HP9000
This machine was bought by Jim Austin in about 1989 on his first research grant. The project ‘Vision by Associative Reasoning’ was a collaborative project funded by the then DTI (now innovate) to develop a system for matching maps to the ground for navigation systems.
It was a collaborative project between British Aerospace, RSRE at Malvern and the Universities of Sussex and York. The project involved high data processing needs, high resolution graphics and large storage. The aim of the work at York was to use neural network based associative memories to do the task.
The grant provided £90K for equipment, with this we bought 2 HP 9000 series workstations and a server. These were selected due to their impressive capabilities at the time.
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HP 9000 is a line of workstation and server computer systems produced by the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company. The native operating system for almost all HP 9000 systems is HP-UX, which is based on UNIX System V.
The HP 9000 brand was introduced in 1984 to encompass several extant technical workstation models launched formerly in the early 1980s. Most of these were based on the Motorola 68000 series, but there were also entries based on HP's own FOCUS designs. From the mid-1980s, the line was transitioned to HP's new PA-RISC architecture. Finally, in the 2000s, systems using the IA-64 were added.
The HP 9000 line was discontinued in 2008, being superseded by Itanium-based HPE Integrity Servers running HP-UX.