Meaning – The term RS/6000, refers to a family of workstations and servers based on IBM’s POWER architecture. They are primarily designed for running multiuser numerical computing applications that use the AIX operating system.
The first RS/6000 models used the Micro Channel bus, later models used PCI. Some later models conformed to the PReP and CHRP standard platforms, which were co-developed with Apple and Motorola, with Open Firmware. The plan was to enable the RS/6000 to run multiple 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 names were changed to eServer pSeries in 2000.
Example of usage – “Many RS/6000 and subsequent pSeries machines came with a service processor, which booted itself when power was applied and continuously ran its own firmware, independent of the operating system. The service processor could call a phone number (via a modem) in case of serious failure with the machine.”
