port of OpenVMS to the Intel Itanium architecture. The Itanium port was the result of Compaq's decision to discontinue future development of the Alpha architecture in favour of adopting the then-new Itanium architecture. The porting began in late 2001, and the first boot on took place on January 31, 2003. The first boot consisted of booting a minimal system configuration on a HP i2000 workstation, logging in as the SYSTEM user, and running the DIRECTORY command. The Itanium port of OpenVMS supports specific models and configurations of HPE Integrity Servers. The Itanium releases were originally named HP OpenVMS Industry Standard 64 for Integrity Servers, although the names OpenVMS I64 or OpenVMS for Integrity Servers are more commonly used. The Itanium port was accomplished using source code maintained in common within the OpenVMS Alpha source code library, with the addition of conditional code and additional modules where changes specific to Itanium were required. This required certain architectural dependencies of OpenVMS to be replaced, or emulated in software. Some of the changes included using the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) to boot the operating system, reimplementing the functionality previously provided by Alpha PALcode inside the kernel, using new executable file formats (Executable and Linking Format and DWARF), and adopting IEEE 754 as the default floating point format. As with the VAX to Alpha port, a binary translator for Alpha to Itanium was made available, allowing user mode OpenVMS Alpha software to be ported to Itanium in situations where it was not possible to recompile the source code. This translator is known as the Alpha Environment Software Translator (AEST), and it also supported translating VAX executables which had already translated with VEST. Two pre-production releases, OpenVMS I64 V8.0 and V8.1, were available on June 30, 2003, and on December 18, 2003. These releases were intended for HP organizations and third-party vendors involved with porting software packages to OpenVMS I64. The first production release, V8.2, was released in February 2005. V8.2 was also released for Alpha, subsequent V8.x releases of OpenVMS have maintained feature parity between the Alpha and Itanium architectures. Port to x86-64 When VMS Software Inc. (VSI) announced that they had secured the rights to develop the OpenVMS operating system from HP, they also announced their intention to port OpenVMS to the x86-64 architecture. The porting effort ran concurrently with the establishment of the company, as well as the development of VSI's own