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Comment by ylee

>Unfortunately for HP, its workstations (the ones OP acquired) weren't nearly as popular with universities and developers as Sun Microsystems', so you tended to find HP-UX in commercial production—larger servers, more workload, but smaller numbers. And thus smaller ability to promote its innovations or be selected because of them.

Columbia University during the 1990s was a SunOS/Solaris shop (and, before then, VAX <https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/>). My first year, AcIS (Academic Information Systems, IT for faculty/students) set up a single computer lab in the engineering building <https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...> with HP workstations. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course.

The boxes used the same Kerberos authentication as the Sun systems, so I presume I must have been using context-dependent filesystems for binaries when logging into the systems locally, or when I chose to remote log into one specifically from elsewhere (just for novelty's sake; I preferred the Sun cluster, or the Sun box dedicated to staff use).

MAE—the raison d'etre for the HP boxes—was slow and unstable, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced HP, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.

parent ylee 11 months ago

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