Workstation Owner Sadly Marks the End-of-Life for HP-UX (osnews.com)
- Reference: 0180516029
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/05/0520224/workstation-owner-sadly-marks-the-end-of-life-for-hp-ux
- Source link: https://www.osnews.com/story/144094/hp-ux-hits-end-of-life-today-and-im-sad/
They call it "the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux."
> I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an [2]HP c8000 , the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never "leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract)...
>
> Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean.
>
> Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it.
As the clocks chimed midnight on New Year's Eve, he advised everyone to "spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists."
[1] https://www.osnews.com/story/144094/hp-ux-hits-end-of-life-today-and-im-sad/
[2] https://www.openpa.net/systems/hp_c8000.html
Also, Itanium (Score:2)
With the end of 2025, the last commercial support obligations for Itanium hardware have ended as well. Essentially, Itanium finally, officially died 4 days ago.
Re: (Score:2)
It is really surprising how long bad ideas keep staying around. Itanium is a monument to the sheer incompetence of Intel when it comes to CPU design.
Re:Also, Itanium (Score:4, Informative)
Itanium was the longest lived (25 years) of Intel's various failed attempts to kill x86. It obviously failed in this regard, but it was successful at killing other RISC CPU architectures, including PA-RISC and Alpha.
Previous attempts include iAPX 432, i960 and i860, all now consigned to the dustbin of history, along with IA-64 (Itanium,) although the i960 had some success in embedded IO controllers.
Re: (Score:3)
Parts of Alpha AXP live on in AMD's processor line-up though. The front side bus is a direct successor of Alpha's front side bus, and x86-64 is heavily inspired by Alpha's architecture too.
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I would expect that competent people make it on the second or at least the 3rd attempt. Intel failed 6 times by this count. AMD, on the other hand, needed one attempt to succeed and that is why it is the AMD64 architecture. What a crass difference.
Re: (Score:2)
Intel has suffered from having fuck-you money since the 1980s. Such companies can suffer from accumulating faddish management and misallocating resources. Intel is a poster child example of this.
That's ended very recently. Intel's net income graphs since 2022 are astonishing: the wheels fell off entirely. We'll see if they get their poop back in a group with Panther Lake next week. It's looking pretty solid.
Re: (Score:2)
Abandonware is just one way that copyright is broken as a concept.
If you don't want it (and end-of-life is just one way of expressing that), then you don't get to hoard it.
is it me? (Score:3)
Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that there's a news article about someone who turned off their old computer?
I mean (Score:5, Interesting)
HP-UX was always the "busted" Unix. In the 1990s when you'd read instructions for compiling software, there were always workarounds for deficiencies with HP-UX.
Irix was more than a "movie star" (appearing in Jurassic Park) -- all the graphics innovations we have today started with SGI, and Irix was solid. The first 64 bit Unix was IRIX. The Nintendo 64 was the direct child of SGI workstations. But the SGI keyboards were mushy as all hell so I guess nobody is perfect.
Solaris had an enormous amount of effort put into making it as good as possible. Like the version of Troff that came with Solaris is light years beyond anything else available even today. And do you know why? Because there was a brief time in history that Unix typesetting was considered state of the art and people literally bought Unix workstations to run troff. So Sun dumped a ton of money into making Troff as good as humanly possible. Sun gave us NEWS and Java and all kinds of innovations.
I don't doubt that HP-UX was capable but it's exactly the situation that the guy in the article is describing -- it was 100% an enterprise product sold to banks and similar customers with zero effort made to make it sexy or accessible to even broader commercial customers. When freaking IBM outshines you by a mile (like, you can get a Visual Studio integration for z/OS today) you've completely lost the plot.
Re: (Score:2)
IRIX was the origin of XFS in Linux. The design and command line syntax of the LVM subsystem in Linux was modeled after the HP-UX LVM implementation: HP's LVM was a leading implementation at the time and it worked well: I used it on HP-UX servers for backing up Oracle volumes, among other things.
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Some versions of HP-UX 9 had a nasty bug whereby a fork() loop could hard crash the system because IIRC there was no bounds checking on the process table. I know, I found it by accident when learning to code multiprocess in C at uni. I was definately not Mr Popularity in the sys admin office that day.
I was using HP-UX in the early 2000s (Score:2)
We had a bunch of HP-UX machines and a handful of Sun boxes running Solaris. Personally, I've been much happier working in an all-Linux environment.
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Back when Solaris and HP-UX was in the ascendent Linux frankly wasn't really up to much either at the application, graphics or even system level (proper pthreads didn't arrive until kernel version 3, before then it was faked with seperate processes) no I'm not sure what the appeal of early linux was other than being able to run it on a PC. And yes, I've used all 3 and still using Linux today.
Used to sysadmin hpux (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact HPUX was the first Unix I was introduced to as a CS student back in 1997. I remember the large monitors that were super high resolution and CDE looked great. You didn't need anti-aliasing because the fonts (well-designed bitmap fonts) looked crisp and readable on those enormous 19" 1600x1200 CRTs. When LCDs came out they were a real step backwards compared to those monitors. Has take a long time to finally exceed the quality of those 1600x1200 displays with modern 2k and 4k displays.
When I got my first job as a sysadmin at a uni in the CS dept we had a whole bunch of HPUX workstations, and also a file server running HPUX. I've forgotten nearly everything I knew about HPUX but I vaguely remember the SAM utility. Around that time I was introduced to Linux. Eventually as Linux got better and better I managed to convince the department to let us roll out Linux in one computer lab as a test. It was so popular with the students compared to the Solaris and HPUX labs that by around 2000 we had replaced all of the open lab HP and Solaris workstations with Linux on x86 PCs (RedHat if I recall) and everyone from the faculty to the students were quite happy with them.
I feel somewhat bad at helping an entire CS department migrate away from HPUX machines as they really were high quality machines, but it was good move, for the department, the students, and for me professionally.
Re: (Score:2)
I worked with HP-UX in 1990/1991, when it was still HP-UX 7.1. I was once credited in Emacs 19.10 for porting it to HP-UX 9.x in 1993. At the time, a friend of mine coded a variant of Atari's MIDImaze for UNIX, and we were playing netmaze on a pool of HP-UX workstations in the university's computer pool, because the new PA-RISC architecture was REALLY fast compared to anything Sun SPARC or x86 had to offer.
hp workstaions rocked (Score:1)
look my sig hp-ux was not needed 20 years ago
Fuck Carly et all (Score:1)
Fuck Carly and the rest of the assclowns that destroyed HP, Compaq, and seriously wounded Agilent. Special mention CEO's of Sun Microsystems, Commodore, Atari, and Palm.
all of you can eat giant bags of dick
Re: (Score:2)
Commodore especially whoever fucked that company, man...
Re: (Score:2)
That'd be [1]Mehdi Ali. [commodore.ca]
[1] https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/mehdi-ali-the-end-of-commodore/
What is the last unix standing? (Score:2)
Don't tell me it's MacOS. (Also don't be an ignorant ass and say Linux.)
Re: (Score:2)
Is a fork still considered Unix? AIX still exists, as does Solaris and of course SCO Unix.
The BSDs are also still around, although [1]according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] they're considered "Unix-like"... as is Linux.
Also according to Wikipedia, both macOS and Z/OS are current, certified Unix systems. SCO OpenServer is also listed there, but it doesn't appear to be maintained.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_systems
Re: (Score:2)
A couple of Linux distros have been certified as UNIX(tm) before: Inspur's K-UX and Huawei's EulerOS.
20 year is forever in tech years. (Score:2)
HP has a long history of supporting their hardware/software for decades after last sale. 20 years is certainly impressive. But, as the saying goes, all good things come to an end.
Re: (Score:2)
> But, as the saying goes, all good things come to an end.
Only MS DOS^WWindows is immortal.
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>> But, as the saying goes, all good things come to an end.
> Only MS DOS^WWindows is immortal.
Not really. But it is the one most overstaying its welcome.
The Curious Case of..Measuring Progress. (Score:2)
> HP has a long history of supporting their hardware/software for decades after last sale. 20 years is certainly impressive. But, as the saying goes, all good things come to an end.
If 20 years is considered 'forever' in tech years, IPv6 is pulling a whole-ass Benjamin Button.
Re: 20 year is forever in tech years. (Score:2)
Even if something isn't supported the files should be left for download as 'legacy unsupported, use at your own risk'