RS/6000

RISC System/6000, or RS/6000 for short, is a family of RISC-based UNIX servers, workstations and supercomputers made by IBM in the 1990s. The RS/6000 family replaced the IBM RT computer platform in February 1990 and was the first computer line to see the use of IBM's POWER and PowerPC based microprocessors. RS/6000 was renamed eServer pSeries in October 2000.

History

The first generations of RS/6000 systems used the Micro Channel bus technology but later models used PCI. Some later models used the standardized PReP and CHRP platforms, co-developed with Apple and Motorola, with Open Firmware. The plan was to enable the use of a multitude of operating systems such as Windows NT, NetWare, OS/2, Solaris, Taligent, AIX and Mac OS but in the end only IBM's UNIX variant AIX was used and supported on RS/6000. Linux is widely used on CHRP based RS/6000s, but support was added after the RS/6000 name was changed to eServer pSeries in 2000.

RS/6000 types of computers are the POWERserver servers, POWERstation workstations and Scalable POWERparallel supercomputer platform. While most machines were desktops, desksides, or rack mounted, there was a laptop model too, the Model 860. A lot of famous computers are RS/6000 based, such as the P2SC based Deep Blue supercomputer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and the POWER3 based ASCI White which was the fastest computer in the world 2000-2002.