3000 emulator speeds up, links up

Although the Charon HPA/3000 software-hardware bundle is still several months away from selling as a customer-installed emulator, the product is taking steps forward with both engineering and compatibility. Reports have been emerging about third-party essentials starting to run with the Stromasys product which will bring MPE/iX to the Intel Xeon hardware.

The hardware was the lead item in a brief status update we received today from the Stromasys CTO Robert Boers. The Intel i7 is already doing the job of achieving performance equal to the original A-Class 3000 hardware.

We are moving faster than expected.We now run MPE on our core i7 Charon-HPA system at or above the execution speed on A400-100-110 hardware. Installations are updated this week. Experience shows :-)

Meanwhile, another 3000 software vendor checked in to report on compatibility with the emulator. We'd already heard that Robelle's Suprtool has been run successfully on the HPA/3000. Not long ago, Minisoft's Doug Greenup said his company's software, used to link the 3000 with databases, has been tested against the solution. "Our products worked like they were interacting with an HP 3000," he said. "So if any of our customers deploy Stromasys, we are confident our MPE products will work."

EchoTech's Craig Lalley, who demoed the product at the HP3000 Reunion, gave Minisoft access to the Stromasys emulator to test some of what Greenup calls "our legacy MPE products. The HP terminal emulators under Windows and Macintosh worked fine connecting up via Telnet. We ran some VPlus screens with no problems. Connections were reliable and fast. We also tested our ODBC, JDBC, AND OLE DB middleware drivers and connected and ran queries."