IBM Intellistation 185 AIX workstation (2016) (ibmfiles.com)

An interesting writeup about one of the last Unix workstations from 2006.

I still have to deal with a handful of UNIX systems at $WORK mostly AIX, and I don't really like it much compared to all of the Linux boxes that we mostly use. On one hand it seems to be rock solid and all of that but on the other it's like driving a Ferrari to go to work instead of a more sensitive Toyota. Most of them are being replaced by cheaper Linux servers where memory is not so pricey and mostly feel the same, albeit some memory allocation/caching difference

Can somebody provide an example why would someone prefer such a workstation over a Windows workstation back then? I.e., which specific programs/applications demanded it?

> HP's HP-UX hardware being an exception since they just sloppily hacked in standard ATI cards / which means you wouldn't get the extra benefits of running a GXT6500 on AIX as you would with a FireGL X3 on HP-UX. HP probably had the lowest share of the UNIX CAD market so they probably felt little need to invest much R&D: not to mention HP can't make a proper enterprise workstation or server ANYWAYS.

As the kids say: LOL.

Aah, the PowerPC architecture! Very nice! Remember working on the ibm P5 series, really nice machines with both hot swap and cold swap components, color coded for convenience. Great operating system, aix was solidly integrated into the architecture. Lpars and soft partitions, really flexible. And available too, we rarely rebooted the whole machine, in fact can probably count on one hand the number of times we rebooted it

Very cool, we had a couple of these (along with a couple HP-UX and SGI boxes, amongst a sea of Sun workstations) at my first gig as a Unix administrator. It was such a treat to see the diversity of the proprietary *nix world when Linux was taking over (this was the late 00's when their fates were clearly written at a megacorp that kept them around mostly for contractual obligations).

Anyone still using those giant trackballs for everyday work?

When I worked in the AIX division in TX, we used to joke that AIX stood for "'aint Unix." Still... I could get interns to do tasks using smitty I would not have felt comfortable letting them handle on HPUX or IRIX.

IMHO the article doesn't make it very clear... The PowerPC 970 is what Apple badged as the "G5" and this seems to be IBM's take on a G5 workstation.