OpenPA.net

During the 1980s and 1990s, HP was part of DTC and TAC contracts with the US Navy to supply industrial computers and workstations for military uses and “tactical decision support.”

PA-RISC was developed and introduced by HP during the 1980s to replace 16-bit stack-based CPUs in HP 3000 servers and Motorola 680x0 CPUs in HP’s Unix systems with a common system architecture.

The Exemplar Operating System SPP-UX, was a scalable Unix based on Mach developed by Convex for its SPP1000 and SPP2000 mainframe computers with up to 128 or 512 processors.

HP-UX is HP’s commercial Unix operating system for its PA-RISC workstations and servers.

HP-RT was a real-time operating system from HP for its HP 9000 740 VME instrumentation computers, released from 1993 to 1997 in six versions from 1.0 to 3.0.

Besides the well known commercial PA-RISC operating systems and research projects based on Unix and Mach, several rather odd operating system choices were ported to PA-RISC over the years.

Only three portable PA-RISC workstations were produced during 1990s — all by third-party vendors utilizing HP 9000 workstation designs from that era.

When OpenPA was founded in 1999, Unix/RISC companies like HP just started to open up to open source projects, the Internet and the public interest in general and began publishing much information freely on the web.

The HP 9000/800 series were the first PA-RISC systems released in the 1980s, all server systems, although some had graphics capabilities.

The HP 9000 family of computers was produced by HP between 1982 and the 2000s and included a large range of Unix computers in different classes – from the early FOCUS 500s to servers and workstations based on HP PA-RISC, the HP 9000 800 and 700 series HP…

Not only HP sold PA-RISC computers in the golden decade of Unix RISC workstations in the 90s.

The DN10000 were designed by Apollo based on their own PRISM RISC architecture at the end of the 1980s, before HP bought Apollo and integrated it with the HP 9000 lineup.

PA-RISC was used for many research projects in the late-1980s until the mid-1990s, a time when microkernels were popular in research.

Much has happened since the founding years of this PA-RISC information site in long-gone 1999, so some historiography on OpenPA is in order.

Operating systems for PA-RISC computers have a history that started in the 1980s in parallel to the release of early PA-RISC servers and computers.

The OpenPA frontend and backend have been cleaned and streamlined and the design adjusted slightly for the 21st century.

There is a new OpenPA print edition - the 11th release of the Book of PA-RISC since July 2006.

The HP Agilent 16600 and 16700 series are logic analyzers with PA-RISC processors sold by HP and Agilent, based on PA-RISC HP 9000 workstation architecture from the mid-1990s.

Various updates have been done and integrated into OpenPA, including new content, corrections and streamlining: PA-RISC Computers and HP 9000 and PA-RISC Computers Story pages updated and revised, content additions, some restructuring and harmonization be…

OpenPA.net turns twenty this year!

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.

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,…

The PA-RISC Operating Systems page has been updated with new content.

The PA-RISC Chipsets page has been split into separate sub-pages for each chipset and system design (ASP, LASI, Stretch ...).

Many parts of the OpenPA site were updated, revised and cleaned up between the end of 2015 and January 2016, after a long hiatus.

A new release of the print edition has been released after more than three years.

A new page with timelines on PA-RISC systems has been added to OpenPA, to detail some of the history and historic data of the systems covered here.

The pages on PA-RISC chipsets and PA-RISC system architecture have been combined.

Several pages with old content which were removed in 2008 have been added back to the new Archive section: PA-RISC LED codes PA-RISC PDC Boot-ROM HP 9000 Memory Modules PA-RISC Expansion Cards The content is still rather outdated and not actively maintain…

The majority of HP documentation on PA-RISC and HP 9000 systems disappeared from their official resources during the last two to three years.

The links to the firmware updates have been removed from the individual systems pages.

The following pages have been updated, restructured and extended between 2012 and 2014: PA-RISC System Architecture (new): a new page has been added that describes the multiple PA-RISC platforum designs from the early 1980s to mid-2000s, consolidating inf…

A new release of the print edition has been released after three years.

Entries on the Stretch chipset have been improved with more details and sections added for the Itanium/PA-RISC zx1 chipset and its various components.

The T-Class servers are large 32-bit PA-RISC mainframes from the mid-1990s, built with modular system cards that contain processors, memory or I/O devices.

December 2009 marks the 10th anniversary of OpenPA.net.

HP used various CPU bus designs to attach the main processor to the main system bus with its I/O adapters and the memory.

Several forms of memory and I/O controllers (MIOCs) were employed on HP PA-RISC systems.

Several outdated and incomplete pages have been removed from OpenPA.

The Convex Exemplar SPP1x00, introduced between 1994-1996, are scalable 32-bit mainframes, with either PA-7100 (SPP1000) or PA-7200 (SPP1200 and SPP1600) processors.

The jointly marketed Exemplar SPP2000 (Convex)/S-Class and X-Class (HP) are the 64-bit Exemplar successors to the 32-bit based SPP1x00s from the mid-1990s.

The page on HP X-Terminals was contributed (i. e. donated) to Wikipedia as of September 5, 2008.

Several other vendors sold PA-RISC workstations and servers in the mid-1990s, with Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Oki being active at that timeframe with various PA-RISC offerings on the Japanese market.

The V2500 and V2600 are the second generation scalable PA-RISC V-Class servers built upon the Convex Exemplar architecture.

These first HP V-Class servers were closely based on the Convex SPP architecture and are more or less the direct successor to the Convex Exemplar SPP2000 computers.

The Second Edition of the OpenPA Print Edition was released with much new content additions and typographic improvements.

Several pages for systems with the HP PA-RISC successor — the HP/Intel Itanium (IA64) architecture — have been added.

The page detailing the various research and development projects of operating system ports to the PA-RISC platform has been reworked and filled with much more content.

The newer PA-RISC based servers, including the rp5430/rp5450 (L1500/L3000), rp7400 (N4000) and rp7405/rp7410 (N4000), are based around rather complicated chipset setups — the rp7405/rp7410 N4000s are build around the cell-based “Core Electronics Complex”…

The rp7400 were the original version of the N4000 line of servers — the newer rp7405 and rp7410 servers were also labeled as N4000 and feature a similar set of I/O options and expandability in basically the same chassis.