Windows NT and NetWare PA-RISC

Parallel to the well-known Unix and Mach operating systems for PA-RISC, some rather odd operating system ports were attempted over time. Forgotten since, HP and PA-RISC were part of several corporate development projects for commercial operating systems in the 1990s: Windows NT was ported by HP to PA-RISC as a demonstration and NetWare on PA-RISC had a serious product roadmap planned.

There was even an abortive HP-UX port to Intel i386.

Windows NT

There were development efforts in the mid-1990s to port Microsoft Windows NT to PA-RISC. HP wanted to hedge its bets in the workstation market and especially the anticipated NT workstation market, which threatened Unix workstations.

PA-RISC Roadmap
PA-RISC Roadmap © Computer World 1994

Several magazine sources and USEnet posts around 1993 point to HP pursuing a PA-RISC port to NT, modified the PA-RISC architecture for bi-endianess PA-7100LC processors and even conducted a back-room presentation at the ’94 Comdex conference of a (modified HP 712?) PA-7100LC workstation running Windows NT. Mentions of NT on PA-RISC continued in 1994 with some customer interest and the HP 9000 712 workstations were mentioned before release as possibly supporting Windows NT, next to Unix. No further indications in the press appeared after 1995.

Windows NT
Windows NT © Microsoft 1994 archive.org

Sources at HP (from the Unix division no less) spoke of dim prospects for NT on PA-RISC in October 1994 and it (NT) being a dead-end architecture in 1996. The final nail was the missing application landscape for PA-RISC on NT, as many applications would have to be ported or recompiled. Consensus at HP at the time seemed to favor the ancipated move to the post-RISC era with VLIW EPIC/Itanium – which did support Windows NT next to HP-UX, with Windows 2000 and XP follow-ons too.

Windows NT apparently supported the following HP 9000 PA-RISC computers:

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NetWare

In the early 1990s, a two-year effort to port the NetWare operating system to PA-RISC was planned by HP and Novell. It was led by Novell as part of its aggressive into the UNIX industry with first product shipments targeted for 1992-93. The PA-RISC port was more mortar for Novell’s brick wall.

Netware
© Netware, from archive.org

Novell dominated the network operation system market at the time and had agreements with other RISC vendors to port NetWare to their architectures.

Development of PA-RISC was part of Processor-Independent NetWare (PIN) of NetWare 4.1, with support planned for a multitude of computer architectures of the day besides x86, like Alpha, Sun, MIPS and PowerPC.

The porting effort at NetWare for PIN and HP for the PA-RISC part took longer than planned (got bogged down), and HP finally pulled out in 1994 after Novell was unable to deliver Processor-Independent NetWare (PIN) on schedule.

PA-RISC NetWare was supposed to be released in summer of 1994, until HP cancelled its plans to sell PIN on HP 9000 after the porting delays. HP decided to satisfy the niche for NetWare in its product lineup with Intel-based NetServer computers supplemented by Portable NetWare, NetWare 4.1 Services and Novell Directory Service (NDS) ports to HP-UX.

The delay of PIN and cancellation of PA-RISC were a major disappointment when PA-RISC was one of [the] prime choices for NetWare.

NetWare apparently supported the following HP 9000 PA-RISC computers:

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HP-UX on Intel x86

Apparently, HP conducted a prototype port of HP-UX to x86 hardware when the future of HP-UX and the Itanium platform were in doubt during the early 2010s. PA-RISC was long gone then and HP had a team working in secret (skunkworks) to port HP-UX to x86 away from Itanium.

Some documents were made public through lawsuits; Oracle described HP efforts on repositioning itself and its server and Unix division in the early 2010s. HP apparently mulled buying parts of Sun and Solaris to consolidate its Unix position. Solaris was the Unix leader at the time in the US and HP-UX everywhere else, even though on a death march due to inevitable Itanium trajectory.

Parts of the conversation in these documents mention a successful boot of HP-UX on x86 in December of 2009, with porting efforts projected to cost 100M+ between 2010 and 2016. The plan was for mission-critical x86 systems (ProLiant DL980 and Superdome with x86) and first releases projected in 2011 (developer) and 2012 (Superdome and Linux ABI).

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Documentation

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