“It’s not an easy job, but Hewlett-Packard is determined to support no fewer than five major operating systems: Linux, HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS and Windows. Dig a bit deeper and it’s even more complicated with three main flavors of Linux — Debian, Red Hat, and UnitedLinux — and at least as many versions of Windows — Windows 2000, XP and the up coming .NET Server.” The story is at NewsForge.
Too Many Unices? HP Supports them All
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From the article,
Ultimately, HP-UX will be our Unix offering and at some stage Tru64 will go away
So, if you want to get technical about it, MPE, which runs on HP3000 line of machines is still supported till 2005. After that, however, it will also go away. So, either its six major operating systems or four, but not five
There’s also the Tandem OS, and that one needs to be supported : it’s used at euronext, NYSE, Tokyo etc … All major stock exchange software do run on Tandem so this is an OS not to forget.
Has for MPE when HP bought the thing they did say the support would diseapear, but the support is still here, My guess is that they’ll have major client asking for support in 2005 and they’ll keep the OS. The Only dead os I know is BeOS, Apple II’s DOS, C64’s, TOS et a few others from hardware of the eighties, from all major OS used in the industry, not by the Home users, none is dead.
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
BSD’s seams weird they would have nothing doing with BSD’s at all. I suppose if they don’t have anything with them they won’t support it, but that just seams surprising with eveything else they have.
Indeed, pretty soon, MacOSX will be present on more workstations than any other Unix platform (if it not already is – and this is only after it has in existance for a year, with the first 6 months only counting as a prerelease version, but every year, expect several million additional MacOSX unix boxes).
Already, in the open source world, many program source headers contain pragmas that take MacOSX into account. Since MacOSX also is of the BSD family, porting an application usually requires little more than a remake, even if the application uses X-Windows rather than text i/o. (Xfree86 is a free download).
Tru64 is very much a BSD. There is also many aspects of Mach.
The MacOS X troll, while not suprising here, is missing the fact that Sun and HP and IBM are basically keeping Ximian afloat so that Gnome can be the replacement for CDE. Add to that the fact that KDE works on all those platforms means that “because it’s pretty and intuitive” isn’t going to convert anyone with a unix box on their desk to Apple. Those people are going to be fine with the usability increase from going to Gnome, and they get to keep their hardware instead of paying a $2k/seat Jobs tax.
Too Many Unices? HP Supports them All
HP has 3 Unices, one of which is going to be phrased out. Maybe you meant “Too Many OS? HP Supports them All”… I mean, after all, Windows and OpenVMS aren’t Unices, IIRC.
<waiting to be moderated down>
Indeed, pretty soon, MacOSX will be present on more workstations than any other Unix platform (if it not already is – and this is only after it has in existance for a year, with the first 6 months only counting as a prerelease version, but every year, expect several million additional MacOSX unix boxes).
For many UNIX workstation users, me included, Mac OS X isn’t that fanstatic in comparison with what we got. Sure, it has a nice GUI, but it forces us to buy a slow, expensive piece of hardware.
Many of the Unices are BSD-based too. For example, Tru64 and Solaris. Also, for many of the UNIX workstation users, moving from CDE to GNOME 2.0 is good enough – no need to use an Unix that doesn’t use X, and forces you to use something slow to run legacy X applications.
In the end, Mac OS X would capture what it was intended to capture – the market owned by Mac OS 8/9 and the market own by Windows and Windows .NET Server.
Besides, the whole article is about HP, not the UNIX market in general.
I guess people were living under huge rock if they didn’t notice that HP bought Compaq. And as business continuation they support Compaq product line which had OpenVMS, Tru64. Linux and Windows. Now add HP-UX to the pile and it became a news.
Talking about OSes HP is supporting much more than brain dead journalists on newsforge can count.
WinCE for handhelds, a whole shenangan of embedded OSes for printers, routers and switches. MPE was already mentioned here.
Multiply it by variety hardware – starting from Alpha, PA-RISC and Itanium down to StrongARM .
I wonder if DECnet and Pathworks are still supported.
I work for DEC/Compaq/HP on Tru64 and OpenVMS, all is well for us for many years to come (at least 2012 and maybe 2016) and DECnet is still going strong. Pathworks, well who know, I would not lose any sleep, killing off that product.
Hewlett-Packard is determined to support no fewer than
five major operating systems: Linux, HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS and Windows
Hmmm. I only count four major OSes in that sentence.
(Just kidding. Don’t get your penguins in a wad!)
IBM has enough operating systems to gang up on Hewlett-Packard and steal its lunch money. In their stable, IBM currently has:
1) Four mainframe operating systems
z/OS, z/VM, TPF, VSE
2) One minicomputer operating system
OS/400
3) Two “in-house” unixes
AIX 5L
Dynix/ptx
4) They may still be at least reselling boxes running Caldera’s
OpenServer
Unixware
5) One “in-house” desktop system
OS/2
6) The horde of Microsoft operating systems.
7) Linux on their four major hardware platforms.
8) Probably a few obscure embedded systems (for example, the OS that runs their cryptographic co-processors).
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
Solaris is a SVR4 based, not BSD based.
Well, technically speaking, Solaris 1.x was in fact BSD based.
Modern Solaris, 2.x and above, is SVR4. It is also what most people mean by Solaris, just as “SunOS” is colloquially used to refer to Sun’s BSD variant (Solaris 1.x, or SunOS < 5 ), even though the heart of the Solaris 2.x + operating system is also SunOS. So everybody is right, according to his own definitions.
Sun’s Interactive Unix (an x86 Unix variant they purchased) is probably SVR4 as well, but its users are few and far between at this point. It gets little airplay, so I just thought I’d mention it. :0)
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier