History

AIX Version 1, introduced in 1986 for the IBM 6150 RT workstation, was based on UNIX System V Releases 1 and 2. In developing AIX, IBM and INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation (whom IBM contracted) also incorporated source code from 4.2 and 4.3BSD UNIX.

Among other variants, IBM later produced AIX Version 3 (also known as AIX/6000), based on System V Release 3, for their IBM POWER-based RS/6000 platform. Since 1990, AIX has served as the primary operating system for the RS/6000 series (now called System p by IBM).

AIX Version 4, introduced in 1994, introduced support for symmetric multiprocessing with the introduction of the first RS/6000 SMP servers. AIX Version 4 continued to evolve though the 1990s culminating with the introduction of AIX 4.3.3 in 1999.

In the late 1990s, under Project Monterey, IBM and the Santa Cruz Operation planned to integrate AIX and UnixWare into a single 32-bit/64-bit multiplatform UNIX with particular emphasis on supporting the Intel IA-64 architecture. This never came to fruition, though a beta test version of AIX 5L for IA-64 systems was released.

AIX 6 was announced in May 2007 and ran an open beta from June 2007 until the general availability (GA) of AIX 6.1 on November 9th, 2007. Major new features in AIX 6.1 are full RBAC, Workload Partitions (WPAR) enabling application mobility, and Live Partition Mobility on the new POWER6 hardware.