OpenPA and Internet History

When OpenPA was founded in 1999, companies like HP just began opening up to open source projects, the Internet and the public in general. Information started to be published more freely on the new Web. Our main efforts at OpenPA during that time were finding, analyzing and correlating the large amount of distributed information into a single website.

PA-RISC computers were still used in the early 2000s and their resale to second hand users just started. Open source projects and hobbyists profited in a large, active community.

Our challenges at OpenPA during that time were finding all available information, as search engines were still young in the late 1990s, and making sense of it all – as it was just so much and new sources kept appearing. This phase went on until the mid-2000s with solid and stable sources.

The Internet and available information have changed since in a profound way. Almost all original sources disappeared in the two decades since then, and much has been lost on the Information Highway – making OpenPA the authoritative source for PA-RISC. What started as a documentation exercise of collecting new information in the 1990s Internet has become an historic archive of the PA-RISC era.

Over two decades of work researching PA-RISC and HP 9000 resulted in over 200 articles on OpenPA (now 216), on the PA-RISC landscape in an era long forgotten now.

The Internet never forgets

It seems the Internet does forget.

When much PA-RISC information and many sources became public in the late 1990s, there was no real reason to believe they would disappear any time soon again. It seemed most will have good place in repositories, search engines, archives and hobbyists sites (such as GeoCities et al).

However, that changed only a few years later.

OpenPA started right in the period around the dot-com bubble when much documentation and IT was easily available and the Internet and online content looked likely to be around forever.

During the economic and corporate upheavals of the 2000s much information, not only PA-RISC, fell by the wayside and the nature of the Internet and how companies used it changed. Journals closed and got rid of their archives, websites just vanished, companies merged and removed or lost old documentation in the process. Few primary sources remained since.

Professional Computing in the 80s and 90s

HP produced a great deal of documentation and information for PA-RISC over the years. From PA-RISC inception in the 1980s until the late 1990s, much of that information was confined to commercial, industrial and research relationships and was not open to the general public. HP partners and clients had access to that library of documentation on PA-RISC hardware, architecture and software.

A complete ecosystem was available around HP products including HP 9000 and PA-RISC – user groups, conferences, trade journals and specific distribution channels. HP, the HP 9000 series and HP-UX were focused strongly on industrial, engineering and instrumentation customer bases, so documentation and PA-RISC information tended to stay confined to those circles, with less academic (public) exposure than other vendors and architectures.

It was hard to access HP and PA-RISC documentation in this period if not a HP partner or client. Even though called Information Age already, access was tightly confined in the 80s and 90s to those with PA-RISC vendor links or deeper technological interests. This is probably one of the reasons HP 9000 and HPPA computers were not documented as well as other architectures.

It was all very conservative until the the end of the 90s, the era OpenPA started.

The Open Era of the Internet

Around the time open source and Linux took off in the late 1990s, HP began to take notice of fledging open source projects for PA-RISC that potentially had a wider distribution. Many PA-RISC computers found their way in the late 1990s to larger customer bases including university research projects and development groups.

HP Unix Website — 2000s Unix website © HP 2000

This created more demand for proper documentation on PA-RISC systems outside the usual sales and vendor channels. Lots of information on PA-RISC was released because of this in the late 1990s and early 2000s plus many business magazines and industry journals started publishing on the web, including access to their archives.

There was almost too much information available at that time. Search engines were still new-ish and often still directory-based. Many public and specialized repositories existed and were openly accessible as well. In this open era, a splurge of documentation was released by vendors from their commercial, sales and research archives and put freely on the web with no questions asked.

You could even get printed architecture books for free from some vendors for research, and some operating system releases were available freely due to Y2K.

It was a great time researching and documenting PA-RISC as more and more repositories and sources kept appearing. Finding and sorting all this information from expanding sources proved maybe the hardest, as there was so much to choose from.

Fleeting Information

PA-RISC documentation and information changed after these few years of open access. It slowly started in the mid-2000s with corporate upheavals and a profoundly changing technology landscape. Linux and open source projects began arriving at scale in many formerly traditional Unix niches and the Intel/Windows NT ecosystem took swathes out of the RISC workstation market.

RISC and Unix lost significance for clients and thus commercially for vendors. IT had to become cheap and easy, a train which the conservative Unix servers and workstations did not really catch. Traditional IT vendors slowly lost interest in RISC computers with their business units too and providing documentation for increasingly unloved products became an afterthought.

The financial crisis at the end of the 2000s led to more corporate upheavals and economic hardship and more IT consolidation followed. Departments closed and took their websites and documentation with them. Whole business units disappeared with their products. Business press and trade journals were hit as well, and many publishing repositories with articles from the exciting 80s to 2000s information technology vanished without a trace or archive.

Many original PA-RISC sources and documents vanished during the 2010s, as the commercial RISC and Unix era got slowly forgotten and information on it too.

OpenPA thus had to make more use of secondary sources and industry articles that remained available – which in turn also started disappearing in the 2020s. Not much was left compared to the early 2000s – most original HP documentation on PA-RISC, contemporary articles, news releases, prices and even ads were gone.

This changed recently in the 2020s again. Many archives and mirrors were able to collect PA-RISC and HP 9000 documentation over the last few years, so proper linking to those resources became possible again.

RISC History

It got quite difficult to maintain articles based on ever fluctuating sources. This might just be the transitional nature of the Internet, but it was surprising to see so much go after doing this for over two decades. And it got worse in the meantime – so much has been lost as of the 2020s in both official company archives and secondary sources like the press.

Computer Conference CompCon — Proceedings © CompCon 1982

This site has become an historic archive on PA-RISC and HP 9000 since many other sources are just not around anymore. Originally envisaged to be a platform to filter and consolidate all the information the new Internet started to offer on HP RISC, in the span of two decades OpenPA became the sole source of information for many aspects of PA-RISC and HP 9000.

When OpenPA started, HP 9000 machines were still (quite) current and PA-RISC a somewhat actively developed and marketed architecture. Both PA-RISC computers and documentation for them have become historic since, and much of the information and many anecdotes were (or are) at risk of disappearing, unless documented somewhere.

Who still knows that PA-RISC ran not only NeXTSTEP, but also Windows NT and Netware? The PA-RISC 1.0 processors and computers of the 80s had almost been forgotten by the time OpenPA started in 1999 – a whole chapter of PA-RISC had no real product names

OpenPA will try to document and archive as much of the history of PA-RISC in the colorful era of RISC and Unix workstations as possible.

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Sources

Information on PA-RISC and HP 9000 on OpenPA is based on public sources and public repositories. Primary sources are HP and PA-RISC technical reference manuals, handbooks and architecture guides from the 1990s that were published by HP in the early 2000s plus many product brochures added later.

This PA-RISC knowledge base was extended during the early OpenPA years with secondary sources such as magazine articles, news releases and publications like the HP Journal. It has been a long journey since and OpenPA transitioned from documenting then-current Unix PA-RISC workstations to an almost historical archive on the PA-RISC side of the 1990s Unix era.

PA-RISC CPU, chipset and architecture: Articles are mostly based on primary sources from HP like the great HP External Reference Specifications (ERS) and technical publications from HP CPU and chip design labs made available during the 2000s for HP-supported open source projects. Secondary sources in the form of articles or academic papers were used as well.

Computer systems: Information on HP 9000 and PA-RISC computers is based on primary sources from HP and vendors in the form of system user guides, technical handbooks and architecture white papers. Also used were many 1990s HP websites, marketing brochures, news articles and industry reporting.

Operating systems: Articles are based on official user and admin documentation as well as academic papers, talks, whitepapers and such. The heydays of open source, Mach, Linux and BSD research systems from the 1990s resulted in much information on public websites. As much of the operating system development on PA-RISC happened during 1990s and then early 2000s, information is getting sparse now.

Books and papers: A large body of literature exists in academic papers and conferences of the 1980s and 90s, when HP published much on Precision Architecture and RISC computers. COMPCON digests of papers contain many interesting articles – mostly deeply buried in libraries. Some museal sites also have been digitizing many old product brochures from HP and others, another valuable resource.

Archives: Websites and projects that archive and mirror Internet content have been around since the 1990s. Due to the disappearing sources, their archives of public websites have become essential today to document the RISC era. In the last few years until the 2020s, much product documentation, handbooks, guides and other information has been added to those archives as well, helping OpenPA to stay accurate and provid a complete picture of PA-RISC.

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Closing remarks

For a taste of the 90s Internet, there is a fabulous archive of GeoCities on tumblr. Much HP 9000 information can be found at the HP Computer Museum as well as the Hewlett Packard section of archived brochures at 1000 BiT. The great HP-UX Workstation PA-RISC Hardware Compatibility List (mirror) from HP played a big role in the early years.

Many business and tech journals are now available at the Internet Archive, an essential resources for computing research now used as reference in most OpenPA articles.

Wanted: Hardcopy COMPCON digests 1982-1999

OpenPA is looking for hardcopy digests of COMPCON, the Computer Conference of IEEE International from the 1980s and 1990s. Physical copies turn up only rarely and most are buried within libraries and could be retired or discarded soon.

Much PA-RISC history was presented at COMPCON conferences and many interesting articles hide in the digests of Intellectual Leverage for the Information Society conferences on the RISC era of the 1980s and 1990s. These articles would be welcome additions to OpenPA information on PA-RISC.

We are loooking for conference proceedings of:

COMPCON 1982 High technology in the Information Industry;
COMPCON 1983 Intellectual Leverage for Information Technology
COMPCON 1984 Intellectual Leverage for Driving Technologies
COMPCON 1985 Technological Leverage
COMPCON 1986 Digest of Papers
COMPCON 1987 Intellectual Leverage
COMPCON 1988 Intellectual Leverage
COMPCON 1989 Intellectual Leverage
COMPCON 1990 Intellectual Leverage
COMPCON 1991 Intellectual Leverage
COMPCON 1992 Intellectual Leverage
COMPCON 1993 Intellectual Leverage
COMPCON 1994 Intellectual Leverage
COMPCON 1995 Technologies for the Information Highway
COMPCON 1996 Technologies for the Information Highway
COMPCON 1997 Technologies for the Information Highway
COMPCON 1998 Digest of Papers
COMPCON 1999 Digest of Papers

OpenPA would be glad to take used or surplus hardcopies of COMPCON digests as they become available for our PA-RISC archive and the RISC era. 10x

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