AIX for PS/2 Man Page Output

[ardent-blue]

Man Page Output About as far as I care to take it. Perhaps someone with more ability will crack this off over lunch break...

 

[Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen]

I don't understand what the problem is. The manual pages render nicely under the system they document, and it is very well established how to do it. According to https://virtualosmuseum.org/installation-list/ you can get a real AIX 1.3 up and running in their emulator if you follow their instructions, so you can see for yourself in real life.

Is this about you wanting to understand how to reverse engineer the man page nroff macros?

 

[ardent-blue]

I don't understand what the problem is.

Explained in terse detail. The juice is not worth the squeeze.

 

[Istarian]

@Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen I think he would like to have the documentation in a more readily accessible format that doesn't require booting up into an install of AIX for PS/2 and using 'man'. --- It's an acceptable solution for someone actually using such a system daily and needing a specific piece of information, but tedious if you just want to browse some documentation.

@ardent-blue Are these man pages (the source material processed by the command line tools) available online somewhere? Perhaps embedded in the install media? And if not, can you export the specific ones you want?

 

[Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen]

@Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen I think he would like to have the documentation in a more readily accessible format that doesn't require booting up into an install of AIX for PS/2 and using 'man'. --- It's an acceptable solution for someone actually using such a system daily and needing a specific piece of information, but tedious if you just want to browse some documentation.

Understandable, if so groff/nroff with the man macro should be able to do it on any modern Linux/Unix/BSD/etc.

Fortunately IBM has AIX manual pages online, unfortunately not so far back.

 

[ardent-blue]

@ardent-blue Are these man pages (the source material processed by the command line tools) available online somewhere? Perhaps embedded in the install media? And if not, can you export the specific ones you want?

AIX 1.3 Man page Index got these from Colonial Tim, and he left the chat maybe ten plus years ago. He sent me all the 1.3 man pages, but I can't tell if they are all there...

 

[bear]

Anyone else who just wants to reference the pages, they are free to make use of my online manuals collection. I haven't processed AIX 1.3 yet but will relatively soon. Until then the PS/2 1.2.1 pages (catman/nroff format; as distributed, only the X11 manual is provided with full troff source) are there for whatever reference purpose you require.

Manual — AIX PS/2 1.2.1

 

[ardent-blue]

I haven't processed AIX 1.3 yet but will relatively soon.

Just like Heinz ketchup. Anticipation.

I shall meditate on the 1.2.1 material.

Arm the faithful!

Man pages sorted, also has "anchors" [index to us less advanced folks]. Much easier than by the man.x kludge. As the saying goes, "it ain't bragging if you can do it" ...

1t. TCF Cluster Commands ... Reading the paltry period articles, AIX for PS/2 had a "Single System Image" and the file system was "abstracted" where it could be accessed across a network without issues with file locations.

TCF is much more central to AIX 1.2.x than I ever imagined.

 

[Istarian]

@ardent-blue If you should ever happen find yourself in Linux land with a graphical desktop environment, there are apparently a number of GUI software options out there for viewing man files. That may still not be to your taste, but might make it more palatable if the terminal is not your friend. Some are specific to particular desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, etc).

Both Debian and Ubuntu also have an online version, which although they aren't perfect and mostly format the same as the terminal version, they are accessible in any modern web browser

index — Debian Manpages

Ubuntu Manpages

Hundreds of thousands of manpages from every package of every supported Ubuntu release, rendered as browsable HTML.

manpages.ubuntu.com

Examples:

KDE
- KHelpCenter (KDE Help)
- Konqueror (KDE web browser/file manager, using "man:command-name" in the address bar)
GNOME
- Yelp (GNOME Help)
OTHER
- Xman, where available
- gtkman (Python, GTK+3) -- likely to be available from the official Debian package repositories
- Tkman

 

[bear]

1t. TCF Cluster Commands ... Reading the paltry period articles, AIX for PS/2 had a "Single System Image" and the file system was "abstracted" where it could be accessed across a network without issues with file locations.

TCF isn't a "single system image", more of a network-transparent(ish) resource pool. "Single system image" means the entire thing runs a single copy of the OS, and TCF definitely does not do that. I suppose it's possible that IBM called it a "single system image" but if so then it means something different than it usually does. TCF gives, at best, a loosely coupled system.

TCF is much more central to AIX 1.2.x than I ever imagined.

well... it had some interesting features for heterogeneous networking with AIX/370 that were unique to it. It's not "central" in the sense that any part of the system specifically requires it. VM/370 (VM/SP? VM/ESA?) also had TCF, but I'm not sure of the level of direct interoperability of VM TCF with AIX TCF and neither am I sure exactly when TCF got added to VM. It may be that AIX/370 got TCF for the purpose of interacting with VM/370 as hypervisor, and once you have that the code more or less exists to put it in AIX PS/2 as well. I'm speculating.

 

[ggs]

TCF was developed by LCC and licensed to IBM for use in AIX PS/2 and AIX/370. It did appear as a single system image in that you didn’t log into a single node, you logged into the cluster and when you ran a program, it chose the “best” node in the cluster to run it. What appeared as a binary was actually a directory with the actual binaries underneath it. There was an option to ls that allowed you to see the individual binaries. They appeared (as I recall) as @386 and @370. Early in development there was also @vax (you can probably guess what that was for). There was a command (don’t recall it now) that let you specify which type of binary to run (e.g. force it to run a particular type). You could also specify a specific node as well.

 

[ardent-blue]

ggs, I waded through a paper on LOCUS. It seems that LOCUS kept more stuff locally to reduce the effect of slow networking. When faster 10Mbit arrived, you could run a whole lot more from a central server [my SWAG].