The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture.
> The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture.
This sounds cool, but I've wondered - couldn't you just stick something like
(I'm actually doing something like this myself; I don't (yet) have AFS or NFS strongly in play in my environment, but of all things I've resorted to this trick to pick out binaries in ~/.local/bin when using distrobox, because Alpine and OpenSUSE are not ABI compatible)
What's really interesting about @sys is that it supports a search-path at run-time, so the resolution can walk back through a list of target systems to find an available one.
IMHO, HP-UX had hands down best written man pages I've ever seen any UNIX commercial or free. And I've been working quite many with.
All man pages were well written, nicely formatted easy to read and almost all came with often valuable examples giving quick enough understanding to check usage most often. That has been absolutely the thing that I've missed other *nix systems since.
But there are too many things were done so nicely and made it nice to maintain with HP-UX that it's not worth trying to remember and list all. But unfortunately shell environment was not match to convenience GNU tools Linux had from beginning. That is without making effort to install (read: compile from source for quite long time) those HP-UX if that was allowed. With university computing center that no problem, but telco side it was big nono -- not without getting product owner permission first :/
But just an example Ignite-UX was one of my favourites with HP-UX. The simplicity using a one simple command with few options bootable DAT tape that could then be used to either recover whole running fully functional system or clone that developed system first to staging lab and then up to production with ease was great time saver major upgrades and migrations. None of the Linux bare metal backup systems I've tested have been able to recover exactly same disk layouts, usually LVM part is poorly done. As has been VmWare p2v migration tools also btw.
That Linux LVM that Sistina did first before Red Hat bought them, is implemented quite exactly what HP-UX had for some time then.
HP-UX general support seems it is EOLd by end of this year. Extended, apparently very pricey, support will last till 2028.
It would be nice if anyone having still contacts they could ask if HPE would be willing to relax at least parts of HP-UX, like documentation and let achieve.org take them and let us occasionally check things as rererence how it was HP-UX.
It would be shame if all that work that they did documents were lost and unavailable general public later on.
I agree that LVM in HP-UX was far ahead of Linux back in the day. To be fair some of those advanced features in HP-UX LVM required an additional license (eg: mirroring required Enterprise Operating Environment). I haven't touched HP-UX in like 10 years however.
That is true, sw licenses were a major nuisance. As they usually are. Not just where to get one, but in time, to keep track of those and secure so that proof of purchase was not lost before deployment and include final delivery. HP product codes and major version change product renaming plague were not exactly my favourite part of work!
Many HP-UX boxen (servers) came with default (interactive) multiuser OS licenses. Product differentiation which HP sales loved had license castrated workstations, which came only two user license.
First time I had no clue about this and were wondering why some odd network management software I was installing a server did not restart properly and was causing head scratching. Then I found that logs stated our license was not valid though it had been confirmed valid in other test install.
A HP support guy I knew and saw later told that I had probably to install optional two-user package and then the software will start. Oh, great that it was. But what the heck that two-user license only prevented only two serial line users simultaneously and only systems console was serial that time and everyone else logged in via network. To be sure I made PM check if we still were within license because of that. He told me later yep, no problem there. Just get it done and we're ready deploy it to site.
I remember the hours gcc needed to compile itself on those HP servers. We needed it for all the programs that would not compile with HP's cc. We also installed some GNU userland utilities because, as you wrote, they were better than the ones in HP-UX. Those were the years around 1990.
I did some HP-UX in late 80's, migration of servers across the country for a courrier company from NCR towers to HP servers running HP-UX (sorry don't recall the models of hand).
Had fun porting sortware across, a radio system that was unable to test fully unless in the field (which it did first time, which was amazing). Had many good chats with HP engineers back then (we did a large purchase as a global company) and one I still recall was early editions of HP-UX having an error code of 8008, until somebody in senior managment at HP saw it one time (no customer had ever complained apparently about it).
I liked HP-UX having previously worked on IBM RT systems running AIX, as well as NCR towers with there more vanilla System V. Though did have SMIT with AIX and SAM with HP-UX for those manual saving moments of ease to fall back on. Though my favourite flabour of unix of that time would be the Pyramid systems dual universe OSx. You could have a BSD or an AT&T enviroment at once, able to use both flavours in scripts by prefixing with bsd or att, to run that command. Don't recall how it handled TERMCAP/TERMINFO of hand (that was always an area of fun back then).
Fun times, in the days in which O'Reilly and magazines like Byte or Unix World, were the internet, along with expensive training courses and manuals that you would use and thumb every page of the multi tombed encyclopedic stack they came in.
Best C platform for developing that I did use in that era, hands down the VAX under DCL, the profilers etc, pure leaps and joy.
Oh hey, a 9000/340 in the Cambridge area. Almost certainly that originated with the university's Engineering department, who back in the 1990s got rid of a lot of these machines that they had been using as X terminals. My notes say they had six diskless workstations to each server, and kept the monitors to use with the replacement machines, which would explain why this person's 9000/340 has no disk or monitor.
Some truly terrible quality pictures of the one I used to own are at https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/tiroth... (I have long since disposed of it). Some of the people who got the machines had a play around with getting Linux booting on them. Amazingly some of that code is still in the kernel, eg drivers/net/ethernet/amd/hplance.c so it might even still work ;-)
I totally missed the EOL announcement. Not that I use it, but it is one on the few last big proprietary Unix. I thought their will always be enough paying customers to maintain it (even if sold to third party).
My significant experiences on HP-UX were HP Vault, one the very first approaches of doing containers in UNIX, and going through 32 bit to 64 bit transition.
Nowadays NetBSD offers something similar to "context depended filesystem", i.e. a special form of symbolic links that can points to different locations, according to wide range set of attributes: from domainname via machine_arch to gid.
The "context dependent filesystem" concept is a bit trippy, but I think it's a pretty neat solution to "some systems need a their own version of a file, other files ought to be universal".
It reminds me a little of a thing used in clustering of DECs (later HPs) Tru64 Unix.
The clusters had a shared OS image - that is a single, shared root filesystem for all members. To allow node-specific config files, there was a type of symbolic link called a “Context Dependent Symbolic Link” (CDSL). They were just like a normal symlink, but had a `{memb}` component in the target, which was resolved at runtime to the member ID of the current system. These would be used to resolve to a path under `/cluster/members/{memb}`, so each host could have its own version of a config file.
The single shared root filesystem made upgrades and patching of the OS extra fun. There was a multi-phase process where both old and new copies of files were present and hosts were rebooted one at a time, switching from the old to the new OS.
My first thought, upon reading that these were being given away, and seeing "Cambridge" was that they should go to the "Centre for Computing History".
I've been trying to visit this place with my daughter for 4 (or more?) years now, every time we've been in the area (roughly once per year), I forget that it isn't open on Mondays (which is the day we typically have a couple of hours before leaving the area), walk up to the doors only to realise (again) I've made the same mistake, and my daughter and I walk away disappointed.
Thanks for this. Brings back so many memories of the long hours spent in computer rooms with HP 9000s and RS/6000s back in the 90s. Seeing that SAM interface made me shiver :)
It's great that there are folks like you preserving this history
Oh my! Thanks for the memories - HPUX was my first workstation class unix operating system (sili-g's were too expensive). I remember downloading and compiling gcc on hpux. THe ideas of compiling a compiler with itself blew my mind!
>I’ve got my HP 9000 Model 340 booting over the network from an HP 9000 Model 705 in Cluster Server mode and I’ve learned some very unsettling things about HP-UX and its filesystem.
>Boot-up video at the end of the blog, where I play a bit of the original version of Columns.
Did anyone use AFS (Andrew File System)?
My university in the 1990's had hundreds of Unix workstations from Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, and Linux.
It was all tied together using this so everything felt the same no matter what system you were on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System
The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture.
https://docs.openafs.org/Reference/1/sys.html
https://web.mit.edu/sipb/doc/working/afs/html/subsection7.6....
"On an Athena DECstation, it's pmax_ul4; on an Athena RS6000, it's rs_aix31" and so on.
> The IT dept installed and compiled tons of software for the various systems and AFS had an @sys string that you would put into your symbolic link and then it would dereference to the actual directory for that specific system architecture.
This sounds cool, but I've wondered - couldn't you just stick something like
in /etc/profile or so?(I'm actually doing something like this myself; I don't (yet) have AFS or NFS strongly in play in my environment, but of all things I've resorted to this trick to pick out binaries in ~/.local/bin when using distrobox, because Alpine and OpenSUSE are not ABI compatible)
What's really interesting about @sys is that it supports a search-path at run-time, so the resolution can walk back through a list of target systems to find an available one.
IMHO, HP-UX had hands down best written man pages I've ever seen any UNIX commercial or free. And I've been working quite many with.
All man pages were well written, nicely formatted easy to read and almost all came with often valuable examples giving quick enough understanding to check usage most often. That has been absolutely the thing that I've missed other *nix systems since.
But there are too many things were done so nicely and made it nice to maintain with HP-UX that it's not worth trying to remember and list all. But unfortunately shell environment was not match to convenience GNU tools Linux had from beginning. That is without making effort to install (read: compile from source for quite long time) those HP-UX if that was allowed. With university computing center that no problem, but telco side it was big nono -- not without getting product owner permission first :/
But just an example Ignite-UX was one of my favourites with HP-UX. The simplicity using a one simple command with few options bootable DAT tape that could then be used to either recover whole running fully functional system or clone that developed system first to staging lab and then up to production with ease was great time saver major upgrades and migrations. None of the Linux bare metal backup systems I've tested have been able to recover exactly same disk layouts, usually LVM part is poorly done. As has been VmWare p2v migration tools also btw.
That Linux LVM that Sistina did first before Red Hat bought them, is implemented quite exactly what HP-UX had for some time then.
And documentation, apparently no longer to be found on public HP sites, after all their reboots as companies.
Occasionally I find some stuff via search engine, mostly random.
HP-UX general support seems it is EOLd by end of this year. Extended, apparently very pricey, support will last till 2028.
It would be nice if anyone having still contacts they could ask if HPE would be willing to relax at least parts of HP-UX, like documentation and let achieve.org take them and let us occasionally check things as rererence how it was HP-UX.
It would be shame if all that work that they did documents were lost and unavailable general public later on.
I agree that LVM in HP-UX was far ahead of Linux back in the day. To be fair some of those advanced features in HP-UX LVM required an additional license (eg: mirroring required Enterprise Operating Environment). I haven't touched HP-UX in like 10 years however.
That is true, sw licenses were a major nuisance. As they usually are. Not just where to get one, but in time, to keep track of those and secure so that proof of purchase was not lost before deployment and include final delivery. HP product codes and major version change product renaming plague were not exactly my favourite part of work!
Many HP-UX boxen (servers) came with default (interactive) multiuser OS licenses. Product differentiation which HP sales loved had license castrated workstations, which came only two user license.
First time I had no clue about this and were wondering why some odd network management software I was installing a server did not restart properly and was causing head scratching. Then I found that logs stated our license was not valid though it had been confirmed valid in other test install.
A HP support guy I knew and saw later told that I had probably to install optional two-user package and then the software will start. Oh, great that it was. But what the heck that two-user license only prevented only two serial line users simultaneously and only systems console was serial that time and everyone else logged in via network. To be sure I made PM check if we still were within license because of that. He told me later yep, no problem there. Just get it done and we're ready deploy it to site.
I remember the hours gcc needed to compile itself on those HP servers. We needed it for all the programs that would not compile with HP's cc. We also installed some GNU userland utilities because, as you wrote, they were better than the ones in HP-UX. Those were the years around 1990.
I did some HP-UX in late 80's, migration of servers across the country for a courrier company from NCR towers to HP servers running HP-UX (sorry don't recall the models of hand).
Had fun porting sortware across, a radio system that was unable to test fully unless in the field (which it did first time, which was amazing). Had many good chats with HP engineers back then (we did a large purchase as a global company) and one I still recall was early editions of HP-UX having an error code of 8008, until somebody in senior managment at HP saw it one time (no customer had ever complained apparently about it).
I liked HP-UX having previously worked on IBM RT systems running AIX, as well as NCR towers with there more vanilla System V. Though did have SMIT with AIX and SAM with HP-UX for those manual saving moments of ease to fall back on. Though my favourite flabour of unix of that time would be the Pyramid systems dual universe OSx. You could have a BSD or an AT&T enviroment at once, able to use both flavours in scripts by prefixing with bsd or att, to run that command. Don't recall how it handled TERMCAP/TERMINFO of hand (that was always an area of fun back then).
Fun times, in the days in which O'Reilly and magazines like Byte or Unix World, were the internet, along with expensive training courses and manuals that you would use and thumb every page of the multi tombed encyclopedic stack they came in.
Best C platform for developing that I did use in that era, hands down the VAX under DCL, the profilers etc, pure leaps and joy.
I very rarely read man pages (similarly gnu info) on Linux nowadays, whoever they're written for isn't me.
Superior alternatives:
* tldr/tealdeer - usually just a pile of typical usage examples, almost always covers what I want
* jfgi because surely someone has tried to do this before and asked about it on an ancient forum
* llms - regurgitating the info from above, possibly with the bonus of letting it try a script on a sandbox and then entering a error-confusion loop
* source - documentation can be wrong or incomplete, but the source never lies
Oh hey, a 9000/340 in the Cambridge area. Almost certainly that originated with the university's Engineering department, who back in the 1990s got rid of a lot of these machines that they had been using as X terminals. My notes say they had six diskless workstations to each server, and kept the monitors to use with the replacement machines, which would explain why this person's 9000/340 has no disk or monitor.
Some truly terrible quality pictures of the one I used to own are at https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/tiroth... (I have long since disposed of it). Some of the people who got the machines had a play around with getting Linux booting on them. Amazingly some of that code is still in the kernel, eg drivers/net/ethernet/amd/hplance.c so it might even still work ;-)
9.x was released in 1992:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX
11.0 was released in 1997, with latest 11.31 going EOL 2025-12-31.
I totally missed the EOL announcement. Not that I use it, but it is one on the few last big proprietary Unix. I thought their will always be enough paying customers to maintain it (even if sold to third party).
As soon as Intel killed Itanium, the clock was ticking for HP-UX.
I used the versions 10 and 11.
My significant experiences on HP-UX were HP Vault, one the very first approaches of doing containers in UNIX, and going through 32 bit to 64 bit transition.
Nowadays NetBSD offers something similar to "context depended filesystem", i.e. a special form of symbolic links that can points to different locations, according to wide range set of attributes: from domainname via machine_arch to gid.
For details see https://man.netbsd.org/symlink.7 - section Magic symlinks at very end of manual.
I seem to remember something like that in DG/UX too.
The "context dependent filesystem" concept is a bit trippy, but I think it's a pretty neat solution to "some systems need a their own version of a file, other files ought to be universal".
It reminds me a little of a thing used in clustering of DECs (later HPs) Tru64 Unix.
The clusters had a shared OS image - that is a single, shared root filesystem for all members. To allow node-specific config files, there was a type of symbolic link called a “Context Dependent Symbolic Link” (CDSL). They were just like a normal symlink, but had a `{memb}` component in the target, which was resolved at runtime to the member ID of the current system. These would be used to resolve to a path under `/cluster/members/{memb}`, so each host could have its own version of a config file.
The single shared root filesystem made upgrades and patching of the OS extra fun. There was a multi-phase process where both old and new copies of files were present and hosts were rebooted one at a time, switching from the old to the new OS.
My first thought, upon reading that these were being given away, and seeing "Cambridge" was that they should go to the "Centre for Computing History".
I've been trying to visit this place with my daughter for 4 (or more?) years now, every time we've been in the area (roughly once per year), I forget that it isn't open on Mondays (which is the day we typically have a couple of hours before leaving the area), walk up to the doors only to realise (again) I've made the same mistake, and my daughter and I walk away disappointed.
We'll make it one day!
I have the HP logic analyzer that runs HP-UX. To me it's crazy that I can connect to it with a 2025 Linux OS and run X11 apps remotely out of the box.
It's too bad they went to Windows later on. Having the Unix environment available makes the older stuff really flexible.
Thanks for this. Brings back so many memories of the long hours spent in computer rooms with HP 9000s and RS/6000s back in the 90s. Seeing that SAM interface made me shiver :)
It's great that there are folks like you preserving this history
Oh my! Thanks for the memories - HPUX was my first workstation class unix operating system (sili-g's were too expensive). I remember downloading and compiling gcc on hpux. THe ideas of compiling a compiler with itself blew my mind!
From the author's Reddit post <https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1ot83o4/y...>:
>I’ve got my HP 9000 Model 340 booting over the network from an HP 9000 Model 705 in Cluster Server mode and I’ve learned some very unsettling things about HP-UX and its filesystem.
>Boot-up video at the end of the blog, where I play a bit of the original version of Columns.