By Birket Foster

Special to the NewsWire

Mannheim, Germany — Yesterday at the Connect Europe user conference, the 25th anniversary of the HP-UX operating system was celebrated in a special session hosted by HP's Juergen Probst. It marked a milestone, not as many years of service as the HP 3000, but over a million copies of HP's Unix have shipped across the four processors that provided the operating system's path – an impressive history in the world of computing.

Guests who dropped in on the anniversary party included Brian Cox, Director of Software Marketing for Business Critical Systems, and Martin Whittaker, director of engineering for BCS. Connect's conference included a separate track on HP-UX. HP gave a good review of the history of HP-UX, then shifted into detailing gains that customers were getting in moving from HP-UX 11v2 to HP-UX 11v3.

Since HP-UX futures are limited to operating on the Itanium processor, the Itanium roadmap was rolled out, and a roadmap for versions 4 and 5 of the OS was outlined. It seems HP has done quite a bit of work on virtualization, and a discussion of the guest operating systems showed off the flexibility of the new HP-UX environment.