No RISC No Fun

HP 9000 and PA-RISC Computers Story

By Paul Weissmann on 14 January 2018

A first attempt to tell the story of HP 9000 and PA-RISC computers from the 1980s to the 2000s, this article tries to unify all the different leads and streams of HP 9000 and PA-RISC into a long, single story. The HP 9000 Series of computers spanned almost three decades and very diverse platforms of Unix computers. The article focuses on the PA-RISC part of that story, beginning with the formative HP 9000 800 servers in the late 1980s through the rise and renaming in the 90s until the big RISC and Unix contraction of the 2000s.

The article used much of the information available on OpenPA for years, and structured and compressed it into a single story. There is more to be written on the architecture and market side of things in the future. Along the way, many pages and sections on OpenPA were revised or rewritten altogether.

PA-RISC sources and accuracy

By Paul Weissmann on 3 January 2018

A process that started during the mid-2000s seems to be deepening now in the late-2010s — more and more information and sources from the early (public) Internet days of the 1980s and 90s are disappearing from the web, with magazines and journals closing, companies merging and people and memory passing away. This includes much of the PA-RISC documentation, either official or third-party. Some of it might be preserved at archive.org or mirrored in archives around the web, but the availability of definitive documentation and official sources just keeps diminishing. There are laudable initiatives out there, but it is getting harder writing articles on this decades-old technology.

All that is saying is there might be inaccuracies in the information on this site, it is getting difficult finding valid sources. This might just be the transitional nature of the Internet, but it was surprising to see so much go.

PA-RISC Operating Systems updated

By Paul Weissmann on 2 January 2018

The PA-RISC Operating Systems page has been updated with new content. An overview table has been added as a cross-reference for which PA-RISC operating systems support which PA-RISC computers. The information on the history of PA-RISC operating systems has been extended as well, with sections on Commercial Unix, research projects, open source and other systems.

On related news, this site turned eighteen last year!