Information resource on PA-RISC and HP 9000 workstations and servers
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 claimed four times the performance of the previous high-end HP 9000 model. HP added SMP support to PA-RISC and HP 9000 since that offer[ed] the…
HP designed all of its PA-RISC processors inhouse for two decades and fabbed them as well for more than a decade. HP manufactured PA-RISC processors in its own facilities in Colorado, from the 1986 TS-1 in TTL to 64-bit PA-8200 in CMOS , 1997. Close to PA-RISC s Decline, HP switched to Intel fabs for two years and then to IBM in 2001 for CMOS SoI. Fabrication Year CPU Die mm and gates FETs Process…
Two new releases of QEMU , the RISC workstation emulator, brought new support for PA-RISC workstation and devices. QEMU 10.2 and 11.0 added support for HP 9000 715 workstations and many PA-RISC devices and 64-bit support. QEMU on PA-RISC now supports the following HP 9000 and Visualize computers: HP 9000 715/64 workstation, 32-bit (I/O not stable) HP A400 server, 64-bit (still unstable) HP…
In the late-1980s, HP developed graphical accelerators for the fledging 3D design market as an outgrowth of MCAD solutions on Unix. With SRX and VRX graphics systems, external boxes that connected to the main PA-RISC workstation, HP tried to compete with other entrants in the 3D and animation markets such as Silicon Graphics (SGI 4D). SRX and VRX, and their Turbo versions, were developed in the HP…
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. The flagship Blackbird PowerBook 500 was designed inhouse by Apple industrial designers, using a diverse workflow spanning Apple tools and Unix platforms to merge 2D CAD with 3D surface…
PA-RISC processors were the HP design for the RISC era of business and technical computing between the 1980s and 2000s. PA-RISC was developed in three generations (PA-RISC 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0) in sold in four phases: Infancy , Growth , Maturity and Decline . PA-RISC had strong competition from other RISC and sometimes CISC platforms. PA-RISC, the Precision Architecture , was an offspring from HP…
AutoCAD is a 2D and 3D CAD software solution, developed and sold by AutoDesk sind the early 1980s. AutoCAD was conceived for mechanical design engineers and later extended to architects and other professions that use CAD. In the 1980s, AutoCAD was the first CAD program in the world to run on a PC. Originally designed for PCs with MS-DOS and Macintosh The IBM PC version was what enabled the company…
I-DEAS was a CAD and mechanical design automation (MDA) software developed in the early 1980s by SDRC, Structural Dynamics Research Corporation. Originally developed as Integrated Design and Engineering Analysis Software , I-DEAS and SDRC were part of several mergers and acquisitions in the 2000s and sold to EDS in 2001, merged into Unigraphics NX, another CAD product, in 2002 and eventually sold…
CATIA from Dassault Systems is a CAD, CAM and CAE software suite that has been released in many different versions since the early 1980s. Originally developed for aircraft design, it was released as CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application) in 1981. CATIA was ported to Unix and RISC computers in the late 1980s (first IBM RT-PC, then RS/6000) in version 3, with version 4…
Different operating systems have been developed for PA-RISC computers since their inception in 1986, most of them Unix or Unix-like. Conceived as an Unix platform, PA-RISC supported many commercial, research and open source systems and was intensively during the 1990s with technical Unix software. PA-RISC operating system history started in 1986 with Unix and HP s own HP-UX. Early PA-RISC…
PA-RISC started its life as conservative RISC design for Unix computing in the 1980s. Performance in the early years was on par with other RISC and Unix platforms , but in the 90s, PA-RISC grew into a fast technical RISC platform with 64-bit PA-8000 CPUs. But supercomputers? HP used PA-RISC s floating-point prowess and the newly-acquired Convex Exemplar technology to compete with…
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. In the 1990s, mainstream RISC workstations became powerful enough for serious technical computing with applications like I-DEAS, CATIA, Unigraphics, HP ME10 and MSC/Nastran and Patran . PA-RISC processors had strong floating point performance,…
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. Nova F, G, H and I Class were business-oriented PA-RISC servers, designed by the HP Technical Server division with 32-bit PA-7000 and PA-7100 processors. They were used as multifunction or dedicated network servers for applications, databases…
Many different Unix and non-Unix operating systems have been developed for PA-RISC computers since their inception. PA-RISC operating system history starts with Unix in 1986: HP s own HP-UX, still shipped today. Several Unix, Mach and other architectures have been ported to PA-RISC over the years, some open, some commercial, some closed. The Infancy of PA-RISC operating systems from 1986 to 1991…
Adobe ported its Acrobat PDF products to Unix quite early in the mid-1990s with multple Unix platforms supported by the Acrobat PDF creator. Support in Acrobat Reader for viewing PDFs was added later. Acrobat and Reader were available for HP-UX on PA-RISC until the mid-2000s: Acrobat Reader supported PA-RISC for around ten years, starting with Acrobat Reader 3.0 (1996) on HP-UX 9.03, followed by…
PA-RISC workstations were popular in the 1990s heydays of Unix, a time that predates the modern graphical Internet and web browsers a bit. Later, in the 2000s, PA-RISC computers were used even more in specialized niches, in which Internet access did not feature highly. Thus there have been almost no modern browsers available since. The main protagonists of the early web were available on HP-UX:…
PA-RISC and HP-UX workstations were often used in 1990s desktop publishing (DTP). HP 9000 computers were frequently involved in technical documentation and publishing frameworks, journals or large-scale project libraries. Even though the least desirable job in engineering, high-profile DTP programs were available on HP-UX well into the 1990s, when DTP firmly moved to Windows NT and Mac. FrameMaker…
As part of Unix office software on HP-UX, there were a few popular stand-alone spreadsheet applications available. The popular 1980s Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet started on DOS and PCs and was ported in the early 1990s to Unix and HP-UX on PA-RISC. Lotus 1-2-3 on Unix ran on HP-UX 7 and newer, possibly on both HP-UX and Motorola HP 9000s. The X11 and terminal-based program was released between 1991 and…
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 . Word and office programs allowed engineers to stay integrated into the wider IT environment and help with technical documentation. Popular applications included CorelDRAW! for graphics and the WordPerfect ,…
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. While the main use of HP-UX workstations usually was design and engineering, the use of emulators allowed these technical systems and their users to connect to wider office and productivity applications in the office to use mail, office…
The era of HP Unix workstations came to a close in the early 2000s. After a long line of PA-RISC HP 9000 700 and HP Visualize workstations for HP-UX in the 1990s, HP slowly transitioned its RISC and Unix offering towards server at the turn of the century. In the early 2000s, HP released a last batch of technical Unix workstations based on PA-RISC Workstation Architecture 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004…
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. Previous HP-UX 11.00 was the first 64-bit HP Unix. HP released HP-UX 11i originally as HP-UX 11.11 , changed that later to 11i and then even later to 11i v1 to differentiate from newer HP-UX server and Itanium products. With HP-UX 11i (11.11) HP introduced…
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. Toshiba SPARC LT AS1000 laptops were released in 1990 and were one of the first Unix laptops developed with still early RISC technology in the 1980s. SPARC LT were close to Sun SPARCstations (1+ or 2) but needed modified SunOS for the custom…
A new edition of the OpenPA PA-RISC Book has been released. Available as PDF, the Book of PA-RISC is in its fourteenth release, now in Edition 3.0 with more than 500 pages of PA-RISC information! Much new PA-RISC content has been added and many existing chapters revised and extended. Some of the major changes since the last release: PA-RISC Architecture and Precision HP Visualize Intel-based…
QEMU is an open source computer emulation and virtualization software for many different computer systems. It includes support for many RISC architectures besides x86, with PA-RISC emulation since 2018. Current QEMU version is 9.2.0. QEMU emulates a complete computer in software without the need for specific virtualization hardware. With QEMU , a full HP Visualize B160L and C3700 workstation can…
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 computing with >20 GFLOPS. Intel iWarp was jointly developed between Intel and Carnegie Mellon University, supported by DARPA (DoD) in the late…
Another forgotten VLIW processor of the 1990s: Sun MAJC is a VLIW architecture developed by Sun for media and signal processing. Sun produced one MAJC processor in 1999, MAJC-5200, a high performance general purpose microprocessor for multimedia and Java computing. MAJC is a scalable architecture that exploited multiple forms of parallelism, a hot topic of 1990s microarchitecture. MAJC was…
New series on forgotten VLIW and RISC Processors of the 1990s with Philips Trimedia VLIW as first article. The series was motivated by the HOT CHIPS conferences with so many unknown CPUs of the 90s. Philips TriMedia is a range of 32-bit VLIW processors for media processing released during the 1990s: TM-1000 was the first CPU, released in 1996, followed by TM-1100 in 1998 and TM-1300 (PNX1300) in…
Another entry in the RISC Laptops series on 1990s Unix laptops with RISC processors: IBM WorkPad z50 . It looks like a Thinkpad, but it s not. The WorkPad z50 is a mobile companion released by IBM in 1999 with MIPS processor for Windows CE. Aimed at the fledging handheld PC and PDA market of the late 90s, z50 were almost laptops but still had a RISC processor: NEC VR4121, a 64-bit MIPS processor.…
SAIC apparently produced another PA-RISC portable computer in the mid-1990s: the SAIC Talon . Compared to the well-known boxy Galaxy 1100, the Talon is even more rugged at almost 50 pounds and integrated a 32-bit HP 9000 712 PA-RISC system design into a military portable case. SAIC Talon PA-RISC portables were apparently produced as part of the US Navy TAC-4 program, under which HP provided…
HOT CHIPS is an IEEE conference on microprocessors and microcomputers, organized yearly since 1989. Almost all cutting edge RISC and computer architectures of the 1990s were presented at HOT CHIPS over the years, and interesting PA-RISC information can be found at the conference in HP presentations between 1991 and 1999. Most historic HOT CHIPS programs and proceedings are now only available in…
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…
The processing power of Unix and RISC computers was often measured by industry benchmarks to compare the speed with other vendors. Frequently used in the 1990s and 2000s were SPEC scores in CPU92, CPU95 and CPU2000 varieties, as quoted in press releases, magazines and websites for comparing CPUs and workstations. During the 1990s, John DiMarco regularly posted collected SPEC benchmark scores to…
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. Still, it is historically interesting to see how different RISC architectures fared against each other in the RISC/Unix world of the 90s. While PA-RISC processors were usually faster than their competition at the same…
Much more documentation for the relative obscure HP-RT real-time operating system for PA-RISC has been unearthed. HP-RT was an operating for HP 9000 740 VME instrumentation computers, released between 1993 and 1997 to offer real-time functionality for PA-RISC VME computers, POSIX 1003.1 and POSIX 1003.4 compatible. Documentation includes HP-RT manuals and articles of the HP Integrated Systems…
The golden 1990s were a period of experimentation and change in the computing world. Many different hardware architectures (RISC, CISC, VLIW) and platforms (Sun, DEC, IBM, HP) competed for hardware buyers, as did operating systems. PA-RISC was right in the middle of this , though HP itself was rather conservative. Unix was the operating system of choice for PA-RISC since the 1980s with HP-UX in…
The Linux and OpenBSD ports to PA-RISC turned 25 this year . Both popular Unix-like open source operating systems started PA-RISC development at the turn of the century, when HP PA-RISC computers had been largely confined to commercial Unix with HP-UX and closed research systems based on Mach. Not many options were available for second hand PA-RISC computers in the 1990s. Earlier ports of…
During the early 1990s, so-called pizzabox workstations were very popular. Unix workstations had usually been bulky and cumbersome affairs since the 1980s, so smaller, desktop-compatible boxes were a welcome change. HP produced two PA-RISC pizzaboxes in its lineup: HP 9000 705/710 and the ever popular HP 9000 712 . HP 9000 705/710 were the first small PA-RISC workstations, released in 1992. They…
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. For HP-UX on PA-RISC, HP supported HP FireGL cards in firmware and X11. HP FireGL cards were modified ATI cards and GPUs with HP providing drivers for HP-UX for 64-bit c8000 workstations running HP-UX 11.00 and higher: HP FireGL-UX PCI, IBM…
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. The page on PA-RISC graphics adapters has been split into several articles for specific HP video adapter groups. HP PA-RISC video adapters used a variety of HP…
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. This included many iconic 3D games from the early 1990s, compiled with OpenGL but also some other, semi-commercial ports of well-known games. Many freeware games were available for Unix and often could be compiled on various versions of HP-UX. Unix…
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. Hitachi 3050RX 100C were Japanese RISC laptops for Unix computing, introduced in 1994. Hitachi was a PRO consortium member for HP PA-RISC computers, the 100C was based on custom Hitachi PA/50L processor. They were possibly compatible with HP 9000…
Another slight detour from PA-RISC content on OpenPA: The RISC Laptop Archive on the various RISC-based laptops sold throughout the 1990s. Technical computing in the 1990s was mostly done on RISC workstations with Unix operating systems and specialized applications. For mobile use cases, some popular Unix vendors built RISC laptops. Often based on contemporary Unix workstations, these RISC laptops…
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. These updated the late 1990s X-Class and P-Class and were based on Intel Xeon and advanced chipsets. A1280 were new x-class, A6034 new p-class. Based on Intel Pentium III processors, x-class and p-class were up to two-way SMP capable…
HP-UX 11.11 , the Unix from HP for PA-RISC computers, was renamed 11i in 2000. This first version HP-UX 11i v1 was the last release for PA-RISC workstations . In turn, HP-UX 11i was shipped in different operating environments (OEs) for different PA-RISC computers in specific use cases, but with the same Base OS common core: Technical Computing Operating Environment (TCOE) for workstations Minimal…
HP Visualize X-Class were Intel-based personal workstations for Windows NT, released in 1999. HP complemented its PA-RISC graphics offering with these Intel NT workstations. X-Class Visualize A5014A X500 to X550 were performance HP NT workstations, above the P-Class. Based on Intel Pentium III processors with up to two-way SMP, X-Class used Xeon CPUs, an upgrade to Katmai/Coppermine processors in…
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. Visualize fx adapters for Intel were AGP, AGP Pro and sometimes PCI dual-slot cards that used the same 3D engine as the PA-RISC HP-UX cards. They had impressive speeds for 3D and CAM/CAD but were only offered for a…
HP Visualize Personal Workstations were Intel-based computers for Windows NT, released in 1999. With the P-Class, HP complemented its PA-RISC Visualize Unix workstations. Visualize P450 to P700C P-Class were entry-level HP NT workstations, followed by X-Class. Based on Intel Pentium III processors, up to two-way SMP capable and with the Intel 440BX chipset, P-Class start with the P450, P500 and…
Stratus Technologies produced a line of Ultra High Availability Fault Tolerant PA-RISC servers in the 1990s, the Stratus Continuum . They were based on multiple 32-bit and 64-bit PA-RISC processors and sold as the Continuum 400, 600 and 1200 series between 1995 and 2004 by Stratus together with HP. Stratus Continuums feature a great deal of redundancy, with up to four CPUs to form one single…
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. HP Visualize were a deep design and integration of previous HP graphics systems like CRX and HCRX from the 1990s. HP very briefly called these cards HP VisualEyes in 1995 before renaming and marketing them under HP…