Re: Itanic industrial mistake
"Although VMS is therefore relevant to the lingering on of Itanium, another significant factor is perhaps the fact that no port of HP-UX to x86 or x86-64 has ever been released."
I suspect the reason for no x86 port of HP-UX goes back to AT&T SVr4. Sun Solaris 2 was developed from scratch and dual endian.
HP decided to incorporate SVr4 into HP-UX without a full rework, so it stayed big endian only.
If you look at the source code there is so much low level bit twiddling that it would be impractical to try to "port" HP-UX to a little endian CPU with anything short of a complete ground up rewrite.
There were a couple perfunctory stabs at it that were cancelled early on.
Since most customers are primarily interested in application environments above the OS, porting HP-UX to x86-64 was less attractive than migrating them to Linux.