IBM RISC System/6000 Family

Just when PowerSeeker thought they had nowhere to go...

From the June 1990 issue of Byte magazine

The Company

I previously wrote about the early days of IBM here:

The Computer

IBM debuted the RISC System/6000 line in February 1990. This family of products included RISC-powered servers, workstations, and supercomputers. It was the first line of computers to make use of the POWER and PowerPC processors. (IBM developed the PowerPC chips with Apple and Motorola.) The RISC System/6000 servers were replaced by the eServer pSeries. Workstations were sold under the RISC System/6000 name until 2002.

Since the RS/6000 is designed for commercial and industrial use, there aren’t a lot of reviews. The January 1991 issue of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Computer magazine published an article entitled “A Performance Comparison of the IBM RS/6000 and the Astronautics ZS-1”. Most of the article would only be interesting to a computer scientist. I found this conclusion near the end:

“The RS/6000 implementation is clearly superior for this work load. One important caveat, however, is that the RS/6000 and ZS-1 were designed for fundamentally different environments. The RS/6000 is intended to serve as a high-speed workstation or compute/file server on a network. Its full support of the IEEE floating-point standard would complicate the typical problems of implementing this architecture at a much faster clock speed. Its admirably short pipelines would also lengthen as the clock speed increases.”

Performance Computing printed a review of the IBM RS/6000 HA-H70 Cluster Server in their November 1999 issue. It concluded: “The cabinet design of the HA-H70’s S00 rack shares features with other systems at the high end of the RS/6000 line—matte black in color, strongly architectural in appearance, and generally distinctive. The system engineering inside the cabinet provides ample room for expansion boards, RAM, and disk storage within each of the H70 units. Additionally, the system’s design forms a good foundation for HA features, and we liked the structured robustness of the HA features within the HACMP software. We rate design as excellent for the HA-H70, and confer the corresponding four Performance Computing flags.”

I actually own an RS/6000 workstation. I bought it last year on Facebook Marketplace. It runs IBM AIX 4.3 with CDE 1.0. I haven’t had much time to play with it. Hopefully, I’ll get to it soon.

My IBM RS/6000 43P Model 150 workstation

Have you ever used any RISC System/6000 products? Do you know anything about its history? Tell us about it in the comments below.

What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.