AIX: The Last Standing Commercial Unix

February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Nearly six decades ago, a bunch of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric started work on a new multi-user operating system for General Electric mainframes called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, or MULTICS. After four years of work, the project was mothballed, but was reborning when Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs, created a single-user operating system based on the ideas behind MULTICS to run on a PDP-7 that Ma Bell had laying around.

And thus UNICS – and what would eventually become Unix and the whole open systems revolution – was born. With Unix came …