December 19, 2025
Boot ghosts, bragging rights
The scariest boot loader code
From dusty office relic to hacker hero tale, with a surprise “I built that” cameo
TLDR: An old HP workstation with a scary boot loader sparked an open‑source porting saga and a cameo from someone who helped design its guts. Comments split between “ship code that works” pragmatists and nostalgic fans, showing why old hardware and the people behind it still shape today’s tech stories.
A forgotten HP 9000/720 rescued from a printer room becomes the star of a boot‑loader horror story: one dying disk, a tiny startup program (the “boot loader”) holding everything together, and a dream to run OpenBSD instead of HP’s Unix. The thread turns into a popcorn‑worthy mashup of nostalgia and tough love. Fans cheer Michael Shalayeff’s fearless porting grind and MIT student Matt Fredette’s NetBSD port sneak peek, while others remind everyone that wild code is only cool if it actually works.
Then a plot twist: a commenter drops a mic with “I designed the original EISA logic” for the HP 9000/720, sending the crowd into “hardware dad just walked in” mode. Old‑school pros call these boxes rockets, and the nostalgia torrents in—think boot‑server life, rare power outages, and X terminals waiting for their daily bread. The hot take war lands on two camps: the “ship code that runs, no excuses” crowd vs. the “heroic tinkering is how legends are made” fans. Jokes fly about haunted boot loaders, printer‑room boss fights, and the eternal “replace the dying disk” debate. Through all the drama, people salute the grit that kept obscure machines alive—and the pioneers who built them.
Key Points
- •An HP 9000/720 PA-RISC workstation, initially used for HP-UX-only software, was repurposed as a boot server for company X terminals.
- •The machine had failing SCSI disks and required manual intervention after outages, but remained in service until X terminals were retired.
- •The author acquired the machine intending to run OpenBSD and followed the PA-RISC port led by Michael Shalayeff since 1998.
- •OpenBSD’s PA-RISC work drew inspiration from the PA-RISC port of MkLinux (Mach + Linux) despite scarce documentation.
- •In early 2002, MIT’s Matt Fredette reported reaching single-user mode on a NetBSD hp700 port based on OpenBSD/hppa code, though it remained unstable.