I got a report from Tom McNeal, who worked in the MPE/XL 32-bit lab from 1981 to 1992, that Vision was an architecture HP dropped in 1983.

"HPE was the original name for the first MPE/XL 32 bit machine; it was inherited from the Vision architecture that was dumped in favor of PA-RISC in 1983."

In a story about the February 1984 Interex user conference, the HP Chronicle reported that HP had announced the cancellation of Vision, to be replaced by the Spectrum Project. Spectrum yielded MPE/XL and the first Series 840 and 930 HP 3000s in 1986, built around PA-RISC chip architecture.

Ron Seybold
Editor, 3000 Newswire

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On May 4, 2012, at 2:38 PM, Peter M. Eggers wrote:

> My curiosity got the best of me, and I started to google it.  Interesting
> how "google" has been added as a verb to the English language, but that is
> another subject. ;-)
> 
> From CPU Shack:
> 
> HP's (and the world's) first fully 32 bit microprocessor was FOCUS (pre
>> 1984). It was a huge (at the time) 450,000 transistor chip with a stack
>> based instruction set, described as "essentially a gigantic microcode<http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpuAppendC.html#microcode>ROM with a simple 32 bit data path bolted to its side". Performance wasn't
>> spectacular, but it was used in a pre-Unix workstation from HP. It led to
>> the Vision, a fairly complex capability-based architecture. At the same
>> time as Vision, the Spectrum project was started at HP labs based on the IBM
>> 801 <http://www.cpushack.com/CPU/cpuAppendA.html#801>, and further
>> developed with implementation groups.
> 
> Ah, the days of brilliant HP engineering, but there I go again.
> 
> A great reference with further reference links at the end:
> http://www.openpa.net/systems/hp-9000_520.html
> 
> Now back to work, though I really want to find out more about HP's FOCUS
> cpu.  Damn priorities!!
> 
> Pete

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