not a Mac: HP Visualize C8000

[ClassicHasClass]

Picked up a HP Visualize C8000 for a nice price, the last of the HP-UX PA-RISC workstations. This one is well-equipped with a FireGL-UX card (the same as the ATI professional FireGL series), dual-core 1.1GHz PA-8900 CPU and a gig of RAM. I'd have it booted and ready to show, but it does not like my KVM, so I'm going to have to get a mechanical switchbox for it and I need to reinstall HP-UX 11i v1 because the install on the built-in hard disk is b0rk3d (the previous owner apparently moved pieces of it to an NIS server which of course it is no longer connected to, so it can't even start X). Fortunately, I have MCOE and GTCE, so I'll just blast it out and install it from scratch when I get a hot minute.

I have a soft spot for PA-RISC because I had root to a HP 9000-K250 and a Visualize C3750 when I was a programmer/DBA. It's actually a very clean instruction set, surprisingly easy to program for, but HP just couldn't compete in the workstation market and as usual bet wrong on Itanic.

[mcdermd]

Nice. I used K-class and N-class 9000s at one of my previous jobs. HP-UX was always ... interesting. They used the PA-RISC processor in the later HP3000s also. We used those running MPE XL and IMAGE XL databases.

[ClassicHasClass]

I don't mind sam, but I prefer smit. What we really hated was the benighted C compiler: just ANSI compliant enough to be ANSI compliant, but still require bizarre hacks to compile. Part of my consultant work was helping one of the other analysts port software to it. One particularly irritating failure turned out to be a bug in HP's preprocessor.

I was always curious about MPE/iX but never got to play with it.