenomenon and launched AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) in 1986, developed with the help of Interactive Systems Corporation. The name actually came from ISC, which had already created the PC-IX system for IBM personal computers.
IBM was juggling two distinct Power architectures at the time. On one side, OS/400 equipped a range of machines, on the other, AIX established itself on the IBM 6150 RT workstation in 1986. The AS/400 followed the next year with OS/400.
AIX's real rise to prominence came in 1990 with Version 3, renamed AIX/6000. It accompanied the RS/6000 platform which definitively buried the IBM RT. This RS/6000 generation inaugurated the era of POWER and PowerPC microprocessors at IBM. AIX finally found its machine of choice.
1994 marked an important technical milestone with AIX 4, which introduced symmetric multiprocessing on the first RS/6000 SMP servers. The system matured through version 4.3.3 in 1999, while IBM rethought its product strategy.
The year 2000 transformed IBM's organization. The company unified its server lines under the eServer banner: AS/400 became iSeries, RS/6000 transformed into pSeries. Beyond the marketing, this restructuring concealed a technical reality. The arrival of the POWER4 processor in 2001-2002 brought the hardware platforms closer together. The differences between "p" and "i" systems were now limited to the software layers.
POWER5 took an additional step in 2004 by making the System i5 570 strictly identical to the System p5 570. AIX 5.3 arrived in August, taking advantage of this standardization. POWER6 followed in May 2007, accompanied by AIX 6.1 in November. IBM pushed the logic to its conclusion in April 2008 by merging its two lines under the Power Systems designation. A single hardware, three system choices: IBM i, AIX or Linux.
The 2010s followed at a sustained pace. POWER7 arrived in February 2010, AIX 7.1 in September. POWER7+ landed in August 2012, then POWER8 in June 2014. This latest processor broke with tradition: each core handled eight hardware threads in parallel, a massively multithreaded architecture that exploited large caches to maximize memory and I/O throughput.
AIX 7.2, announced in October 2015, brought a remarkable feature: Live Kernel Update. Kernel patches could now be applied without disrupting running applications. This version also cleaned up obsolete components and restructured the network with bos.net.tcp.client, but it absolutely required POWER7 or a later generation.
POWER9 arrived in 2016 with its 14 nm fabrication and 3.9 GHz frequency. Performance gains reached 50% compared to POWER8, and doubled versus POWER7+. On AIX 7.2 TL 3, SMT8 mode activated automatically, fully exploiting the processor's capabilities.
Today, AIX powers the most critical infrastructures. Finance, industry, retail, telecommunications, healthcare, government and public sector: wherever reliability is non-negotiable. The system has proven its ability to evolve with new hardware architectures without sacrificing compatibility with existing systems.
This technical longevity perfectly illustrates IBM's strategy: converging its server lines toward a unified platform while preserving customers' software investments. AIX embodies this continuity in innovation, heir to UNIX but resolutely oriented toward the future of enterprise computing.