Hewlett-Packard - the garage, the HP 9000 and the split

HP-UX is the thread that ties this record to the operating systems elsewhere in the glossary. Hewlett Packard Unix was based on System V, initially System III; the encyclopaedia's infobox dates its initial release to 1982 and its prose to 1984, a discrepancy recorded here rather than resolved. It ran the HP Integral PC and the HP 9000 Series 200, 300 and 400 on Motorola 68000 processors, the Series 500 on HP's own FOCUS architecture, then PA-RISC and finally Intel's Itanium in the Integrity servers; it was the first Unix to offer access control lists for files and among the first with a built-in logical volume manager. The last release, 11i v3, came on 22 May 2025, and following the discontinuation of Itanium, support ended on 31 December 2025.

OpenView was the management side. The foundational product was Network Node Manager, network monitoring software based on SNMP, and the family grew by purchase: Novadigm and its Radia suite in April 2004, Peregrine Systems in December 2005, Mercury Interactive in November 2006, Opsware. In 2007 the whole line was rebranded HP BTO Software under the HP Software Division and the OpenView name was phased out; HP Software passed to HPE at the split and was sold to Micro Focus in a merger completed on 1 September 2017.

The corporate arc: Agilent, the test and measurement business that was the company's origin, was spun off in 1999. On 3 September 2001 HP announced an agreement to merge with Compaq, and after a shareholder vote the merger became official on 3 May 2002, bringing with it the Digital Equipment Corporation that Compaq had bought in 1998. Electronic Data Systems followed under an agreement of 13 May 2008, lifting combined revenue to $118.4 billion and the company to ninth on the Fortune 500 in 2009; 3Com, Palm and 3PAR were all bought in 2010, Autonomy after them.

On 1 November 2015 Hewlett-Packard split into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which took the enterprise products and services, and HP Inc., which took the personal computers and printers. The HPE Networking card on this timeline follows the networking half from 3Com and Aruba to the 2025 Juniper merger; this card ends where the name did.