More issues. The "|" key doesn't work at all, either in the text terminal or in mwm (which starts fine when I do "startx").
How am I supposed to troubleshoot without a "|" key?
Hold down the left Alt and type 124 on the numpad, when you release the Alt button a pipe symbol may appear if you are lucky.
Sounds like a lang / keyboard mapping problem.
The keyboard is not original IBM. In the end, though, this was just par for the course. The machine did not work properly with AIX - lockups while booting, DVD-ROM not recognized, keyboard problems, network problems. So I gave up and installed CRUX PPC instead. The machine works fine with that - go figure.