HP9000 info/review

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I had the oportunity to *play* with a pre-release version of the 
new Hewlett Packard 9000 Unix system the other day, and thought other
folks might be interested in what I saw.

The 9000 is availiable in several configurations ranging from a single
user/single cpu version to a multi-user/3 cpu model.  The system I
saw was a minimum configuration, consisting of a single cpu, 1.5 Meg
of memory, and an integrated crt.   (Oh yeah, it runs off a custom
32 bit micro.).

My general impression of the machine was favorable.  It seemed to run
quite fast, considering that it does not posess hardware floating point.
I found that it's execution speed was comparable to that of
a 11/780 with a couple of users running vi.  It will be interesting to
see how the multi-cpu version runs.

In terms of the Unix implementation, it is suppose to be derived from
v7, with some of the Berkeley utilities (and maybe some System 3, I'm
not sure).  This version seemed to have most of the utilities that I
remembered to look for, including vi, lint, more, uucp, news, etc.
Adb was missing, and I don't know if they plan to include it in the
release version.  Otherwise, I saw everything that I wanted.

My only gripe with the system is that HP has joined the group of Unix
suppliers which has decided to *improve* the user interface by making
it consistant, at the expense of compatability with other versions.
For example, if you want ps with a long listing you can't type
"ps l", you HAVE to type "ps -l".  They have also changed some of the 
flags to ps.  I personally find this to be VERY annoying. 

In all, I was pretty impressed with the system, and would recommend that 
people who are in the market for a 32 bit Unix system take a look at it.

Don Wegeng
Xerox Corp.
Rochester, NY
(716) 422-3347

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