IBM Corp may have given up writing an AIX personality for Workplace operating system (CI No 2,590) but it has not given up on a Workplace Unix. The company is developing a totally new version of Unix, incompatible with AIX applications, for use with OS/2 for PowerPC. Miles Barel, worldwide brand manager for OS/2, told our sister publication PowerPC News last week that the new Unix will borrow heavily from the AIX Application Programming Interface set, but is also closely based on standards such as SPEC 1170 and Motif. It would be inaccurate to call it AIX, Barel points out, because it will be neither binary nor source code-compatible. However he is adamant that transferring applications between IBM New Unix and AIX will be considerably easier than most Unix conversions: most people reckon that the definition of the average Unix conversion is one weekend’s work. An AIX to New Unix conversion will take more like a Saturday. Assistant general manager worldwide marketing at IBM Corp’s RS/6000 division, Jeff Mason, described the Unix as a Spec1170-compliant subset of AIX. The system is dubbed Workplace Unix and is being developed entirely by Lee Reiswig’s Personal Software Products division. Workplace Unix will be hosted directly on the microkernel and will not need the OS/2 personality to be present to run, which sounds like possible competition for AIX, despite what IBM is claiming. Of course New Unix cannot be PowerOpen-compliant either. An obvious alternative approach would have been simply to retain the existing AIX application programming interface set, and therefore source compatibility, so that applications could be re-compiled for the Little-Endian operaing system. But Barel said key differences, introduced by the use of the microkernel, preclude this approach. His emphasis on standards sounds as if IBM may be borrowing technology from the OSF/1 effort. The Open Software Foundation’s offering was another Unix – based on the IBM microkernel – developed by a group whose leading lights included IBM and Digital Equipment Corp. Why is IBM building the new system? Though it has proved impractical to implement kosher AIX over the microkernel, Barel said the company has identified a demand to run existing Unix applications on the desktop alongside OS/2.
Magnificent IBM obsessions
So the new operating system is designed to attract Unix developers to Workplace like bees to honey. There is a problem – the possible confusion that the move will cause. Barel is adamant that there will be no confusion, just as he is adamant that this New Unix is not really a New Unix. AIX remains the strategic Unix for everyone that only wants to use Unix. It is those users that might otherwise find themselves rebooting between OS/2 and AIX that will want the new product. Bur the fact remains that Unix developers, targeting IBM’s PowerPC Box, will be faced with four choices: develop to the AIX application programming interface and ignore the New Unix user base; develop to the New Unix base and ignore the AIX users; develop for both; use a subset of Application Programming Interfaces that are common to both and end up with a lowest common denominator application. There is also going to be uncertainty, no matter what IBM says, about future strategic directions. Barel paints a picture in which both New Unix and AIX carry on in parallel for ever – but can this really be the case? Would not some form of rationalisation or convergence make sense? One way and another, the Workplace strategy looks as if it is almost ready to join those other magnificent IBM obsessions that stretch through AD/Cycle, Systems Application Architecture, Micro Channel Architecture all the way back through the Fort Knox machine that was to have created a single success to System 38 and 4300, right back to Future System, which collapsed und-er its own contradictions way back in 1976.
