3000 NewsWire

The Very Top Stories of 2007

Here on the last day of 2007, we have the advantage of 12 months of perspective to decide on the three biggest stories of the year just ending. Most customers will agree on Number 1, and we'll get to that in a few paragraphs. But what other two stories had the most influence on the customer base?

3. In my view, the overall behavior of HP in patching situations comes very close to being the top stop story of the year. Twice in less than six months time of 2007, HP released patches during the year which only the vendor could create, considering the timeframe of the patch development.

If HP has truly been working to kill off the HP 3000 — as some wounded customers and partners insist — it would hold fast to a deadly intent: Draw down the available resource to repair internal problems in MPE/iX. Even if the vendor supplied support, creating patches for the entire customer base to use demonstrated a subtle agenda, it seems. HP doesn't want to be caught leaving a critical problem unfixed, at least not while it continues to charge someone for 3000 support.

2. The ecosystem became richer and more complete than ever. Whether it was MB Foster taking over ODBC support from HP labs, a swelling inventory of available HP 3000s, or the SCSI Pass Through tool to add new disk support — not to mention a white paper that outlines open source development techniques from the HP labs, illustrated by a Samba port — the future of the platform has no firm end before 2027. Third party partners span both the migration and homesteading needs of the community; MB Foster, Speedware, Allegro Consultants and a fleet of independent advisors raised their profiles and maintained five years of momentum for either side of the 3000 mission. After all, so many sites are homesteading until they complete migrations, or can afford the switch.

Moreover, that prediction of migration expertise being as pricey and rare as Y2K consulting, well, it never came to pass, not even one year beyond HP's envisioned end date. People still misunderstand the support aspect of the 3000, and others showed they hadn't found everything that could make a migration affordable and faster. There's much to learn, beliefs and outlooks to change, and a growing host of experts to help.

Even in the face of the number one story of the year, the ecosystem of OpenMPE maintained its mission. Proof of this relevance? HP lost a liaison  to the OpenMPE group and named another. If OpenMPE were irrelevant to HP, such a move doesn't happen in 2007.

As for the top story of the year, most of us can guess that it involved two letters and two years.

1. HP extended its support period two years, through 2010 for the HP 3000. And the announcement came in September, at the suggestion of OpenMPE, so customers could have time to plan for their 2008 HP 3000 resources. It's true, the vendor now supports no more than one third of the systems still in production, by our estimate. But the presence of HP in the market in any way — even in a period where the vendor promises little if any patch development — helps define the useful lifespan of the server.

More than six years ago, HP recommended that the risks on the system made getting off it critical, a top priority for customers. But HP itself hasn't shut down all of its own HP 3000s. Meanwhile, the HP Services arm of the vendor calls the tune for how much farther the vendor will move along the 3000 support path. The vendor continues to charge for license transfers, and there's no end-date for the HP Service counsel for migration.

Two more years will slow some migrations, but it will also allow the vendor more time to become a partner in the next platform chosen by sites. We can't be sure of what's in store for 2008, but it's one of three remaining years of the system's vendor-supported lifespan.

Have a Happy New Year, and check back with us on Wednesday for a look at suggested New Year's resolutions for 2008. It's been a fun and captivating year for us here at the NewsWire. Thanks for another 12 months of this wild ride.

Top 2007 Stories, Part 3

Halfway through our recap of the Top Stories of the 3000 community's 2007, we should pause to take note of the top story from 20 years earlier. Writing a history of a community like yours, where continuity is the 3000's credo, led me to back issues of the HP Chronicle, the newsmagazine I had the pleasure of editing from 1984 through 1992.

Halfway through those crucial eight years, the community finally saw the rollout of the first PA-RISC HP 3000 — the same technology HP created to run the systems still in mission critical service today. HP called its RISC project Spectrum. The first system was a Series 930, shipped to ASK Computer just before Labor Day. Labor was the key word to describe the new computer, which I wrote "was undermanned from the first day. HP sold so few 930s, [all to Bay Area customers] that it promised the Series 950 loaded with a more powerful processor on the same schedule."

The Year 1987 represented the high-water mark of the system's footprint in the world of computing. HP announced it had shipped the 30,000th HP 3000 system, moving from 20,000 installed to 30,000 in just two years' time.

But during 2007, 3000 hardware made a different kind of news. Reliability services became more widespread than ever, operated by independent HP 3000 veterans making use of low-cost RISC systems. Nothing as elderly as a Series 950, but systems with more horsepower and life left in them than you might expect.

6. A few blocks of San Francisco went without power on an afternoon in July, and massive chunks of the Internet was knocked out. Big companies and famous sites. Good Morning Silicon Valley noted the popular sites that were knocked out:

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 disaster lasted a few hours, a wakeup call for any 3000 owner who believes the system will never fail because it never has over years, perhaps more than a decade. We reviewed what we offered as a guide to DR services, including a new turnkey operation opened up for multiple OS environments at Hill Country Technologies. The story included Web links to many services who understand the mission critical needs of the 3000.

5. HP rolled out a crucial patch to disable the Large Files function for IMAGE/SQL's greater than 4GB datasets. The repairs were the first of two critical repairs for the database, both engineered in a hurry to give the customers assurance of the 3000's stability. HP later repaired Large Files with a binary-level patch and the first fix for the 3000's millicode in 16 years. Fast response, available to the entire 3000 community, regardless of a customer's support relations with HP. Surprising, during the sixth year after HP announced its 3000 exit plans.

4. Jennie Hou took the reins from Dave Wilde as business manager for HP 3000 operations at HP. She may oversee the exit of HP from the 3000 community, but the new manager said that HP doesn't have a confirmed date for ending its 3000 support. We asked Hou, "Does HP intend to exit the support business for the 3000 at some date?"

Of course. Eventually there will be no HP support of the 3000. HP will exit that support business completely. HP cares about our installed base and wants to help our customers in maintaining a stable e3000 environment while they conduct their migrations. Therefore, the support model evolves based on customer needs and balanced business approach.

Already in August, though, HP was talking about a conceptual model to extend its support business. Nothing official at that time, though.

Top 2007 Stories, Part 2

HP reached out for more HP 3000 relevance in 2007 with a Right to Use License, one of the top news stories of 2007. Outside suppliers made at least as much impact on the majority of the community, despite being only a fraction of the size of Hewlett-Packard. The news in 2007 showed that size can be measured in dedication as well as resource.

Continuing our 2007 countdown of top stories:

9. A third party picked up the challenge of extending an HP product lifespan. Not by actually taking on HP source code, but by returning to the source of HP Transact design — that's how ScreenJet  offered a future for customers using Transact applications. Somewhere out there, people outside HP created the solutions HP sold to customers over the past 20 years. ScreenJet joined forces with Transact's creator David Dummer to offer Transaction, a vehicle that might carry a customer on a 3000 for many years to come, or help them move onto a new platform.

8. HP offered retirement plans that lured some of its most visible 3000 links out of the company. Community liaison Jeff Vance and OpenMPE link Mike Paivinen both took early retirement offers to leave the 3000 group inside HP. HP moved other experts into the jobs, but the exits showed a serious side to the composition of the 3000 expertise: advancing years crossing over careers. Vance took a post with a third party vendor who's still supporting HP 3000 sites, but also offering a vendor-neutral K-12 solution.

7. Independent organizations kept pushing at 3000 events. Encompass held its largest user conference ever during a week of June, where HP introduced its new community liaisions for the platform. Greater Houston's Regional User Group kept working to assemble a meeting that will include 3000 content. And in the biggest surprise, a 3000 meeting developed in just three months' time as the e3000 Community Meet opened eyes and meeting doors in San Francisco.

Top 2007 Stories, Part 1

You can argue that any year when HP extends its 3000 business is a notable year. And so 2007 was as notable as 2005, both years when HP moved its HP 3000 finish line back by two years. HP's actions, however, don't necessarily make the biggest news in a community that survives with less Hewlett-Packard resource every year.

HP did reach out to that community on several occasions during 2007. The company spent the back end of 2006 devising a new license it rolled out early in 2007. That story was one of several where HP was reacting to the 3000 community, rather than leading as it did during the 1990s.

Twelve months to a year, a dozen stories to lead the news and evolution of the 3000 community. Let's count them down.

12. RTU license program returns HP to 3000 vendor ranks. HP created a Right to Use license for HP 3000 owners, something a customer needs to pay the vendor for during some sales of existing systems. Ross McDonald, HP's 3000 lab director, said the vendor realized that customers needed a way to "create a valid system when purchased upgrade kits were no longer available."

To be sure, someone in the community needed something to justify the new RTU. HP was adding a 3000 product to the price list for the first time since 2002. McDonald said the process was complex, maybe just as complicated as discovering who needs to pay for an RTU. McDonald shed some light on the answer with one comment.

For the customer who cares about software licensing, and wants to do the right thing, I think [the RTU] really helps them.

11. Alliances and mergers continued on the 3000 stage. Cognos and Speedware went to work on a joint agreement to serve migrating 3000 sites, punctuating the policy that the rivalry between the companies is long over in the HP 3000 market space. Meanwhile, Ecometry slipped into the Escalate e-commerce organization, ending an era of independence for the company that started so many retailers on HP 3000 ownership.

10. The HP 3000 marketplace saw its two leading COBOL choices merge. Micro Focus purchased its rival Acucorp in a $40 million deal, combining the company wich had engineered a new COBOL for the 3000 with a company that dominates the COBOL market share. Both companies are continuing with their own development paths for the next two years. But the merger was a part of the Micro Focus emphasis on legacy opportunities — like a 3000 community looking for new places to run old COBOL code.

Love is the hardest, best gift of all

After we suggested some Christmas wishes for the HP 3000 last week, we got word of how tough it might be to deliver on one of them: expansion to 32GB of RAM on MPE/iX systems. While the HP 3000's OS was built to handle 64-bit computing, it didn't become a full 64-bit system. That's what the work was going to accomplish when HP moved the OS to the Itanium architecture and Integrity. A move that never got engineered, of course.

Discussion among community members has included some comment from both an HP expert as well as a third party engineering guru. Sad to say, the phrase "you could just tell them to migrate" came up after the candid talk about what the 3000 won't be re-engineered to do — at least on HP's watch.

A reply of "migrate" when the community customers ask for more from their 3000s, especially when the reply comes from a long-tenured expert, seems to show how much feelings can affect choices. Even technical choices. There is a way to extend the 3000's memory from 8GB to 32. But HP explains that it can't justify doing this kind of work any longer. Adding "migrate" after the explanation isn't a way to sell this decision, however.

There are people who have known MPE/iX just as long as HP's lab experts, and deeper in some places. I remember the book Beyond RISC. Copyright 1988, it says in my worn-at-the-edges copy. Third party experts wrote that book. HP bought thousands. That's being of one mind and one heart. Now the sides feel differently about MPE.

What's the difference? These two sides, inside HP and out in the expert community seem like a couple of steady beaus to me. They have both wooed and wrestled with that MPE gal, while she has gained weight (years) and lost her tone (customers, demanding updates) and shown more grey (elderly versions of Ethernet, SCSI, all the tendrils of open source). Yes, they've both had a relationship with her, still do. But the outside experts still love her. HP's experts can take her out, buy her dinner, even give a thoughtful gift that shows they know her. But the message seems to say that they're not in love anymore.

"I don't know what you see in MPE," HP seems to write, when the 3000 experts drift beyond good technical theory. "Why not just leave her at home to watch old movies? She's happy enough there. And there's younger people you could take out. They even know music written after 1992!"

"They do, those new ones," I hear the expert saying. "But MPE knows more song lyrics than those new women will ever learn. Remember when lyrics mattered to make a song a classic? Poetry, that stuff. Plus, I still see her beauty. It was striking when she was younger. Fellas swooned over her, even the big guys who pass her by now."

"You could do better."

"Maybe so. But what about my commitment to her. What's that worth?"

"Lock yourself in with her, if you want," I seem to hear from inside HP. "I just wish people would stop hitting her Web site. I gotta maintain that place, you know. It doesn't feel like anybody appreciates that work that I do — or what I've done for years, really."

"You could do more, I know. She deserves it."

"If my parents would let me, I could," HP seems to say. "But they tell me that I should be looking for a younger partner, one who can give them more grandchildren, not a load of medical bills and health issues. Shin splints, geez. Next it'll be something else. It always is with the older ones."

I admit it — there's more emotion and subtext in this commentary than I can report using facts. But feelings are not facts. They just lead to thoughts, and those can lead to actions. I'm not reporting from inside the community expert's heart, or from inside the HP experts' still working on MPE/iX — but you know, it's the heart that matters when people are advised, en masse, to "migrate away from that relationship, won't you?"

Or maybe this OS is just a tool that's worn out. But I don't think so, not for community members who still rely on MPE. I wish for two things under my reporter-writer's holiday tree tomorrow. Continued candor like those messages, and ample ardor for all. It's a pleasure to have the writing here show what I believe you feel.

Enjoy your loved ones during the holiday break — whoever they are, and whatever they have been or can become.

A holiday gift list to wish for

Since today is the final day in the office until after Christmas, we thought we could extend our holiday wishes to the community by passing along a wish list. We've heard these desires from HP 3000 customers, consultants and vendors during 2007. Some of them might appear to be like the Red Ryder BB-Gun that's at the center of the holiday epic A Christmas Story. As in, "you don't want that, you'll put your eye out."

If you're unfamiliar with the movie, the line means "I don't want you to have that, because I'll worry what you will hurt once you get it." See if you can find the wishes on the holiday list that seem like BB-Guns, and remember: Gift giving season is celebrated this week, but can be practiced the whole year through.

1. Unleashing the full horsepower of A-Class and N-Class 3000s
2. Just unleashing the power of the A-Class 3000s (since every models operates at a quarter of its possible speed)
3. Well, then just unleash the N-Class systems' full clock speeds
4. HP's requirements to license a company for MPE/iX source code use
5. A way to use more than 16GB of memory on a 3000
6. A 3000 network link just one-tenth as fast as the new 10Gbit Ethernet
7. A water-cooled HP 3000 cluster, just like IBM used to make
8. A guaranteed ending date of HP's 3000 support for MPE/iX
9. Freedom to re-license your own copy of MPE/iX during a sale of an 3000

Those last two items might seem like real BB-Guns. But I think they have a chance of helping the community see the 3000 more clearly, instead of putting its eye out.

First off, a guaranteed ending date for HP 3000 support is something that both homesteaders and migration experts desire. By moving the finish line twice now, HP keeps customers from finishing migrations, or even starting them, according to migration partners.

What's more, the "we're not sure when support is really done" message keeps the 3000's service and support aftermarket in limbo. Customers tell us that they will be using their HP 3000 systems until their business demands they migrate away. HP plans to change its business practices someday for the HP 3000. But nobody knows for certain what day that will be.

That brings us to No. 9, the freedom to re-license your own MPE/iX. Development on this software ends in one year. That's the end of changes to the operating environment, the genuine Freeze Line for the 3000. The only thing to protect with a Right To Use License during 2009 will be HP support contracts. It seems HP should be able to compete on a level field with the rest of the community. HP Services seems to need those special 3000 licenses.

Number 10? A wish for a long life and continued interest in MPE/iX from the HP 3000 gurus of the community, whether inside HP or outside. There's nobody to bring any of these gifts if nobody cares inside of Hewlett Packard about your community.

PDF news for perusal, or pursuing the past

While we lean our ear onto the rail to listen for news in this quiet holiday season, it seemed time to point out some online resources we've put into place to read print editions of The 3000 NewsWire. Issues are available both new (November 2007's print) and a few old ones as well.

Late last month we posted our full print issue for November, a new feature of the NewsWire as we entered our 13th year of listening and reporting. PDF is hardly a new technology, which actually makes it a good choice for a community like ours, so focused on reliable solutions. Since the issue includes our sponsors' ads, we advise that you use a broadband link to download the latest, since it's about 20 MB — with resolution enough so you can print a custom copy with pages for your own issue.

We are continuing to print and mail our quarterly issues, just so nobody in the community gets confused. This is extra exposure. PDF technology lets us push these printed pages even farther than postal delivery — just like this blog puts the news online faster than our old printed and Online Extras ever could.

We'll be back with more news to report for tomorrow. But ah, it's already the eve of what much of the world will consider a five-day holiday around Christmas. Or at least four, if you're finishing up projects tomorrow.

Today we also moved the location of the 2005 issues of our FlashPaper, the hot-news rundown we wrote and printed for 10 years, inserted just before our mailing date. There's nothing new in these documents, but keeping track of promises and plans more than two years later might be worthwhile for the advocates of the system's HP end-game.

The FlashPaper PDF are easy to track down, but we won't add more to that archive just yet. You can click on the links below to peruse stories already considered historic, in some quarters, about the story of the HP 3000. (These are modest little files that download in a blink, fast as the Flash, since it was only a two-page roundup.)

January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005

A Vegas date to save for '08

There's no Web site up for details, and the invitations have not gone out in the mails, but Encompass has already settled on a site for the user group's annual HP Technology Forum. Don't change your travel plans from last year — the conference song remains the same, venue-wise, and so will not be leaving Las Vegas.

Encompass user group president Nina Buik said in an interview this year that Vegas has plenty of "curb appeal" as a user group meeting destination. She did not say that the city is a major upgrade from Houston's curb, the last venue the Forum used other than Vegas.

But we'll say it, with no disrespect to Houston. People just don't say, "Hey, I'm headed out to a weekend in Houston!" Or if they do, it doesn't get the same response as "Let's hit Vegas for a weekend." Here at the NewsWire it was a short hop from Austin to Houston. Proximity is not curb appeal, however.

So what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, at least for 2008. The Forum is scheduled for June 16-19, 2008, the same dates as HP's Software Universe conference. While the two shows are separated by one mile of the Las Vegas strip, keeping the conference in Vegas looks like coupling up the user's meeting in a permanent way with HP's other customer and partner events.

HP's Universe doesn't have a user group attached to its content, but HP rolls out plenty of executives and demonstrations and 240 sessions, according to a summary from last year. Not that it matters too much, but this will be the first HP user conference since the Interex era of 1972-2005 where the meeting is no longer a movable feast, but instead stays put.

There are advantages to gathering in a familiar place. The Forum is even remaining at the same resort hotel, the Mandalay Bay, so the long winding walks from rooms toward talks will be less circuitous. I stayed at the Luxor last year, which looked like a nearby choice but turned out to be a quarter-mile away on foot — and only one stop away on the free inter-casino monorail.

Last year HP's Storageworks was also held in the Mandalay, so I'd be surprised to see it announced for anyplace else. The arrangement does make for a concentrated week of networking, especially for any HP 3000 shops moving into a final approach for a Unix or Windows landing.

Perhaps Encompass felt lucky in Vegas last year, or found it hit the jackpot on customer compliments for a mid-summer desert conference. Mom will be pleased, on my account. She's been retired in Vegas for more than 17 years, so I'll have a conference of another kind to precede the meeting with users and HP.

HP leads Cognos into extra support year

Early in September of 2007, Cognos announced it would support PowerHouse products in "Mature Platform Extended Support" beyond HP's then-announced 2008 date. Cognos was extending out to the end of 2009 with its mature support, but ending development support about 12 months from now.

Then HP released word of its own Mature Product Support without Sustaining Engineering for the 3000. Cognos has since updated its own support plans to match HP's timeline, according to the latest PowerHouse roadmap. Product manager Bob Deskin left word on the Internet forums about the changed (PDF) roadmap.

I have just posted an update to our Roadmap at powerhouse.cognos.com containing Cognos' commitment to Mature Platform Extended Support for PowerHouse on MPE/iX until December 31, 2010.

And so two of the largest providers of HP 3000 services leap together to the end of this decade with their plans to collect support revenues from MPE/iX customers.

A skeptic might say that the Cognos announcement was simply an extension of revenues, instead of help for customers who might have been left holding the bag on PowerHouse application support during 2010. Indeed, the development future for the product looks sketchy, what with IBM purchasing Cognos for the latter's Business Intelligence products, rather than the small group of the Cognos Application Development Tools operation.

But application viability sparks migrations more often than the functionality of the hardware or operating environment. One extra year to migrate away from PowerHouse, knowing some sort of lab-level support is online, might aid smaller companies who need more time to switch away from their HP 3000s. Customers need application support extended like this from third parties, as well as HP, to make a viable 2009 and 2010 operation — or rely on third party experts such as Pivital Solutions or id Enterprises for MPE and PowerHouse advice, respectively.

HP liberates some 3000 patches

Customers of all types, self-supporting and third-party supported, as well as those with HP support can now download new HP 3000 patches. Well, not exactly new, but tested long enough to gain the HP support labs' elusive General Release status.

An HP advisory has outlined a raft of patches which HP labeled as Recommended fixes for HP 3000s running MPE/iX 7.5, 7.0 and 6.5. The patches can be downloaded from the HP IT Response Center Web site by any customer running an HP 3000. According to HP support, a Recommended patch

should be applied at your earliest convenience. There is potential for sub-optimal performance, lock-ups or unwanted  shutdowns. This will protect your system from a serious, but not  unrecoverable failure.

More than a dozen such patches were identified as General Release fixes in an HP patch advisory from last week. None bring extra functionality to the HP 3000 customer, unless you count 7.0 patch MPEMXQ3B, which HP described as "Enhancement: Load PDC [Processor Dependent Code] into main memory on A- and N-Class systems." The patch is a fix for a problem which has much more serious consequence — a panic — on HP's Unix systems, according to HP's notes.

The advantage of this patch seems to be giving diagnostics software better performance. HP's details on the "enhancement" patch, from the HP Web page

Intermittent small system freezes and system software clock slips happen on multiprocessor A- and N-Class systems. The clock slips are not gradual, they happen in steps of several seconds each.

The clock slips occur when a CPU that tries to load and run PDC code from NVRAM has to block on a condition where the system bus is too busy. Loading (copying) the PDC code from NVRAM (EEPROM) into normal memory will avoid any blocking for PDC code and will also make its execution significantly faster. 

MPE code using PDC calls (mainly diagnostics) will see increased performance.

This is a solution borrowed from HP-UX where similar issues were seen with A-, L- and N-Classes. Unlike the HP-UX code though, MPE will not ‘panic’ if it cannot relocate the PDC.  MPE will fallback to execute PDC from NVRAM instead (just like without this patch).

HP explains that the patch applies the enhancement by reducing the amount of memory available for the OS and applications by 2MB.

Of such specific repairs and minute enhancements are the General Releases of 2007 made. Other patches now in GR, most to avoid System Aborts (SA):

MPENX08A - SA0 attempting to boost the priority of a completed disk I/O

MPEMXU5C - FSCHECK error header record main_rec count did not match actual count

MPEMXP3C - SA614 when POSIX app writes past limit of fixed-length record file

MPEMXC7C - SA 0 With An Invalid Virtual Address

MPEMX59B - Workaround For OCT Cornercase Involving SCANFMVAT CM Code

MPELXY8B - SA1350 during termination of a process with DEBUG breakpoints set

MPELXJ7C - Data Loss When Using TAR with MPE fixed ASCII Files

MPEMXW2A - SA5414 while running FCSCAN in a loop

MPEMXM7A - DAT fails to open Disc to Disc dump when limit is a multiple of 4096MB

MPELXT1D - Network Spooler: 2 fixes for PJL syntax errors, NMS 9621

INTHDH4A - General Fixes for Internet Services Products (such as INETD and REMSH) on MPE/iX 7.5

INTHD63A - General Fixes for Internet Services Products on MPE/iX 7.0

HP has moved some patches for the 3000 into General Release at a much faster clip, when the potential for data corruption loomed, even for just a few customers. While many sites will leave this list of patches alone, some might be a repair for a system which must continue to carry mission critical data for an indefinite future of homesteading.

Even with the GRs for patches announced in one massive e-mail notice, however, dozens more remain quarantined in beta test status. Genuine advances such as the brand-new SCSI Pass Through driver need to be implemented and tested by HP support customers — the only ones who can use a BT patch.