last I used AIX was around......mmmmm.....1996-7. I don't remember the version number. Must be gettin old.

As a (developer's) desktop I found it much less nifty/friendly/useful than both the SunOS (nobody trusted Solaris yet) and HP-UX machines I used the year before (although HP's original cfront based C++ compiler from that era was far and away the worst compiler ever).

We seem to have different ideas about what makes a good OS - mine involves ease of application development and user experience. I seem to recall doing Motif programmin on AIX to be painful - tooltip windows would simply freeze and the app would stop responding to events deep in the event dispatching code.

Even more criminal is that IBM licensed but never shipped NeXTStep for AIX (although a friend of mine who was inside IBM at the time said he had a desktop with it for awhile). So AIX might have had the same decent UI layer as OS X does today - except IBM fumbled that ball too (FWIW, there was OpenStep for Solaris too for awhile and Sun fumbled the same ball).

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BTW, I found out why my linux desktop is ancient - seems we have a custom modified kernel for some reason (our app server pretty well takes over the box and wants some wacky capabilities) and there is work to get it updated.

Whether this was a [link|http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/08/amazon_probs_continue/|good idea] is debateable - although this article definitely exagerates the actual scope of the issues.