HP was also one of the few companies to actually sell Itanium systems! They were also the last to stop selling them. They ported both OpenVMS and HP-UX to Itanium.
Well, largely because they made it difficult for customers to stay on PA-RISC, then later, because their competitors were dying off...and if you were in the market for stodgy RISC/Unix there weren't many other choices.
There's still a lot of AIX around and the LoB is seeing revenue growth. You just don't hear about it on HN because it's mostly doing mundane, mission critical stuff buried in large orgs.
I still run into a number of Solaris/SPARC shops, but even the most die hard of them are actively looking for the off-ramp. The writing is on that wall.
I believe it! For a few years, I worked on fairly large system deployed to an AIX environment. The hardware and software were both rock solid. While I haven't used it, the performance of the newer POWER stuff looks incredible.
