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HP 9000 870 Emerald were the first PA-RISC multiprocessor (SMP) system released by HP, in 1991. 870S were hosted in a large cabinet with up to four 50 MHz PCX for around half a million US dollars, positioned against IBM mainframe transaction computers.

HP designed all of its PA-RISC processors inhouse for two decades – and fabbed them as well for more than a decade.

Two new releases of QEMU, the RISC workstation emulator, brought new support for PA-RISC workstation and devices.

In the late-1980s, HP developed graphical accelerators for the fledging 3D design market as an outgrowth of MCAD solutions on Unix.

When Apple used HP 9000 735 workstations and Unigraphics on HP-UX to design the PowerBook 500, a 1994 portable computer using Motorola 68040 processors, later labeled as one of the “all-time best PowerBook models.”

PA-RISC processors were the HP design for the RISC era of business and technical computing between the 1980s and 2000s.

AutoCAD is a 2D and 3D CAD software solution, developed and sold by AutoDesk sind the early 1980s.

I-DEAS was a CAD and mechanical design automation (MDA) software developed in the early 1980s by SDRC, Structural Dynamics Research Corporation.

CATIA from Dassault Systems is a CAD, CAM and CAE software suite that has been released in many different versions since the early 1980s.

Different operating systems have been developed for PA-RISC computers since their inception in 1986, most of them Unix or Unix-like.

PA-RISC started its life as conservative RISC design for Unix computing in the 1980s.

CAD, CAM and CAE applications for computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering were one of the main use cases for PA-RISC and HP 9000 computers.

HP Nova servers were archetypical HP 9000 800 PA-RISC servers from the early 1990s, when HP 9000 workstations and servers had very divergent system designs.

Many different Unix and non-Unix operating systems have been developed for PA-RISC computers since their inception.

Adobe ported its Acrobat PDF products to Unix quite early in the mid-1990s with multple Unix platforms supported by the Acrobat PDF creator.

PA-RISC workstations were popular in the 1990s heydays of Unix, a time that predates the modern graphical Internet and web browsers a bit.

PA-RISC and HP-UX workstations were often used in 1990s desktop publishing (DTP).

As part of Unix office software on HP-UX, there were a few popular stand-alone spreadsheet applications available.

Quite a few office and productivity suites were ported to in the 1980s and 1990s: “No Longer The Exclusive Domain Of Academics And Engineers, UNIX Is Gaining Prominence In Office Environments”.

With HP-UX software emulators for PC and Macintosh systems, HP 9000 PA-RISC workstations could run 1990s-vintage DOS, Windows and Apple Mac OS and applications.

The era of HP Unix workstations came to a close in the early 2000s.

HP-UX 11i v1 are HP Unix 11.11 releases from 2000 to 2006 and support most 64-bit PA-RISC servers and workstations and some 32-bit as well.

Another entry in the RISC Laptops series on 1990s Unix laptops with RISC processors: Toshiba SPARC LT laptops based on Sun SPARC architecture for Unix.

A new edition of the OpenPA PA-RISC Book has been released.

QEMU is an open source computer emulation and virtualization software for many different computer systems.

A very forgotten VLIW architecture of the late 1980s: Intel iWarp is a combined VLIW and RISC computer architecture that coupled a 32-bit CPU core with long instructions and “powerful communication support” to enable meshed computers for powerful parallel…

Another forgotten VLIW processor of the 1990s: Sun MAJC is a VLIW architecture developed by Sun for media and signal processing.

New series on forgotten VLIW and RISC Processors of the 1990s with Philips Trimedia VLIW as first article.

Another entry in the RISC Laptops series on 1990s Unix laptops with RISC processors: IBM WorkPad z50.

SAIC apparently produced another PA-RISC portable computer in the mid-1990s: the SAIC Talon.

HOT CHIPS is an IEEE conference on microprocessors and microcomputers, organized yearly since 1989.

OpenPA is looking for hardcopy digests of COMPCON, the Computer Conference of IEEE International from the 1980s and 1990s.

The processing power of Unix and RISC computers was often measured by industry benchmarks to compare the speed with other vendors.

Comparing the speed of CPU architectures is a very complex and sometimes futile undertaking, as the platform around processors might be much more significant than the actual ISA.

Much more documentation for the relative obscure HP-RT real-time operating system for PA-RISC has been unearthed.

The golden 1990s were a period of experimentation and change in the computing world.

The Linux and OpenBSD ports to PA-RISC turned 25 this year.

During the early 1990s, so-called “pizzabox” workstations were very popular.

HP used a few third-party 3D accelerators on its PA-RISC and Itanium Unix workstations: Various ATI FireGL and nVIDIA Quadro AGP video cards were used by HP.

HP 9000 and PA-RISC workstations were shipped almost exlusively with custom HP graphics adapters, which HP designed for a variety of different use cases, from simple 1990s 2D design to advanced CAD/CAM, 3D modeling and scientific design.

While HP-UX was mostly used for engineering and design applications during the PA-RISC heydays, several Unix games run on HP-UX, ported in the 1990s.

Two more RISC laptops have been added to the RISC Laptop Archive: UltraSPARC-based RDI UltraBook and the rare PA-RISC Hitachi 3050RX 100C from Japan.

Another slight detour from PA-RISC content on OpenPA: The RISC Laptop Archive on the various RISC-based laptops sold throughout the 1990s.

The last of the HP Visualize NT Workstations – and the provisional end of the Intel x86-cycle on OpenPA: HP released newer x-class and p-class workstations in 2000.

HP-UX 11.11, the Unix from HP for PA-RISC computers, was renamed 11i in 2000.

HP Visualize X-Class were Intel-based personal workstations for Windows NT, released in 1999.

HP offered Visualize FX video adapters for Intel HP Kayak, Visualize P-Class and X-Class NT workstations in the late 1990s, first developed for and shipped with HP Kayak workstations.

HP Visualize Personal Workstations were Intel-based computers for Windows NT, released in 1999.

Stratus Technologies produced a line of “Ultra High Availability Fault Tolerant” PA-RISC servers in the 1990s, the Stratus Continuum.

HP Visualize graphics adapters were used in many HP 9000 and HP Visualize PA-RISC workstations, often integrated onto the mainboard or as separate GSC expansion cards of various types.