HP-UX

» see hpe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The last update shipped on 22 May 2025. It was called 2505.11iv3, which decodes as May 2025 on release 11i version 3. That release had first appeared in February 2007. Eighteen years of annual patch rollups on a single release is not a product under development. It is a product being kept breathing for customers who could not move.

HP-UX started in 1982 on the HP 9000 Series 500, running on HP's own FOCUS processor, and the first version was System III semantics laid on top of a kernel HP already had. Then it moved onto Motorola 68000 workstations, and then onto HP's PA-RISC, which carried it through the late eighties and the nineties. It finished on Itanium, after HP tied its future to Intel's EPIC architecture in 1999. Four architectures under one name is unusual, and it is the reason the thing lasted as long as it did.

It was also technically early in ways that are now invisible. HP-UX was among the first Unixes to ship access control lists for file permissions rather than the classic Unix permission bits, and among the first with a logical volume manager built in, which is what lets you grow a filesystem across disks without taking anything offline. Both of those are ordinary today. They were not ordinary in 1988, and they are exactly what you build when your customers are running payroll.

I have never administered an HP-UX box. The window when I might have was the window when I was learning Unix at all, from about 2003 at university, and by then the answer to every question was Linux. Commercial Unix in Turkey lived somewhere I was not, in bank machine rooms and telco racks behind a vendor support contract. What I had instead was Linux on a machine I already owned, which cost nothing and taught the same commands. That substitution happened everywhere at once, and it is most of the reason this obituary exists.

~ the record ~

~ the itanium bet ~

In 1999 HP and Intel announced they would build the future of high-end computing together, and HP began winding down PA-RISC. Itanium was supposed to succeed everything, with compilers clever enough to schedule instructions ahead of time so the chip would not need the expensive machinery x86 used to work it out at runtime. The compilers never got that clever. AMD shipped 64-bit x86 instead and the market took it. Itanium spent twenty years as a platform kept alive largely by the operating systems that had nowhere else to run.

HP-UX was the largest of those, and it could not leave, because HP had already spent PA-RISC on the move. An x86-64 port was started and then cancelled around 2012, at which point the operating system's remaining lifespan stopped being a question about software and became a question about Intel's shipping schedule. Intel took the last Itanium orders in January 2020 and shipped the final ones on 29 July 2021.

After that HP-UX was a system with no new hardware. Not deprecated and not replaced, only impossible to install on anything you could still buy.

~ the long tail ~

The end was announced on 21 October 2024 in a product change notice, which is how enterprise software dies: a PDF with a document number and fourteen months of warning. HPE's own support matrix keeps a tier called Mature Software Product Support without Sustaining Engineering running to at least 31 December 2028. That means you can still pay HPE to answer the telephone. It does not mean anybody will fix what you find.

SUSE and the other Linux vendors spent the last few years writing migration guides, which is the polite version of standing outside the building with a sign. There are still HP-UX systems running somewhere, because there always are, and every one of them is now a clock.

~ what got buried with it ~

What ends here is larger than one operating system. The commercial Unix era assumed that whoever sold you the hardware also sold you the kernel and the support contract, and that the integration was worth paying a premium for. It was, for a while, for workloads that were not permitted to fail. Then Linux got good enough on hardware that got cheap enough, and the argument stopped working.

Solaris is a maintenance line item inside Oracle. AIX still ships, on IBM's own Power chips, which is precisely the position HP-UX lost when Itanium ended. Being welded to one vendor's silicon kept these systems alive for decades and then finished them, in the same way and for the same reason.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »