One of the neater aspects of HP-UX is that, given the breadth of pre-2000s HP, HP-UX ran on a number of different devices. You can almost (_almost_ - it's a stretch) think of it as a precursor to how Linux proliferated on routers and smartphones.
While you'd _expect_ to find HP-UX racked in a datacenter, you can also find it on workstations, where its proprietary VUE desktop environment eventually morphed into CDE (which, ironically, I've only ever used on Solaris).
It powered at least one early, pre-laptop-form-factor portable PC, the HP Integral. And you can also find it running on oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other test equipment from the 80s and 90s.
Ah, memories. At my first real job, my desktop machine was an HP-UX workstation with a monochrome monitor. The company did UNIX CAD software, so each developer got a different type of system to ensure we developed on all the platforms we supported - HP-UX, AIX (IBM), SunOS/Solaris, Ultrix (DEC) and IRIX (SGI).
I was instantly jealous of the devs who got the SGI machines, not only did they have color monitors (!) but they got to play networked games with each other (battletanks I think?) at lunchtimes.
There's was also a really smooth game where you had spaceships flying around and shooting with a lot of inertia.. would you know what that was? I was most impressed with the smoothness of it considering we were all on networked terminals on a shared 10mbit network.
I once worked at a shop that supported their product on a variety of Windows, UNIX, and Linux platforms. Most of the development was done on Windows, but there were some there that favored Linux and a few, Solaris. The machines running HPUX were primarily used to debug issues that arouse only on HPUX. I think the machine running HPUX was old and slow, so none there favored it as a devlopment platform.
Same. I ran the build farm at a large company, and HPUX was there solely to build releases and run their tests. I never touched it for any other reason, and that as little as possible.
Egads, was Itanic ever slow for anything not manually optimized to run on it.
Good riddance. Of all the Unix variants I tried over the years, HP-UX was the second worst (that dishonor goes to Xenix).
I remember giving a talk at Chico State University back in the dotcom era, and got a tour of the CS dept; they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions. But anything with HPUX was named after diseases (e.g. Typhus, Malaria) and the feeling in the dept was not subtle.
HPUX was without a doubt the worst UNIX imo. Solaris was great. IRIX was great. AIX was neat, if a little weird. But SSH'ing into an HPUX box felt like you had been transported back into 1979 or something lol
I think the weirdest I encountered was Apollo Domain/OS. But SPP-UX was close as a microkernel with an HP-UX compatible personality on top.
But in some sense, every high-performance platform back then was an abomination. Whether it was the variant of AIX on an SP2, the weirdly unique Irix versions that seemed to exist in each Origin system at each national lab, or the painfully slow fork/exec on a Cray T3E frontend system when compiling apps.
Still good enough to learn UNIX, that was my introduction back in 1993.
The system was still expensive enough that we had a single tower for the whole class, we would take turns into the system, having prepared our samples on MS-DOS using Turbo C, with mocks for the UNIX system calls and conditional makefiles.
If anyone has a computer museum or something and is looking for a donation of a 68k based hpux box let me know! They're pretty rare. The pa-risc one I'm still keeping though.
One of the neater aspects of HP-UX is that, given the breadth of pre-2000s HP, HP-UX ran on a number of different devices. You can almost (_almost_ - it's a stretch) think of it as a precursor to how Linux proliferated on routers and smartphones.
While you'd _expect_ to find HP-UX racked in a datacenter, you can also find it on workstations, where its proprietary VUE desktop environment eventually morphed into CDE (which, ironically, I've only ever used on Solaris).
It powered at least one early, pre-laptop-form-factor portable PC, the HP Integral. And you can also find it running on oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other test equipment from the 80s and 90s.
I really liked VUE so much more. The collaboration with IBM really made CDE more business-like and boring.
I still run 10.20 on my old PARISC box for that reason.
Ah, memories. At my first real job, my desktop machine was an HP-UX workstation with a monochrome monitor. The company did UNIX CAD software, so each developer got a different type of system to ensure we developed on all the platforms we supported - HP-UX, AIX (IBM), SunOS/Solaris, Ultrix (DEC) and IRIX (SGI).
I was instantly jealous of the devs who got the SGI machines, not only did they have color monitors (!) but they got to play networked games with each other (battletanks I think?) at lunchtimes.
Probably battlezone.
We would play that and networked Doom on the chemistry department’s SGI machines. The students trying to do real work were less than enthusiastic.
There's was also a really smooth game where you had spaceships flying around and shooting with a lot of inertia.. would you know what that was? I was most impressed with the smoothness of it considering we were all on networked terminals on a shared 10mbit network.
Unfortunately we didn’t know about that one. No clue.
bzflag, which apparently is still being developed.
https://www.bzflag.org/
More likely Chris Fouts’ bz, at least in my case.
I once worked at a shop that supported their product on a variety of Windows, UNIX, and Linux platforms. Most of the development was done on Windows, but there were some there that favored Linux and a few, Solaris. The machines running HPUX were primarily used to debug issues that arouse only on HPUX. I think the machine running HPUX was old and slow, so none there favored it as a devlopment platform.
Same. I ran the build farm at a large company, and HPUX was there solely to build releases and run their tests. I never touched it for any other reason, and that as little as possible.
Egads, was Itanic ever slow for anything not manually optimized to run on it.
Related to OpenBSD/hppa platform support, see perhaps the recent post "The scariest boot loader code":
* http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/boot_hppa.htm...
* Via: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20251231080327
Good riddance. Of all the Unix variants I tried over the years, HP-UX was the second worst (that dishonor goes to Xenix).
I remember giving a talk at Chico State University back in the dotcom era, and got a tour of the CS dept; they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions. But anything with HPUX was named after diseases (e.g. Typhus, Malaria) and the feeling in the dept was not subtle.
Oh dear, time to switch to OpenVMS on Itanium arch.
HPUX was without a doubt the worst UNIX imo. Solaris was great. IRIX was great. AIX was neat, if a little weird. But SSH'ing into an HPUX box felt like you had been transported back into 1979 or something lol
I think the weirdest I encountered was Apollo Domain/OS. But SPP-UX was close as a microkernel with an HP-UX compatible personality on top.
But in some sense, every high-performance platform back then was an abomination. Whether it was the variant of AIX on an SP2, the weirdly unique Irix versions that seemed to exist in each Origin system at each national lab, or the painfully slow fork/exec on a Cray T3E frontend system when compiling apps.
Still, it got containers before Solaris via Vault.
Irix, Solaris and NeXTSTEP are my favourite UNIXes.
Xenix was worse, but only a little. Both it and HPUS were atrocities.
Still good enough to learn UNIX, that was my introduction back in 1993.
The system was still expensive enough that we had a single tower for the whole class, we would take turns into the system, having prepared our samples on MS-DOS using Turbo C, with mocks for the UNIX system calls and conditional makefiles.
If anyone has a computer museum or something and is looking for a donation of a 68k based hpux box let me know! They're pretty rare. The pa-risc one I'm still keeping though.
[dupe]
"HP-UX hits end-of-life today, and I'm sad"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46493790
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487365