OpenPA.net

About OpenPA

OpenPA is an information resource for HP PA-RISC based computers and their technical architecture. PA-RISC is a RISC computer architecture invented and designed by Hewlett-Packard in the early to mid-1980s and was used in a large range of HP technical workstations and servers (the HP 9000s). Some of HP’s PA-RISC successors based on the (joint-HP/Intel) Itanium architecture are also covered as ascendants of the HP 9000/PA-RISC systems. This site aims to be a non-commercial, central structured resource for information on these computers and their technical details. It was first published in 1999 and is continously updated with new or corrected content. OpenPA is a registered serial publication with the ISSN 1866-2757.

People

Paul Weissmann is the maintainer and author of OpenPA. He can be reached via e-mail. He also nurtures a site on the state of IPv6 implementations, The IPv6 Resource.

Many people helped OpenPA with contributions and support over the years. Thanks go to:

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Copyright

The copyright of the content on the Openpa.net pages belongs to Paul Weissmann, Berlin, Germany, unless otherwise noted. No parts of this site may be reproduced or copied without prior written permission. Commercial use of the content is prohibited.

Of course parts of the content can be referenced or cited, for this page is supposed to be a reference guide on PA-RISC technology, but if you do, please adhere to accepted academic standards (i.e. note what is a quotation, list the sources and authors, etc.)!

This boils down to:

» Legal notes are on the Legal Notes page.

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How Come?

This site originally was started in 1999 when the author got his first PA-RISC workstation and found almost no coherent information sources on the web. The latter fact bothered him a lot, since the other popular Unix/RISC-workstation families were thouroughly and well documented. Moreover, at that time many old HP 9000 systems were phased out in favor of shiny new Unix or NT servers resulting in the availability of a lot used PA-RISC systems. The author then spent a lot of time digging through various webpages and into the USENET looking for documentation on these systems.

After having gathered a considerable amount of information, documentation and references he finally decided to compile this to a webpage and make it publically available, with hosting provided by Bill Bradford of SunHELP. Over the years more PA-RISC computers fell into his hands and he explored other available operating systems, resulting in many more details on this site. The support from HP for the PA-RISC-Linux Project made more interesting documents about PA-RISC internals available. Furthermore, other open-source operating systems for PA-RISC computers made significant progress so these computers were used by an increasing amount of people. Several moons later, the site got renamed to openpa.net (around 2001) and was updated frequently since then.

» Look at the News page for archived news entries.

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Behind the scenes

The layout of this site relies heavily on CSS in an attempt to faciliate a structured markup and separate the content from the presentation. Separate stylesheets exist for handhelds (PDAs) and print media. They should be automatically used by the browser when appropriate.

RSS feed (RSS 2.0) for news aggregators with information on updates to this site is available.

» Details on the underlying architecture can be found on the Backend page.

Since Summer 2006 (updated November 2007) a PDF version of the complete OpenPA project is available for printing and/or off-line viewing.

» Read more on and download the PDF on the Print Version page.

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