The RT PC's specifications were regarded as "less than impressive" compared to contemporary workstations by its competitors in that particular market, although the product was deemed deserving of "a healthy amount of respect", particularly with the prospect of IBM as "a serious competitor" who, despite having a product whose performance was an estimated 18 months behind other vendors, would potentially be able to catch up quickly by applying the company's renowned technological capabilities.

For running CADAM, a computer-aided design (CAD) program, an IBM 5080 or 5085 graphics processor could be attached.

[7][8] The 6152 Academic System was a PS/2 Model 60 with a RISC Adapter Card, a Micro Channel board containing a ROMP, its support ICs, and up to 8 MB of memory.

The keyboard, mouse, display, disk drives and network were all controlled by a microkernel, called Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), which allowed multiple operating systems to be booted and run at the same time.

Pick was unique in being a unified operating system and database, and ran various accounting applications.

For the graphical user interfaces, AIX v2 came with the X10R3 and later the X10R4 and X11 releases of the X Window System from MIT, together with the Athena widget set.

It was offered as an alternative to AIX, the usual RT PC operating system, to US universities eligible for an IBM educational discount.

Problems with reading unaligned data on the RT forced an incompatible protocol change, leading to version 10 in late 1985.

With typically configured models priced at $20,000, it was a hard sell, and the lack of any reasonable commission lost the interest of IBM's sales force.

[citation needed] Both MIT's Project Athena and Brown University's Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship found the RT inferior to other computers.

The lack of software packages and IBM's sometimes lackluster support of AIX, in addition to sometimes unusual changes from traditional, de facto UNIX operating system standards, caused most software suppliers to be slow in embracing the RT and AIX.

When the RT PC was introduced in January 1986, it competed with several workstations from established providers: the Apollo Computer Domain Series 3000, the DEC MicroVAX II, and Sun Microsystems Sun-3.

From July 1988 to November 1992, the NSFNET's T1 backbone network used routers built from multiple RT PCs (typically nine) interconnect by a Token Ring LAN.