The Search for Old Hockey Pucks

Published: July 26, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's definitely the silly season, and you can tell that Europeans are getting ready to go on its annual vacation and North Americans, while still technically working, are not exactly busting hump to get a lot of things done. Excepting those of us in the IT trade press, of course. Anyway, it being the silly season, the biggest Unix news of the week is that Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix variant is celebrating its 20th anniversary of shipments, and HP's United Kingdom division has a contest to find the oldest running HP-UX box in Britain.

IT vendors are a crafty lot. By getting companies that have probably long since fallen off the HP radar to sign up for the contest, which has some good prizes, HP's UK division can build up a pipeline of potential upgrade clients, which it wants to move from older HP-UX releases and probably even older HP 9000 RISC-based server iron to new Itanium-based Integrity servers and the new HP-UX 11i v3 operating system. (I once heard someone jokingly call HP's Unix "hockey pucks" many years ago, and the term stuck in my head, as did "Slowaris" and "Aches." Nerds are harsh critics and quick with the puns.) And, during a slow news cycle, companies like HP can count on publications like The Unix Guardian to spread the word about their contests.

HP says that it began shipping HP 9000 840 machines running the initial HP-UX operating system out of its Cupertino, California, factories on November 20, 1986. It is hard to say how many vintage machines are out there, but if the HP-UX base is like other vintage server bases, then about half of the boxes out there should be pretty long in the tooth, and maybe a tenth will be remarkably old and somewhat mythical at their companies, considering they are still doing useful work. HP did a great job selling embedded systems in the 1970s and 1980s based on its proprietary MPE platform, and did a very good job riding up the Unix wave--and, to be fair, HP helped create the commercialized Unix server wave, and did particularly well in the United Kingdom. The UK economy was in the dumps just as Unix became suitable for data center computing in the late 1980s, and HP, being a pioneer, was at the right place at the right time with Unix boxes that were a lot less expensive than proprietary machines--and which offered the promise of open APIs and relatively easy portability of applications to other Unixes.

The terms of the "Gold Dust" promotion are outlined on HP UK's Web site. To enter the contest, the HP-UX box has to be at least three years old and it has to be running real workloads, too. It can't just be keeping the data center warm. Those who enter the contest are eligible for a £500 trade-in on the machine if they buy a new Integrity server with up to four active cores and a £1,000 trade-in if they get a box with more than four cores. HP is also giving away a game console with 101 retro video games on it from the 1980s, which will be appealing to nerds for sure. The winner of the contest will be awarded a new entry Integrity machine, an HP-UX 11i v3 license, and a three-year, 24x7 support contract for the whole shebang. You have to enter before July 31. The award will be presented on September 13 at Bletchley Park, in Milton Keynes, the site of a new computer museum and the legendary location of British code-breaking operations during World War II. This is where the father of modern computing, Alan Turing, got his paycheck and where Colossus, a code-breaking machine that was one of the first digital computers, was built.

Whether or not customers participate in the "Gold Dust" contest, HP wants to remind UK shops that it has an HP Integrity Trade-Up program in place until July 31 that gives customers from £1,600 to £60,000 trade-ins if they move from earlier generations of HP-UX iron to new rp HP 9000 and rx Integrity systems. There are additional trade-ins for each activated processor, which range from £500 to £1,000 each as well. (See this table for details on the trade-ins.)

It is a bit of a wonder why HP hasn't launched this promotion on a worldwide scale. Perhaps that is coming in August and culminating in an event in Cupertino in November.

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