Originally released for the IBM 6150 RISC workstation, AIX now supports or has supported a wide variety of hardware platforms, including the IBM RS / 6000 series and later IBM POWER and PowerPC-based systems, IBM System i, System / 370 mainframes, PS / 2 personal computers, and the Apple Network Server.

The AIX family of operating systems debuted in 1986, became the standard operating system for the RS / 6000 series on its launch in 1990, and is still actively developed by IBM.

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 ( later renamed IBM eServer pSeries, then IBM System p, and now IBM Power Systems ).

AIX Version 4, introduced in 1994, added symmetric multiprocessing with the introduction of the first RS / 6000 SMP servers and continued to evolve through the 1990s, culminating with 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 running on Intel IA-64 ( Itanium ) architecture CPUs.

The original AIX ( sometimes called AIX / RT ) was developed for the IBM 6150 RT workstation by IBM in conjunction with Interactive Systems Corporation, who had previously ported UNIX System III to the IBM PC for IBM as PC / IX.

Much of the AIX v2 kernel was written in the PL / I programming language, which proved troublesome during the migration to AIX v3.

AIX v2 included full TCP / IP networking, as well as SNA and two networking file systems: NFS, licensed from Sun Microsystems, and Distributed Services ( DS ).

AIX PS / 2 running on Virtual PC

AIX PS / 2 ( also known as AIX / 386 ) was developed by Locus Computing Corporation under contract to IBM.

AIX PS / 2, first released in 1989, ran on IBM PS / 2 personal computers with Intel 386 and compatible processors.

In 1988, IBM announced AIX / 370, also developed by Locus Computing.

AIX / 370 was IBM's third attempt to offer Unix-like functionality for their mainframe line, specifically the System / 370 ( the prior versions were a TSS / 370 based Unix system developed jointly with AT & T c. 1980, and VM / IX a VM / 370 based system developed jointly with Interactive Systems Corporation c. 1984 ).

With the introduction of the ESA / 390 architecture, AIX / 370 was replaced by AIX / ESA in 1991, which was based on OSF / 1, and also ran on the System / 390 platform.

Unlike AIX / 370, AIX / ESA ran both natively as the host operating system, and as a guest under VM.

IBM used OSF / 1 as the basis of the AIX / ESA operating system for System / 370 and System / 390 mainframes.

AIX was the first operating system to utilize journaling file systems, and IBM has continuously enhanced the software with features like processor, disk and network virtualization, dynamic hardware resource allocation ( including fractional processor units ), and reliability engineering ported from its mainframe designs.

AIX Version 1, introduced in 1986 for the IBM 6150 RT workstation, was based on UNIX System V Releases 1 and 2.

A beta test version of AIX 5L for IA-64 systems was released, but according to documents released in the SCO v. IBM lawsuit, less than forty licenses for the finished Monterey Unix were ever sold before the project was terminated in 2002.

AIX was a component of the 2003 SCO v. IBM lawsuit, in which the SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM, alleging IBM contributed SCO's intellectual property to the Linux codebase.

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 9, 2007.

AIX / ESA, while technically advanced, had little commercial success, partially because UNIX functionality was added as an option to the existing mainframe operating system, MVS, which became MVS / ESA OpenEdition in 1999.

The default shell was Bourne shell up to AIX version 3, but was changed to Korn shell ( ksh88 ) in version 4 in view of XPG4 and POSIX compliance.

* The original Star Desktop evolved into the ViewPoint Desktop and later became GlobalView which was ported to various Unix platforms, such as SunOS Unix and AIX, A Mesa to C compiler was written and the resulting code compiled for the target platform.

This was an entirely new product, not a port of the existing OS / 2, that borrowed certain sections of code from both the existing OS / 2 and AIX products while using an entirely new microkernel code base and adding major features including a system registry and a new driver model.

In the mid-1990s, IBM released a clustered DB2 implementation called DB2 Parallel Edition, which initially ran on AIX.

Bogofilter is written in C, and runs on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, HP-UX, AIX and other platforms and is released under the GNU GPL.

* PowerHA 7. 1 was released in 2010 and uses the Cluster Aware AIX ( CAA ) infrastructure available in AIX V6. 1 TL 6 and AIX 7. 1

* AIX 3. 1, February 1990

IBM introduced JFS with the initial release of AIX version 3. 1 in February, 1990.

In 1990 the Amazon project was started to create a common architecture that would host both AIX and OS / 400.

AIX is based on UNIX System V with 4. 3BSD-compatible extensions.

For the graphical user interfaces, AIX v2 came with the X10R3 and later the X10R4 and X11 versions of the X Window System from MIT, together with the Athena widget set.

The original KornShell, < tt > ksh88 </ tt >, is the default shell on AIX since version 4. with ksh93 available separately.

Commercial Unix vendors, such as Sun, HP, DEC, and IBM each received copies of the vi source, and their operating systems, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, and AIX, today continue to maintain versions of vi directly descended from the 3. 7 release, but with added features, such as adjustable key mappings, encryption, and wide character support.

While i5 / OS, AIX, Linux and Lotus Domino are supported on the POWER processors, Windows is supported with either single-processor internal blade servers ( IXS ) or externally linked multiple-processor servers ( IXA and iSCSI ).

AIX programs are binary compatible with OS / 400 when using OS / 400's PASE ( Portable Applications System Environment ).

This should not be confused with JFS in AIX that actually refers to JFS1.

In parallel with this effort, some of the JFS development team returned to the AIX Operating System Development Group in 1997 and started to move this new JFS source base to the AIX operating system.

NFS is often used with Unix operating systems ( such as Solaris, AIX and HP-UX ) and Unix-like operating systems ( such as Linux and FreeBSD ).

Sometime in the years of 1986-89, the Bellatrix project was started, with the premise of using the America architecture as the base for a common architecture that could host OS / 390 for mainframe applications, OS / 400 for multi-processor server transactional processing, and AIX for scientific applications.