Paul Weissmann, maintainer of OpenPA, the definitive source of information on HP’s PA-RISC hardware and software, has published an article about how the state of information preservation on this topic has changed substantially since OpenPA’s founding in 1999.
The main challenges for OpenPA at the time were both finding all the available information, as search engines were still young in the late 1990s, as well as making sense of it all as it was just so much and new sources kept appearing. This went on until the mid to late 2000s, when solid and stable sources could be found and referenced, which OpenPA did.
The Internet and information on it changed since then, slowly but surely, in a profound way. Many original sources have disappeared and so much information has been lost in only two decades – making OpenPA the authoritative source for PA-RISC in some ways. A long journey from documenting complex information of the 1990s to an historic archive on the PA-RISC era.
OpenPA is an amazing resource, so if you happen to have any information worth sharing with Weissmann, please do so.
I hope that Mr. Weissmann and the PA-RISC community take steps to ensure the long-term resilience of the resources. There are a lot of enthusiasts who still feel the pain from when Nekochan.net, the old SGI community, shut down without warning and without mirrors a few years ago. Fortunately, other communities sprang up to replace Nekochan, but that did not happen overnight, and some very good work was lost.
The PA-RISC was the greatest RISC processor ever created. It is a shame it did not continue and Intel blundered into Itanium instead of continuing PA-RISC development.