HP-UX 10 on PA-RISC

HP-UX groups
©1996 HP, from archive.org

HP-UX 10 is the HP Unix operating system for 32-bit PA-RISC workstations and servers released by HP between 1995 and 1997. It had a short shelf-life due to fears of possible Y2K bugs, for which HP offered an upgrade path to HP-UX 11 and exchange CDs even though HP-UX 10.20 was pretty popular.

HP-UX 10 supported almost all 32-bit HP 9000 700 series workstations, most lettered systems and most older HP 9000 800 servers. It was POSIX 1003.1, 1003.2 and SVID3 compliant. HP-UX 10.01 was the last Unix to officially support 1980s PA-RISC 1.0 computers while HP-UX 10.10 was a feature-only release. HP-UX was eventually extended to 64-bit with HP-UX 11.00 in 1997

HP-UX 10.20

HP-UX 10.20 was released in August 1996 as the HP Unix that supported almost all 32-bit PA-RISC workstations and servers. For HP-UX, 10.20 was pretty fast on supported machines with at least 64 MB RAM. It was discontinued by HP in 2002 and obsoleted in 2003 after shipping multiple releases.

HP-UX Support
© Hewlett Packard 2002

Different HP-UX 10.20 releases were made for HP 9000 700 workstations and HP 9000 800 servers. Several extensions were shipped between 1997 and 1999 to add hardware support, most often through HP-UX Additional Core Enhancements (ACEs).

  1. HP 9000 Servers (10.20): In July and August 1997, Hardware Extensions CDs were shipped to extend support for T600, K370, and K570 servers and improve fibre-channel (FC) support.
  2. HP 9000 Workstations (10.20): Multiple Additional Core Enhancements (ACEs) were shipped to extend hardware support and add new features to 10.20:
    • ACE 9912: Add support for B2000, C3600, J5600, J6000, J7000, VISUALIZE-fxe, IDE CD drives, USB devices
    • ACE 9906: Add support for B1000, C3000, and J5000 workstations and USB; Euro, LVD SCSI, Super I/O
    • ACE 9806: Add support for C360 workstation, PCI Visualize-EG graphics, Visualize-fx hardware texture mapping, Y2K fixes
    • ACE 9804: Add support for J2240 workstations
    • ACE 9802: Add support for Visualize-EG 2D, fixes for Y2K compliance,
    • ACE 9707: Add support for OpenGL; B132L+, B180L, C200, C240 workstations, Ultra SCSI, 100 Base-T Ethernet, Visualize-FX
  3. Hardware Enhancements (10.20): The more focused Hardware Extensions (HWE) enabled new hardware in HP-UX 10.20 or enhanced new functionality through software. This included adding support for new workstation and server hardware to HP-UX 10.20.
    • HWE 1.0 (July 1997): Support for T600, K370, K570
    • HWE 1.1 (February 1998): Support for T600, K370, K570, K380, K580
    • HWE 2.0 (April 1998): Support for HSC-HP/PB, NFS PV3, AutoFS, CacheFS
    • HWE 3.0 (April 1999): Support for A180/A180C, Y2K safe cold install path
  4. HP 9000 Servers (10.30): Released in 1997 with updates and enhancements to 10.20, HP-UX 10.30 focused on 800 Series servers. It added kernel (POSIX) threads, support for NFS version 3 (PV3), streams in TCP/IP, ASE, PPP and Y2K compliance. HP-UX 10.30 was not intended for workstations, discontinued in 1998 and obsoleted in 1999.

Generally, HP-UX 10.20 supported most 32-bit HP 9000 models. Hardware Enhancements bundles (HWE) were shipped with ACEs to support newer PA-8x00 based systems in 32-bit. Most HP graphics options, I/O devices and networking adapters integrated on HP 9000s were supported. Support for PA-RISC 1.0 and older servers was dropped.

HP-UX 10.20 supported systems
Class Computers
HP 9000 700 705, 710, 712, 715, 720, 730, 750, 725, 735, 755, 742i, 743i, 744, 745i, 745, 747i, 748i, 748
HP Visualize C100, C110,C132L, C160L, C160, C180, C200, C240, C360, C3000, C3600, J200, J210, J280, J282, J2240, J5000, J5600, J6000, J7000
Portables RDI PrecisionBook, SAIC Galaxy 1100
HP 9000 A-Class A180, A180C
HP 9000 B-Class B132L, B160L, B132L+, B180L+, B1000, B2000
HP 9000 D-Class D210, D220, D230, D250, D270, D280, D310, D320, D330, D350, D370, D380, D390
HP 9000 E-Class E25, E35, E45, E55
HP 9000 F/G/H/I Series 800 Nova Servers (807-897)
HP 9000 K‑Class K100, K200, K210, K220, K250, K260, K360, K370, K380, K400, K410, K420, K450, K460, K570, K580
HP 9000 R-Class R380, R390
HP 9000 T-Class T500, T520, T600
HP Agilent HP Agilent 16600A, 16700A, 16700B, 16702A, 16702B
Not supported All PA-RISC 1.0 systems HP 9000 840, 822, 835, 850, 870, 890 and so on

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HP-UX 10.10

HP-UX 10.10 was released in 1996 as feature-only release with few enhancements to HP-UX 10.00. It was discontinued by HP in 2000 and obsoleted in 2002.

New features and upgrades in HP-UX 10.10 included:

Supported hardware is unclear but probably the same as HP-UX 10.00. HP-UX 10.10 was the last stable OS release for several older Series 800 servers: 840S, 825S, 835S/SE, 845S/SE, 850S, 855S, 860S, 865S, 870S/x00, 822S, 832S, 842S, 852S, 890.

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HP-UX 10.01

HP-UX 10.0 (or 10.01) was released in 1995, first as on-demand New Business Release (NBR) for new HP 9000 acquisitions and automatically shipped as General Business Release (GBR) for existing installations. There were different HP-UX 10 releases for workstations and server, discontinued in 2000 and obsoleted in 2003.

File system layout in HP-UX 10 was moved to a SVR4 (System V Release 4), which was becoming a UNIX standard in the 1990s. Software and licenses integrated into HP-UX included OSF Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), Streams and XTI over TCP/IP (ARPA/9000), NFS, NCS, X.11, Motif and HP VUE (Visual User Environment). HP-UX 10.0 was binary compatible to HP-UX 9.0.

New features and upgrades in HP-UX 10.0 included:

HP-UX 10.0 supported all currently orderable HP 9000 Server and Workstation systems and added support in the General Business Release for more systems.

HP-UX 10.0 supported systems; * - in General Business Release; ^ - apparently
Class Computers
HP 9000 700 705, 710*, 712, 715, 720, 730, 750*, 725, 735, 755, 742i, 743i, 745i, 747i, 748i
HP Visualize C100, C110, J200, J210^
HP 9000 800 Early HP 9000 800 servers* (PA-RISC 1.0)
HP 9000 E-Class E25, E35, E45, E55
HP 9000 F/G/H/I Series 800 Nova Servers (807-897)
HP 9000 K‑Class K-Class^
HP 9000 T-Class 890, T500
Not supported HP 9000 635, 645, 808 and 815, 825CHX, 825SRX, 834CH, 835SRX and so on

HP kept supporting HP-UX 9.0 in parallel to 10.0 due to the large installed HP-UX 9 userbase. When HP-UX 10.0 was released, HP supported new workstations and graphics in HP-UX 9.07 with a clear upgrade path. At HP-UX 10.01 discontinuance in 2000, HP recommended directly upgrading to 11.00 (and not 10.20).

HP-UX 10.0 was probably the last HP-UX to support early HP 9000 800 servers based on PA-RISC 1.0, though it is not totally clear which systems were supported.

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Software

Many applications and software suites for business and technical computing were ported to HP-UX between the 1980s and 2000s. This included hundreds of third-party commercial applications for Unix, many of which included HP-UX ports. PA-RISC was mainly used for engineering and design but also publishing, development and emulation.

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Documentation

Most of the documentation and references disappeared during the 2010s from the web. Much information has been gleaned from (slowly disappearing) USEnet postings from the 1980s and early 1990s in comp.sys.hp.hpux, especially for older versions of HP-UX. And archive.org has been a great resource with a growing list of HP-UX documentation.

Manuals

Websites

Release notes

Transition to HP-UX 10.20 (Y2K)

Other documents

Pictures © Hewlett Packard, scans from product brochures, from hpmuseum.net and 1000bit.it

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