What Does It Take To Run DOOM On A $10,000 IBM RS/6000 From 2001?

Shoutout to the 4Front Technologies employee who went '...They need the license file for AIX? Alright, let me figure out how to make that' with no question as to why you needed it

One of my coworkers described aix such: "Aix is what you get if an alien came to earth, saw what Unix is through Google translate, then went home and described to another alien what he thought it was though another translator, and that alien implemented what they thought Unix was"

You took a huge RISC doing this.

As usual Michael, you really deliver. What an adventure! You have amazing tenacity that is rarely found these days, especially when unravelling poorly documented lost to time old tech.

NOTES AND CORRECTIONS: - The tablet port was used by the Spaceball 3D Mouse, used for IBM's own CAD software - Past me, it was Ko-fi, not Ko-fo in the credits >.<

Upon seeing the intro, I realized from the login screen that some of the machines at my local Walmart actually still run AIX, which is pretty cool.

me: knows zero about coding, code, or command line witchcraft also me: absolutely loves these types of videos

Wow. Now that you've got this thing magically working, I hope you'll contribute it to the DOOM ports archive!

"Was it worth the price?" When I started my career in 2000 with a CAD System Integrator there were few options to get working for the "big fish". You had HP, Silicon Graphics, IBM and Sun if you wanted to do automotive or aerospace work. All priced in that range. OpenGL was a "new fangled" thing back then and CAD programs where using the commercial Motif library. And the software would set you back sometimes double the hardware cost (but the hourly rates even for freelancers made it feasible). AutoCAD Inventor and SolidWorks were in their infancy and nowhere near capable of doing what CATIA, UGS, ideas, Euclid etc could do on the unix machines. That started to change with the appearance of 3d capable (gaming) PCs. You talked about the netboot in the beginning, questioning it. I remember freelancers bringing their machine clean and whiped to the IT department (or us) of e.g. a automotive supplier together with their license code for the software (you always bought man with machine and license for development work) and two hours later it was installed to company standards. At the end it would be whiped again before it left the premises. For reinstalling there was an option to boot from an DDS4 SCSI tape ... oh well memory lane ;-). And under 5L Quake was no problem ...

Found a bug at 57:03. Seeing that version of KDE gave me flashbacks of running Yellow Dog Linux on a Power Mac. The behavior of the original DOOM port with the palette switching was normal for mid-90s X software. Tons of stuff would only work at 8bpp as well. Caldera's port of WABI was one of them until they finally patched it.

We used to run AIX at work and going home to linux just made me sad when I wanted to do admin stuff. 4.3 isn't just old, it is ancient. I had this weird hope IBM would release AIX for the PS3...

This is a gorgeous wet dream of old UIs all wrapped up in a fantastically made video, 3D renders and everything! I do love this channel.

I wrote FORTRAN-based simulations on a rather earlier beige RS/6000 that sat on my desk in the early 90’s and a quick glance looked it like a PS/2 tower. 25MHz and a very respectable for the time 64 mb of RAM. I got it back in 1993 when over the air updates weren’t exactly common, so I used to get a box of 125 mb tapes with the latest software revs mailed to me by IBM automatically every 3 months, which certainly accounted for some of the rather painful price of the system.

It is kind of cursed to see a shared library with the .a extension. That would confuse the hell out of me for a bit.

You know, I'm mighty impressed that someone at 4Front not only saw your email, they also generated a license for AIX and sent it to you!

56:54 For anyone curious about the song used, SDL uses a clip from ~10 seconds in to "The Living Proof" by Will Provost, an obscure band that released it in February of 2000.

25:46 The VisualAge prices were meant for corporate costumers. You could register for free to the IBM's Partner World for Developers program and you would get the developer tools for free for education, tests and development. Only if you sold the software that you made with whose tools then you would have to have you costumer to pay for licences.

Fun! I have a copy of VisualAge C for AIX 4.3.3 and a beta version of StarOffice 3 for AIX which never saw a commercial release. My 233Mhz 43P has long since died. I can stick them on an FTP somewhere if you like

I was surprised you didn't use a community made Linux for this thing and did everything yourself, well played and very impressive

My first experience of Unix was essentially a box with Start and Stop buttons which was a printer controller. My second and real introduction was being sat down in front of an RS/6000 server with AIX AIX 4.1.3 and being told "Type in r, o, o, t and press enter…" On what I subsequently discovered was a production box. Late 1996 we received a batch of new machines which it turned out had been used for sales presentations fro AIX 4.2 and still had all the funky sound and video files on disk. Unfortunately the required add-on accelerator card had been removed so my experience of the audiovisual tools was pretty much what yours was. I don't know about the desktop workstations but with the servers the SCSI card was included by default, so a factory install. One thing I really liked is that on any other machine changing a SCSI chain, adding or removing a device, would definitely need a reboot but with these it was plug and play — something we did twice nightly with a tape drive to run backups. To this day I have no idea if it was supposed to be PNP but it was absolutely rock solid. That compiler cost? Oh yes. The same numbers but this side of the Atlantic it was in £. All of IBM's software was extortionate. In another department we ran Lotus Notes and Lord knows how much they scalped us for that, I've erased the memory. You're dead right about cross-systems interoperability, for business purposes if you were running IBM-anything it was beautiful. But try not-IBM and you were in for a world of pain. Those new machines mentioned above we ended up downgrading to 4.1.3 because there was no upgrade path to 4.2 that would work for our non-IBM software, everything had to be re-installed at new versions. Thus 2 years later, circa 1998 we were going through the pain of transferring all the operations our RS/6000 estate handled to Windows NT 4 and an entirely new suite of applications for which at least the availability of commodity hardware gave us a massive saving. Running Doom? Nah, don't try that. 😀