HP-UX

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Stands for: Hewlett Packard Unix, the HP 9000 and Integrity operating system, 1982/1984 to 2025

Hewlett Packard Unix, HP's System V Unix for the HP 9000 and later the Itanium-based Integrity servers, first released in the early 1980s and out of support since 31 December 2025.

HP-UX was one of the three great commercial Unixes of the enterprise data centre, beside Sun's Solaris and IBM's AIX. It is based on Unix System V, initially System III, and its first release is dated 1982 in the encyclopaedia's infobox and 1984 in its prose, a discrepancy recorded here rather than resolved. Early versions ran the HP Integral PC and the HP 9000 Series 200, 300 and 400 on Motorola 68000 processors and the Series 500 on HP's own FOCUS architecture; later ones ran PA-RISC and, at the end, Intel's Itanium in the HPE Integrity servers. It was the first Unix to offer access control lists for file permissions and among the first with a built-in logical volume manager; HP-UX 11i was certified to The Open Group's UNIX 03. The last release, 2025.11i v3, came on 22 May 2025, and following the discontinuation of Itanium, support ended on 31 December 2025, with mature support without sustaining engineering on Integrity through at least 2028.

Lineage. HP-UX, from Hewlett Packard Unix, is a proprietary implementation of Unix developed by Hewlett-Packard and later Hewlett Packard Enterprise, based on Unix System V and initially on System III. The encyclopaedia article this entry rests on dates the initial release to 1982 in its infobox and says 'first released in 1984' in its text; both figures stand here because the article states both.

Hardware. The early versions supported the HP Integral PC and the HP 9000 Series 200, 300 and 400 on the Motorola 68000 family, and the HP 9000 Series 500 on HP's proprietary FOCUS architecture; later HP 9000 models used HP's PA-RISC instruction set, and the final versions support the HPE Integrity Servers on Intel's Itanium architecture. The platform list in the infobox is therefore 68k, FOCUS, PA-RISC and IA-64, which is a complete history of HP's own processor choices in four words.

What it did first. HP-UX was the first Unix to offer access control lists for file access permissions as an alternative to the standard Unix permission bits, and among the first to include a built-in logical volume manager; the article marks both claims as needing a citation, and the caveat travels with them. HP-UX 11i offers a clustered file system with shared disks, HP Serviceguard as its cluster solution and Global Workload Management for balancing workloads. HP-UX 11i was certified to The Open Group's UNIX 03 standard; previous releases to UNIX 95.

The end. The latest release is 2025.11i v3 of 22 May 2025. Following the discontinuation of Itanium processors, support for HP-UX ended on 31 December 2025; the article describes the current state as mature support on HPE Integrity without sustaining engineering through at least 2028, and the infobox's working state as discontinued. An operating system that began on 68000 desktops and ended on Itanium servers forty-odd years later is a reasonable definition of a platform.

For the network engineer. HP-UX machines are still met in telecommunications billing, manufacturing and finance, usually running something nobody dares migrate; the practical knowledge is that their TCP/IP stack and tooling differ from Linux in the ways System V differs from BSD, and that the Hewlett-Packard record on the industry timeline carries the corporate story around them.

Also known as: hp ux, hpux, hp-ux 11i, hp 9000, integrity servers

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