Architecture Families at Hewlett-Packard

Through the 70's and into the next decade, HP had ended up supporting three separate architectures. Each form had been commercially successful to one degree or another and had proprietary OS's (Operating Systems), I/O devices, network components, and compilers. It was a challenge for HP to continue supporting a family of diverse architectures. To a great degree, HP was suffering from its own design excellence—customers wanted to continue using architectures that were ten or more years old, which could still meet their business demands. HP was supporting each of the following:

• HP-3000: A 16-bit architecture, which was an early, distributed commercial transaction processing system.

• HP-1000: The then current leader in process control and data acquisition systems.

• HP-9000: Based originally on the Motorola 68000 series, this architecture was primarily used on series of workstations and controllers.

By 1981, the logistics of balancing all three architecture families was becoming more challenging. This challenge was given to Hewlett-Packard's central research organization, the HP Labs, to consolidate the three separate architectures into a single workable system.

The results were successful, as it led to the subsequent development of the new technology, called PA-RISC. This new form of architecture proved to be scalable and gave HP leadership in the performance arena. Just as critically, it proved to be a leader in the price/performance ratio across an extremely broad range of applications.