PA-RISC information - since 1999

HPBSD on PA-RISC

Overview

HPBSD is an original 4.3BSD Unix operating system with additions from 4.4BSD and local modifications developed at the University of Utah. HPBSD was ported between the late-1980s and mid-90s by Mike Hibler and others. The PA-RISC version grew out of a port of 4.3BSD to 68k-based HP 9000/300 and 400 systems.

The University of Utah was a center of PA-RISC operating system research in the 1990s, with PA-RISC ports of Mach 3 and Mach 4, later in other open source ports.

In the 1990s, HPBSD was a stable alternative operating systems on PA-RISC, but contained AT&T and HP source code and was never freely available. Organizations with necessary license agreements with HP and AT&T were able to obtain bootable releases of HPBSD but distribution outside of the University of Utah was limited. It demonstrated that other operating systems and especially BSD Unix could be developed for PA-RISC independently, setting the scene for the later OpenBSD port.

Systems support

HPBSD supported the original PA-RISC 1.1 32-bit HP 9000 700 workstation computers and was later extended for specific C-Class and J-Class workstations.

Hardware support

HPBSD supported most on-board hardware, but only few specific expansion or third-party devices which were used at Utah University.

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Releases

Releases of HPBSD were limited to the University of Utah and a few organizations with necessary license agreements. There were few major releases between the 1980s and 1990s of HPBSD:

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Documentation

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