Hewlett-Packard Advert - January 1983

At around the same time as HP was dabbling in the mainstream microcomputer market with machines like its HP-86, released in 1982 and which retailed for $2,820, which is about £8,500 in 2024, comes a range of machines that are significantly higher up the value food-chain.

The range was based on either Motorola's 68012 or HP's own FOCUS CPU, which was the first commercial single-chip fully-32-bit processor on the market.

HP's processor contained 450,000 transistors and ran at an impressive 18MHz, especially when compared to the pedestrian 5MHz of the original IBM PC.

The HP 9000 series was aimed primarily at the nascent Unix workstation market, and ran the company's own version of System V Unix which it called HP-UX. It also supported a fully-compiled version of BASIC.

And because it was aimed at Unix, it was fiercely expensive, with a server version available for £13,500 (£57,400 in 2024), a workstation for £21,000 (£89,300) and even a multi-user system built in in to a desk for a bargain £34,000 - that's an impressive £144,500 now.

On the upside, the HP 9000 system was said to have the "computational capabilities of a mainframe" without the requirement for an air-conditioned room.

The HP 9000 range itself continued up until 2009, in various forms and using various processors, including Motorola's 68000, HP's own PA-RISC and then Intel's IA-64/Itanium.