Installing AIX PS/2 v1.3 on a 486

Summary

In late August of 2022, after two years of remaining relatively healthy, COVID-19 finally caught up with me. Cut off from friendly gathering, working out, and even food that wasn’t protein bars, a completely normal thought occurred to me: “How about I install AIX on my old 486?” My 486 is, as I assume most extant 486es are today, a franken-486: a hodgepodge of pieces collected over the course of thirty years, ultimately a Ship of Theseus of opportunity (yard sales!) and necessity (30 year old capacitors!). In my case, it’s actually not correct to even call it a 486 anymore - while it might have started life as a Compaq Deskpro 4/33i with a proper 33MHz 486DX CPU, it’s now sporting an 83MHz Pentium Overdrive. But in my heart, it’s still my first computer. I downloaded AIX 1.3 from WinWorld. This nicely expanded into 94 floppy images! While I’m certain I don’t have 94 working floppies, I do have a box of Verbatim DataLife floppies, which have a lifetime warranty (suppose they’d honor it?)… and so far, haven’t let me down. The floppy images Boot_(ESDI)_01.img, Boot_(SCSI)_01.img, and Install.img looked promising, but I have an IDE system. I started out with Install.img (not bootable), then the ESDI image (also not bootable). The SCSI image, at least, did bring me to a bootstrapper. Let’s try “Boot from Diskette”… In this menu, I selected the defaults - unix.gen, Single User, and No. I’m hoping that translates to a kernel image on one of the install floppies, to bring the system up off the floppies in single-user mode, and to not attempt a boot from the hard drive… not to give me a single-user UNIX install, booted from floppies every time. Switching floppies. I did this quite a bit. I was then prompted to switch to the Installation Disk, which curiously, had to be writeable. After loading this floppy, I briefly got some garbled video, and the machine reset. Assuming it was a fluke, I tried again, and got the same behavior. Something very similar happens when this machin...