3000 NewsWire

GHRUG postpones MPE/iX conference

After securing new dates in the same location, the Greater Houston Regional User Group (GHRUG) has postponed its September MPE/iX conference. Group president Richard Pringle cited a lack of time to prepare the kind of meeting that a 3000 community in transition deserves.

The group of volunteers needs more time, according to the GHRUG statement .

Our HP 3000 Conference scheduled for September 14-15, 2007, is being postponed.  "We have always wanted to offer the highest quality MPE/iX International conference," said president Richard Pringle. "In a community with such a wide range of transition and training needs, creating the best possible conference required more time than we first estimated. Our key sponsors and committee members remain fully engaged for our new conference dates. New programs and events are in process today for Spring, March 14 and 15 of 2008 — a year with critical impact for the 3000 community. Your patience and participation is appreciated."

The GHRUG, the last outpost of the once-widespread Interex user groups, is preparing a conference to provide both homesteading skills and migration tactics and techniques, according to its board. The group voted to name the conference after the HP 3000 operating system, planning four tracks and including soft skills in management.

The University of Houston at Clear Lake campus remains the site for the conference, with meeting dates secured from the university officials. The board is conducting an election through this week to lock in director seats and spark more detailed plans for the '08 conference.

HP list starts to list toward history

Even though the HP 3000 mailing list doesn't even boast 600 members, it's a barometer of what the installed base is thinking about. In the last week or so the list has been recounting history, looking back at accomplishments that seem crude and small in today's light.

They were no such thing during the 1970s and 1980s, when the minicomputer was winning share away from mainframes. HP led the way with interactive computing and a bundled IMAGE database. The latter was a result of the US government ruling against IBM, one that forced Big Blue to break up its offerings. At the same time, HP brought out a business server with a database wired into the operating and file systems.

IBM had to break out its software and hardware businesses as a result of the Federal decree. The HP 3000 got its opening to give programmers the power to create their own applications by driving an award-winning database. Datamation, long since passed in the market but a force in the 1970s, crowned IMAGE with the prize in 1977. HP only began to bundle it in 1976.

John Dunlop, who operates the fine 3000links.com Web page, started a thread on the 3000 list not long ago about the days of paper tape computing. Technology that goes back at least to the time of the 3000's inception. Dunlop outlined his challenges with IBM's 360 mainframe and its Job Control Language (JCL) cards. In part, he wrapped up by saying,

Paper tape also had nightmare qualities of its own. It seemed that it was always just as you got close to the end of a complicated program that the tape would break and you would have to start again. However, it was a slight improvement on the cards.

I expect others have similar nostalgic stories. I for one would enjoy hearing them.  Perhaps Ron Seybold could have a nostalgia corner somewhere.

Consider that corner to be right here, in the comments section below.

Vestiges of those accomplishments, and the remains of 360 programming, still run in the 3000 community. Gary Nolan reported that

I still have a COBOL program around that was written in 1974 on the 360, converted to HP 3000 in 1984 and ran in production until 2001 when the company closed down. Since it was an accounting program, it probably would be still running today if the company existed.

Crude tools? How about

In my time at an IBM shop, I remember that one had to keep track of your files manually; that is, there was no directory structure.

The earliest HP 3000s forced programmers to work inside a 64K "stack," making early programs in SPL an assignment only for the most elegant programmers. Why 64K? It was an early highwater mark for computing in general. Dunlop reminisces

Ah, the 64k memory box...  Memory was called “core” not “RAM” back then. Why?  Because every memory bit was a tiny magnetic donut called a “core”, hand strung at the factory with two wires -- one horizontal and one vertical. The refrigerator-sized cabinet not only housed this core memory, but a large oil tank and pump to keep the core memory cool.

Anyone seen the precursor to disks?  Magnetic drum storage.  The control hardware was much simpler because there was exactly the same number of bits, traveling at the same speed, no matter where the data was on the drum.

Why is Windows important, you say?

The platform most often picked to replace HP 3000 missions? That would be Windows, thanks to the "billions and billions," as Carl Sagan would say, of Windows desktops out there.

But what if that sea of piano-note-laden splash screens didn't surge up to sing "Microsoft?" Supposing the trend tilted toward Linux on desktops? How would the 3000-to-Windows migration choice measure up, if Linux gets critical mass on desktops, too?

Linux already powers much of the Internet. HP 3000 experts are reaching out to the Little Penguin That Could for migration server choices, but not anywhere near as often as HP's Unix, or Windows. HP's worldwide director of open-source and Linux marketing, Doug Small, said that the mass will become as critical as your missions for Linux on desks. This year, too.

"Of course," you say, "he's the director of marketing for HP's Linux. What else would he say?" The real question is what will Small do. In the face of a more complex and largely-on-the-sidelines Vista release, HP is likely to release a retail line of PCs bundled with Linux desktop operating systems. HP is already pre-loading Linux on desktops for 37 Latin American countries. (Who knew there were so many?) Retail. Talk about institutionalizing Linux in customers' minds.

It's a stretch to imagine that 100 million Windows desktops will roll to Linux in a hurry. But consider that a manager of HP 3000s and the desktops must roll these systems over every three years, to keep up with Windows' demands. On any of those rolls, a low-cost, high-function Linux could take over. Microsoft knows this, and markets against Linux with vigor approaching desperation.

Lots of programming savvy has built up in the 3000 community over the past 10 years. This savvy, and the ability to hire Windows experts cheaply, is more likely to keep the Microsoft mantra on the lips of your community. More likely than whatever HP will be bundling.

But that is a technical argument, the kind that HP 3000 managers, migrating or not, lost over and over during the past decade. Trends and buzz often rule top management decisions. For the 3000 director who can offer a lower-cost desktop across hundreds of desks, perhaps a big bonus awaits.

HP just announced it will be buying Neoware. For $214 million, HP will get a company provides thin-client systems. DesktopLinux.com says "HP is doing this because it intends to accelerate the growth of HP's thin-client business by boosting its Linux client software."

Yes, because Hewlett-Packard wants more market share of PC desktops. Which means fewer Microsoft outposts, making Windows look like a backward-facing choice to some decision makers. Is that you, who are now considering how safe a bet Windows appears?

Avert a disaster? Plan on it happening

HP 3000 managers, even the women, are "belt-and-suspender guys," to use a phrase from the 1980s. They are accustomed to knowing that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong — and being enough of an IT pro to recover. Quickly.

Oh, that the Internet's infrastructure should be so well engineered. On Tuesday a few blocks of San Francisco were without power, intermittently. Within minutes, massive chunks of the Internet was knocked off the wires and wireless channels. Big companies and famous sites. Good Morning Silicon Valley noted the popular sites that were shut down:

LiveJournal and Second Life went dead, AdBrite dimmed, Craigslist became unlisted, the 1Up gaming network went down, Facebook turned blank, Six Apart couldn't get it together, and Yelp was rendered silent.

The outage even hit our NewsWire offices, thousands of miles away, because we host with Six Apart for this blog. Our content is backed up locally, daily, but our performing platform sank into shadow for more than three worrisome hours. Only a story about the blackouts from an InfoWorld site — just a few blocks from the outage — allayed our concerns. Good Morning Silicon Valley noted that

A good-size chunk of San Francisco was powerless for several hours during the middle of the business day, including hosting service 365 Main, which powers many of the Web's most popular sites and which boasts of doubly redundant backup in case of blackouts

HP offered its latest disaster recovery solution in an entertaining video shown at last month's HP Technology Forum. Disaster recovery (DR) can become your only job if something so simple as power gets interrupted. Many HP 3000 veterans now offer this service to the community.

The Good Morning article quoted several Internet mavens as saying the blackout was a wake up call for the industry. HP 3000 managers are more awake than many, but plenty of sites have a DR plan untested, out of date or just missing in action.

We've run plenty of articles about the community's DR resources, ranging from discounts for DR systems to the turnkey approach across multiple computing platforms including the HP 3000. Have a look, and catch up if you need to:

Free and discount Client Systems offerings

HP blows up marketing real good

Got a turnkey DR solution?

Get that 3000 touch for disasters

Disaster Recovery Optimization Techniques

Storage Selections for Disaster Recovery

How to Do Something to Recover

Give the NewsWire's search facility (in the left-hand column) a try to dig out the rest of what we've run. Your community is full of leading lights to avoid the darkness.

What makes for a run-up

HP's third fiscal quarter closes in less than a week, and the company can point to a stock run-up of almost 50 percent in share price over the last 12 months. It's been a rate of rise to take pride in, at least among HP's employees and officers and the most loyal of customers. Like those who are staying with HP as they make their transition from the 3000. Choosing HP's Unix or HP servers is no slam-dunk sale for your vendor.

But even that performance is being out-paced by Apple today. The company dropped the "Computer" from its name last year, even though its Macintosh systems now rank at Number 4 in the US PC market share. HP often reminds us of its Number 1 ranking in servers of all kinds. PCs, of course, represent so many more computers.

Today Apple announced its quarterly earnings (profits up 73 percent) with news about the opening four weeks of sales of its iPhone. To some eyes, the iPhone is Apple's latest Mac. On this evening, the computer line that isn't Windows-based — but runs Windows alongside Apple's Unix, OS X — is sold by a company capitalized at $129 billion. HP's market cap is $118 billion today. Profit per employee is $45,000 at HP, and $173,000 at Apple.

And Apple's stock run-up? 124 percent per share in the last year, not counting the $13-a-share bump tonight on the iPhone news.

How Apple spins its profit from so few employees might be a trick only a BMW-grade company can perform. But HP can tout its Number 1 status in the whole of the industry. Getting to Number 1 obviously takes a lot more headcount. That musters the clout to deliver HP's Monday salvo, when Hewlett-Packard offered $1.6 billion to buy data center automation software company Opsware.

HP is offering $14.25 per share in cash for Opsware, a 38.6 percent premium over Opsware’s recent closing price. HP said it will fold Opsware into HP’s software business after the deal closes, another sheaf in your vendor's business technology optimization software portfolio.

Apple's release didn't say how many iPhones it sold during the product's first days. But the company reported it sold a total of 270,000 iPhones and related accessories, a number smaller than estimated by at least one-half. The markets didn't care, counting on Apple's forecast to sell one million iPhones by the end of the current quarter. CEO Steve Jobs said, "iPhone is off to a great start... and our new product pipeline is very strong."  Tonight after hours, Apple's stock is trading at about $150 per share.

Apple shipped more than five iPods for every Macintosh it sold this quarter. It would be interesting to have HP report how many printers it sold for every server this quarter, or maybe HP's combination of servers and PCs. These non-business-customer product successes produce the vaunted "halo effect" for a company's brand.

HP pursued the consumer segment hard, even with Apple's products rebranded, to little avail in Carly Fiorina's era. CEO Mark Hurd means to focus your vendor more on computing, even though the printer group provides the most profit of any HP business.

Expect the HP Q3 results to appear, as usual, in mid-August.

Backup pioneer Joerg Groessler dies

Joerg Groessler, creator of breakthrough backup programs for HP 3000s, has died at age 55. The German computer scientist and creator of Online Backup, and the first released version of Backpack/3000, passed away quietly in the night of July 23, ending a battle with a brain tumor which had been diagnosed earlier this year.

Groessler celebrated life in his final months in the community, working until his final two weeks on development at ORBiT Software, the company he founded in the early 1980s. Stories describing his transition suite at the Clairmont assisted living facility where he spent his last days included a 62-inch flat-screen monitor to program on and communicate, fed by 2 MB Internet pipe, "because I don't have time to wait."

Groessler was more than an expert programmer, by accounts from community colleagues as well as co-workers in the ORBiT lab. Close friend and business colleague Jane Copeland, who knew him since his seminal HP market days of the 1970s and was in continual contact with Groessler and his family to the very last, said the man's brilliance was apparent.

"He was a genius," said the founder of API Software, a networking solutions provider to the HP 3000 community and beyond. Even while he was continuing lab work for ORBiT, Groessler contributed "very valuable work for us" during his final year, Copeland said.

Mark Klein, ORBiT's lab software manager for more than a decade and a 3000 star who still develops for the company as an independent, said that Groessler's design of Backup — which has stood up through three distinct generations of MPE, from CISC through RISC and beyond — was both an industry breakthrough and prescient.

"He wasn't the typical [lab director] who rides herd over his masses," Klein said. "He told us what he wanted and let us loose to create it." ORBiT's labs, under Groessler's direction, grew to include a star caliber roster of developers including Stan Sieler, Jason Goertz, Paul Taffel, Jacques van Damme and Klein. "A Joerg Groessler ORBiT was a lot of fun to work at," Klein said.

The design of the 3000's backup solutions came at a time when the fundamental concept of backing up computers was still in its infancy, Klein said. Later, the elegance of his designs paved the way for rapid development.  "We could proof a module even before the entire product was built," he explained. "In the late 1980s that was unique."

Groessler architected the design of Online Backup — which has become Online Backup+ in its latest version — employing such forward thinking that the software still has performance headroom, more than 20 years after it was introduced, Klein said.

Groessler created the 1.05 version of the first third-party tool for backing up MPE systems, software which became Tymlabs' Backpack after re-development by Tymlabs' Technical Director  Winston Krieger. Between the two products, Groessler's initial designs and architecture have dominated more than 90 percent of backup for HP 3000 systems, including those at Hewlett-Packard's own labs and business units.

His subsequent program, Online Backup, grew to an installed base of more than 6,000 licenses by the late 1990s, placing it among the top five for the 3000 market of its day. Groessler gave HP 3000 customers a more intelligent alternative to the HP-included STORE and RESTORE programs in the 3000's MPE operating system. The breakthrough was the ability to select files using rules, versus the blanket backup of STORE and RESTORE.

As the 3000 became more of a mission-critical choice, with its unique interactive abilities winning a place for the system against IBM in the minicomputer market, Groessler's work ensured the safety of countless gigabytes of corporate information.

Groessler is survived by his sister Margaret, who cared for him at an Oakland assisted living facility where he sped about on a customized wheelchair. His June celebration of life event drew more than 100 industry lights, taking over the dining room. "He was active to the end, and vital," said a co-worker. He set a wonderful example of celebrating life."

A story is being told this week about Groessler disappearing from the care facility one morning after an especially hard evening of struggle with his condition. While friends grew worried, he returned from a trip to Fry's Electronics, where his driver had taken him to buy a needed computer cable.

Update to keep the link to IMAGE open

Every HP 3000 contains an ODBC database link tool. ODBCLink/SE was engineered by MBFA, then bundled in with the HP 3000 operating system. The software has been available since MPE/iX 6.0, so that covers close to a decade's worth of releases. MB Foster has offered an upgrade to the 3000 community to expand the tool's power, an upgrade at a discount.

Keeping ODBCLink/SE running isn't complex, but it can require more than just keeping the 3000 plugged in to your building's power source. You have to keep up with some patches if things change in your environment. Current HP support customers can get updates, online, for the bundled software.

On the HP 3000 Internet newsgroup, one 3000 user was trying to keep the link tool from hanging up. HP's Cathlene McRae, Senior Response Center Engineer, offered a few solutions to the problem.

If you are getting a number of hangs from the ODBCLink/SE driver you may need  to do one of the following:

1) Update the version of the ODBCLink/SE driver. The current version is g04.05. Run odbcutse.odbcse.sys to discover your current version.

If the version is f.xx or e.xx,  you should update.  If you need a newer version  of ODBCLink/SE you will need to open a case with the HP Response Center. ODBC  patches are not available on the HP IT Response Center web site.

2) The problem may be network configuration.  emr_na-c01003546 documents these issues.  The hangs may be waits. 

It is possible by adjusting the values on your DBE or TCP configurations, the problems will go away.

Two years after the Interex implosion

It was two years ago this week that the HP 3000 community learned about the Interex user group's vanishing act. The technical and social resource for HP computer users went offline with no notice to the group's HP World sponsors, magazine and show advertisers, volunteers or members, leaving more than $4 million in unpaid bills and long-term debts.

After 24 months, the only remaining asset worth pursuit — the programs in the group's Contributed Software Library — remains in limbo. Members and sponsors have not seen their bank accounts reimbursed for booth reservations, membership dues or sponsor monies, not to mention the unpaid bills to hotels across the country or HP's loss (well over $100,000, for those who are counting.)

It was 60 years ago that Sgt. Pepper taught his band to play (the 20 in that Beatles lyric, plus the 40 since the song's release), but the song of Interex played only about half as long. HP 3000 customers founded the group in earnest in the middle 1970s, led by system managers working to find a way to maximize their investment in HP 3000s. Hewlett-Packard engineers used those users to tune the HP 3000 product offerings, often by repair of the releases after they were already in the field.

Guy Smith, a contributing writer for the 3000 NewsWire in our earliest issues of 1995, posted a note in that week of 2005, noting that "It is no longer an HP World."

My first job in 1978 was for a Sunnyvale timesharing company that ran a HP 3000 Series I. Intel and Rolm ran their financial systems on our machine. The last Interex HP World I attended was the San Francisco blow-out with Circe d' Soliel. Interex promoted HP products until around 1994 when HP pulled its salesforce and subsequently anounced the end FIRST end of the HP-3000. With HP-UX dominating marketing and sales, as a Interex Regional Users Group officer I immediately saw a drop in attendance at the local level.

So many IT shops were losing the HP-3000 only mantle and becoming multi-vendor/OS shops. Windows, NT, Unix, HP-UX. The family HP way was gone, and then Carly Fiorina placed the final stake in the HP 3000 and Interex about three years ago.

What is Mark Hurd's golden handshake compensation? Only the CEO and board members get richer. The rest of struggle to live and have a sense of unity. It is no longer an HP World.

35 years of dropping names

It was a marketplace of names.

That is the sentence one man suggested for opening a history of the HP 3000. Birket Foster of MB Foster has offered it to me in many discussions, chats when the topic became, "When are you going to write that book?"

Birket is one of those names, among the more unique of the cast members which helped produce the HP 3000 marketplace. Others come to mind like Alfredo, Vladimir and the more common-sounding Bob or Fred. (If you're keeping score, the last names are Rego, Volokh, Green and White, the founders of Adager, VEsoft, Robelle, and IMAGE respectively.) That quartet of creators of database tools, a turbo-charged MPE and 3000's award-winning database — their names come to mind first.There are many more, uncommon monikers like J.P., Gilles, Eugene, and a Potter from Quasar who offered the 3000's first QUIZ. 

However, before nearly all of those names rose in your community's ranks — in fact, 35 years ago this summer — were Hewlett and Packard, and the company named for two men who didn't really believe a business computer was in HP's business interest. Despite their reservations, several years of work on the first model of your system led to the summer of 1972, when the HP 3000 was already running late, beset with hardware problems.

Our archives here in the NewsWire offices now include a letter to the first customer to order an HP 3000. But not the first customer to receive a new system, perhaps a good thing. The initial shipments of HP 3000s only fulfilled Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's doubts. Their H-P was stuck with a product which started as a disaster. It was up to another Bill to break the news.

HP put its best face on this first delay, telling Yale-New Haven Hospital that "When a first order comes from a hospital such as Yale-New Haven and from [Dr. David Seligson] a person with an international reputation in the field of laboratory automation, we are doubly flattered." But this HP 3000 system was going to ship late to New Haven.

"Although our development is remarkably close to the targets we set over a year ago, we find that we must slip our shipments to insure that our customers receive a computer system with the built-in reliability that HP is known for," read Bill Terry's letter to Seligson. "Your system will be the first shipped outside the immediate Cupertino area and is scheduled for December, 1972."

The letter arrived in May, seven months before HP allowed the first 3000s outside of California. It was a simpler time with crude technology. HP offered the hospital a bonus for the delay. "We would like to donate an additional 8K words of core memory (part 3006A, $8,000.00) to your HP 3000 system. Additionally, our intention is definitely to continue with plans for the training of your people, both in Cupertino and New Haven, as soon as possible."

So even with the very first order of the HP 3000, the vendor was delivering its product by way of "intention" rather than guarantees. HP's founders had made a fortune with a practice of under-promising and then over-delivering by 1972. Conservative to its core, the company nonetheless would ship a system so crippled it had to be returned for a do-over, two years later.

And those 8K words of memory, at a cost of $8,000, are so small today that 125,000 of them are available for $8. Not core memory, specific to only one computer, but a 1GB memory stick  which can be used in 100 million computers, and millions more cameras, printers and phones. A small contribution indeed, HP offered, in the face of a delay.

But Bill Terry was doing his best with what HP had for the nascent 3000 community. He would survive the debacle of the first HP 3000 models to see himself and other HP computer founders honored with a documentary film, screened when HP's restored Palo Alto garage reopened. This week, Computer Reseller News posted a blog entry about that moment, a part of the "Bill and Dave" book by Michael S. Malone which made its way into bookstores this spring.

So to the 3000's history of names we can add a different Bill. We'd like you to offer any 1970s names you recall to help compose the 3000's story. Thirty-five years is long enough to wait to begin. We could well call the book Don't Trust Anyone Under 30.

When should you encrypt?

In yesterday's entry, we tracked the options available for HP 3000 data encryption. None looked simpler than the Orbit Software product, Backup+/iX, now engineered for 256-bit encryption of data during backups only. The backup-triggered encryption minimizes performance drain, a potential pitfall of encrypting data.

But the question of when to encrypt surfaced just a few hours after the discussion of product and freeware solutions. Tracy Johnson observed

Encryption of data on the host itself is really a waste of time. Why? Unless there is no access control at the host? Encryption during transmission between two computers is usually how it is done because that is when data is vulnerable.

Pete Eggers, whose name has been mentioned as a potential OpenMPE director, replied that the moment of encryption was not clear from the customer's question: how to encrypt a dataset in a TurboIMAGE database.

There is nowhere enough information presented to say that host data encryption is a waste of time — nor enough information to say that any form of transmission of the data warrants
encryption.

Johnson delivered an allegory to explain why host-based encryption appears redundant to him.

I just find it funny that all of a sudden after 60-odd years of computers there is a sudden need for encrypting data where it resides. It still begs the question of lack of access control. If the hypothetical HR department has its data on a host, and the hypothetical Shipping department has access to HR's data, what kind of access control is that?

I recall upon receipt of my set of rainbow books in the early 1980s and a discussion of the (then theoretical) "Class A1" trusted information system holding the highest levels of classified data:

"A blackboard with something written on it can be a Class A1 trusted information system.  All you need to do is put it in a locked room and have users sign in and out at the door where the armed guard is."

Taking away the armed guard and lowering the Trusted Criteria a bit, what I understand is being wanted here, is to require users to decode gibberish written on the blackboard after they have already been let in!

If you see my point, it is far more practical, (if not as efficient) to encrypt data as it is being transmitted, to and from a host and decrypted upon receipt. If a key is lost, you may always transmit again using a new key.

There is also additional risk if the data is encrypted on the host.  If you've lost the key, you've lost everything.

Encrypting data at the host does have its uses. On a PC where there is no access control and the hard drive can be compromised easily, such as at home or in airline baggage, host encryption makes sense and the user counts on it.  But that user also runs the same risk if he forgets the key.

I think the key here are differences between multiuser hosts and PCs. The line became blurred when they starting using PCs as multiuser servers and basic concepts of security became lost.

Eggers replied with another point, about the changes in computing — and how the new world demands a different standard, one that assumes the worst and demonstrates "due care."

Encrypting data is a tool.  Misapplying the tool falls under "due care," and not having proper and/or approved procedures in place to safely use it falls under "due diligence’.

The courts seem to be becoming the school of hard knocks for IT and executives alike as most consider security in a heavily networked society: Annoyingly time-consuming and complex; and/or are blissfully ignorant of consequences; and/or will cross that bridge when they come to it.

The world has changed a lot in 60 years, and at an increasing rate. Adaptability is essential to survive. The days of multiuser text interface database servers connected by simple serial lines to dumb terminals are gone.  Even when client/server systems begin to look like the old dinosaurs, the invisible underlying functionality and complexity is increasing dramatically. This hidden complexity needs to be secured.

With worldwide high-speed broadband interconnectivity increasing at a rapid rate, the bad guys are probing for holes in this ever-increasing complexity of our interconnected systems, making our systems harder and harder to secure.

Most of the government systems with highly-sensitive information or functions are disconnected from networks, or connected only to internal highly secured and controlled networks. There is no way to guarantee their safety if connected to public networks.  But business depends more and more on interconnectivity every year. Therefore, risk analysis is essential — even if it boils down to just purchasing insurance policy to cover a vulnerability.

But it's entirely likely that purchasing a commercial encryption solution could be less expensive, and preventative to boot. That's due diligence, if implemented with proper procedures.