Every now and then I load OpenPA and browse around. Its creator and maintainer, Paul Weissmann, has been very active lately updating the site with new articles, even more information, and tons of other things, and it’s usually a joy to stumble upon something I haven’t read yet, or just didn’t know anything about. This time it’s something called HP-RT, a real-time operating system developed and sold by HP for a number of its PA-RISC workstations back in the ’90s.
HP-RT is derived from the real-time operating system LynxOS and was built as real-time operating system from scratch with native POSIX API and Unix features like protected address spaces, multiprocessing, and standard GUI. Real-time scheduling is part of the kernel with response times under 200 µs, later improved to sub-100 µs for uses such as hospital system tied to a heart monitor, or a missile tracking system.
For programming, HP-RT supported dynamic shared libraries, ANSI C, Softbench (5.2), FORTRAN, ADA, C++ and PA-RISC assembly. From HP-RT 3.0, GUI-based debugging environment (DDErt) and Event Logging library (ELOG) were included. POSIX 1003.1, 1003.1b and POSIX 1003.4a draft 4 were supported.
On the software side, HP-RT supported fast file system, X and Motif clients, X11 SERVERrt, STREAMSrt (SVR 3.2), NFS, and others.
↫ Paul Weissmann at OpenPA
I had no idea HP-RT existed, and looking at the feature list, it seems like it was actually a pretty impressive operating system and wider ecosystem back in the ’90s when it was current. HP released several versions of its real-time operating system, with 1997’s 3.0 and 3.01 being the final version. Support for it ended in the early 2000s alongside the end of the line for PA-RISC.
I’d absolutely love to try it out today, but sadly, my PA-RISC workstation – an HP Visualise c3750 – is way too “new” to be supported by HP-RT, and in the wrong product category at that. HP-RT required both a regular HP 9000 700 HP-UX workstation, as well as one of HP’s VME machines with a single-module module with the specific “rt” affix in the model number. On top of that you obviously needed the actual HP-RT operating system, which was part of the HP-RT Development Environment. The process entails using the HP-UX machine to compile HP-RT, which was then downloaded to the VMe machine.
The odds of not only finding all the right parts to complete the setup, but also to get it all working with what is undoubtedly going to be spotty documentation and next to nobody to talk to about how to do it, are very, very slim. I’m open to suggestions, of course, but considering the probable crazy rarity of the specific hardware, the price-gauging going on in the retrocomputing world, the difficulty of shipping to the Swedish Arctic, and the knwoledge required, I don’t think I’ll be the one to get this to work and show it off.
But man do I want to.
I own both a 712/60 and a C8000, went through the madness of daily-driving the C8000 with HP-UX 11.11 for a while, and have never ever heard of this.
Sadly, the 712/60 is not in the compatibility list.
Completely unrelated note: the HP 712 running nextstep 3.3 is one of my favourite computing experiences ever. Distraction-free productivity, good fun, fast, quiet, reliable. I even managed to adapt a modern Lexmark postscript driver for full colour and duplex support. The available software is great. The main downside is the insane amount of clicking nextstep requires.
The C8000 is the quietest classic unix workstation I’ve worked with but it generates so much heat I only run it during winters.
I’m quite, quite jealous of your c8000 – it’s high on my list, but at like €1500 incl. shipping (eBay) I can’t afford one. The c8000 is one of the machines I would daily-drive for a while *today* just for OSNews, so if anyone wants to make that happen, let me know.
There are still two or three new-old-stock from the same batch I purchased mine a few years ago. Back when I bought it, there were ~50.
Took me a long time to get it up and running and to score a copy of HP-UX 11.11 and all the development tools (I developed a soft spot for Softbench after getting it up and running). Since then, I’ve helped quite a few folks get their machines up and running.
The only sad thing is… the FireGL is OpenGL only (does not support graphics or phigs or however their APIs are called), so I never got to run the racing simulator that HP includes with the development tools (you can run the server version, though). The racing simulator should be compatible with yours!
The developer tools are excellent and include most of the source code (including cursing in the code comments!). The C OpenGL chess game taught me a lot of the little C I know.
It also can browse the web fine via remote X11. It does not invert colours like my SGI Octane and, with gigabit ethernet and the fast CPU, scrolling is smooth and even animations go ok. I also managed to connect it to my HP ZR30W and run it at 2560×1600. Trying to connect to the IBM T221 and run it at 3840×2400 got me X running at 100% CPU though and a blank screen, though =(
Printing sucked. Every old UNIX workstation prints perfectly fine to my new-ish Lexmark laser printer via postscript, but HP seems to favour their printers (no surprise). But I can always send ps or PDF documents straight to the printer via FTP and they print fine.
I also got Debian up and running on sid but upgrading packages is a Russian routelle: you will eventually end up with kernel panics on boot. However, even got X up. Sadly, without hardware acceleration, due to a “magic number” bug that has been around for a decade or more.
Way easier to set up than the IntelliStation 285 I once also owned. HP-UX is easier to setup than AIX and Linux was almost plug-and-play, including netboot. It took me six painful months and a mac-flashed PCI Radeon 7000 to get Linux up in the 285, and powerpc be was still a supported platform.
Honestly, I am a bit more jealous of your machine, as you probably can run all the demos and they probably run cooler as well.
In terms of daily-driving viability, I’d rank (out of what I’ve tried):
solaris > nextstep and irix > hp-ux > aix
(and mac, if you consider it part of this list)
Solaris is well maintained. Nextstep is easy to get running and has tons of useful tools. Irix has too much fun stuff and keeps distracting me during my work day but works perfectly once you are set. HP-UX doesn’t have a lot of good apps (I’ve dumped all the hpux open source 11.11 archive with permission from the maintainer a while back) but excellent tools and makes for a good port target. AIX is pain. All I got to run was Doom and Mathematica.