Skip to content
◈ALB Atlas

IBM RT PC Dead

IBM RT PC
KindMachine
Introduced1986
Discontinued1991
StatusDead
ManufacturerIBM
ClassWorkstation
PlatformIBM ROMP RISC
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

IBM's first RISC workstation — underpowered, overpriced, and immortal anyway: it ran the first version of AIX and housed the microkernel experiments that informed Mach.

Created by IBM
Hosted AIX

The RT PC (January 1986) — IBM's first commercial RISC, the ROMP chip descended from the 801 project — was overpriced and slow. Its significance is software: it ran the first AIX, and its virtual resource manager informed the Mach microkernel work at CMU.

The RT's failure pushed IBM toward RS/6000 in 1990 — the POWER line that became its workstation/Unix answer.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/rt/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC