HP's 3000 legacy includes A, N-Class details

In our recent report on the seventh anniversary of HP's 3000 exit notice, we referred to a shining moment for the community. We captured the first-ever introduction of A-Class and N-Class HP 3000s on February 7, 2001. Although HP introduced its final generation of 3000s over and over for the next six months, that spring morning showed off the new design in extensive detail.

Product Manager Dave Snow is introduced by General Manager Winston Prather at the e3000 Solutions Symposium in our video, waltzing down the meeting room's aisle with an A-Class server under his arm. He's borrowed one of the few that were testing-ready that day from HP's MPE/iX labs. In a separate movie of 5 minutes, Snow leads a tour of the advantages the new design still offers over the 9x9 and 99x 3000s. HP pulled the covers and cabinet doors off to show internal hardware design.

HP hasn't manufactured these N- and A-Class models for more than six years, but they remain popular among community members who need to upgrade 3000s. They were built to a standard of reliability and durability that gives the computers a longer lifespan than many business servers. It's not easy to find this video's level of configuration detail here in 2009, even while the servers continue to be bought and sold

Snow discusses the length of that 3000 lifespan as he starts his advantages tour. The term of useful service of an HP 3000 gave customers an advantage in the short term -- but some say that that same service level contributed to HP's departure from your community.

Snow points to a missing future to start his tour. During his introduction he notes that "we do have a future beyond today's A- and N-Class server, in large part because we have a lot to talk about today." At least at the moment of the computer's introduction, HP seems to be intent on driving forward its 3000 business with technology advances. It was about to start reaping the years of technical work sowed to bring a 28-year-old server into the most current business server design.

3000s didn't wear out or fall so far behind computing needs as soon as other HP solutions. Useful life could easily be 10 years, a rate of churn that didn't fit with HP's new business model during 2001.

Many of the improvements in this ultimate HP 3000 came at the MFIO and processor board level. The servers used networking and peripheral support that provided speed and value that the server never had before 2001. The advantage tour video was shown to a room of 100 developers, 3000 partners and customers. HP hadn't changed the 3000 this much since its PA-RISC rollouts of the late 1980s.

There were to be even more striking changes to a 3000 customer's solutions and future about nine months away from that 2001 morning. By some estimates, judging from the first customer ship dates, these servers had only six months to contribute to division revenues before HP pulled its 3000 plug. No one can be certain how they might have succeeded for a customer base running 3000s 8-10 years old, systems hungry for power and cooling and falling short of CPU needs.

But those same distinctions matter today, even after more than eight years, to community members who need an upgrade before they finish using their 3000s. HP will finish its 3000 business before commerce ends around the A- and N-Class. Waiting for all these years to acquire one delivers a massive discount by now, in addition to the technical advantages.

Living a Long Afterlife

Eight years ago this week, your community lay in a state of shock. Some vendors were not surprised that HP announced the end of its HP 3000 business, but an overwhelming majority of customers and suppliers found themselves caught off guard. The approach of the 3000's afterlife began on Nov. 14, 2001. Like the horizon, of course, the complete exit of 3000 customers has remained out in the distance.

HP continues to find itself surprised at the pace of migration. Alvina Nishimoto, one of the few HP employees left who can help out with 3000-specific issues of moving to HP's alternatives, said as much during the roundtable discussion of this fall's e3000 Community Meet.

It's very quiet on the 3000 front at HP, she explained. But when asked what the surprises have been during the Year No. 8 of the 3000 Transition, Nishimoto said the unexpected continues to surface.

"They're migrating late, which is kind of surprising,” she said. “We have 9x7 customers coming out of the woodwork,” a data point that would seem to suggest more than 1,000 customers continue to use a 3000, because the 9x7s were first shipped 15 years ago. That's been a busy 15 years, since more than half of it has comprised The Afterlife.

We don't let this anniversary pass without reminding our community that HP predicted its demise with astounding inaccuracy. At first 80 percent of you would be migrated off 3000s by 2004. Then came revisions that put 25 percent of the community on the server at 2006, two years later with a larger group. "Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated," homesteaders quipped. HP didn't even have a term for the customers who would stay put, long-term or intermediate. We provided that homesteader title, which HP eventually started to use. It had to; the majority of its customers were not migrated three years out from the end of 2001.

But the reality is that a very large portion of the customer base of 2001 is now using other platforms.

There was always migration underway before The Afterlife began. HP 3000 customer attrition started in the early 1990s, and some in the community peg the highwater mark for customer base in the late 1980s. HP tried to grow back customers in the late '90s with long-overdue enhancements to networking and Internet features. But the very event which postponed migrations, Y2K, also worked to stall HP's drive toward faster and better-connected systems. What HP called the N-Class and A-Class servers only made their debut six months before the vendor pulled its 3000 plug into the future. HP promised these servers for the year 2000.

That lab-based delay came out of unit managed by Winston Prather while the work started in the late 1990s. The same HP employee moved into the general manager post for the 3000 division, shaping the headcount, as the labs were forced to extend the deadline to a year beyond division estimates. It's little wonder why HP 3000 sales came to a standstill after Y2K. Customers were waiting on a promised product better than those 9x7s. It was time to upgrade, but the new generation was overdue.

Once HP announced it would exit your community, those 9x7 owners couldn't justify buying N-Class and A-Class servers. So that glorious day in the spring of 2001 when Platform Product Manager Dave Snow marched down the aisle at the Solutions Symposium with the first A-Class server -- a marvel of reduced size with increased power and efficiency -- didn't arrive soon enough.

HP was doing its own migration to deliver the final generation of 3000s. The PCI peripherals bus, already running and selling HP 9000s for more than a year, proved to be a complex transfer to the 3000. Some have pointed at the differences between IO handing in Unix and MPE/iX to explain the delays. More likely culprits were two elements that were too numerous and too few. HP 3000s supported a wide array of peripherals, since the HP 3000 credo was "leave no customer behind."

At the same time the HP 3000 lab headcount was being squeezed too small to manage both Y2K repairs and tests to MPE/iX, as well as hardware development projects for the PCI servers. Add those elements during an era when HP's CEO was mandating revenue growth as a way to stick to the HP product line, and you get a formula which delivered a late upgrade, which stalled sales and kept the 3000 from growing. The same manager whose lab direction had to juggle two major projects got to pull the plug on the 3000. Winston Prather has always said he made the call to cull out the 3000. It might be one of the few times when a GM at HP erased his own division.

Prather engineered a safe landing for himself and some of the engineers and managers of the group. As for his customers, many were not so lucky. Having spent their careers polishing their HP 3000 expertise, system managers and programmers suddenly got motivated to learn technology on other platforms. They would compete for these jobs against younger and less-costly technologists. The lucky ones retooled themselves. Few community members can point at a career that didn't take a hit in November of 2001.

Companies like HP don't step away from 28-year-old businesses very often. Your community's contribution to HP's knowledge about ending business relationship is worthwhile for a vendor who will nurture in-house technologies. Except that HP doesn't appear to be in that kind of business anymore for computing, given developments like buying its competition in networking with an acquisition of 3com. One day the HP-UX customers will suffer a day like Nov. 14, and HP will be more prepared than it was eight years ago. The community of 3000 customers was always teaching HP something until the day the vendor pulled its plug. Learning how to estimate the pace and impact of churn and change -- those are HP's lessons that entitle you to help and accommodation from the creator of the 3000.

HP's history becomes a phenomenon

The company which created the HP 3000 is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Perhaps it's the coincidence of a zero-numbered commemoration, but history that relates to the 3000 seems to be in the air this week. Most of it represents snapshots of an era we'll never return to, and some community members are thankful for the departure. But what's been left behind could be much more valuable than histories and manuals.

Today Forbes has an early review of the first book by a retired HP executive, Chuck House, who knew and worked with the HP 3000 business. The HP Phenomenon earned praise from a reviewer who's written his own HP book, George Anders. But the reviewer of Phenomenon wrote a more upbeat take on HP's changes than House's clear-eyed memories. Anders wrote the Carly Fiorina saga Perfect Enough, a kinder view of the changes that CEO inflicted on the HP which House remembers.

House still reveres the HP of the Sixties through the 1980s, just like the 3000 community venerates the MPE Software Pocket Guides of the 1970s and '80s. A current thread on the 3000 newsgroup has floated into memory lane about that era of the 3000. Like the guide itself -- and the HP computer management which House admires in his book -- the world has changed enough to make its best days appear to be behind it.

There's no doubt that the pocket guides are a token of the past. I was lucky to receive one that had been in the trenches, obviously well used and well-loved. Alfredo Rego passed on his MPE III guide once the OS started to move out of MPE V territory. But like the community members who now recall how vital a tool the book once was, Alfredo wrote a note in his guide's cover in 1987.

This little MPE III pocket guide is as valid today as it was in 1978. As a matter of fact, I used this guide today to change THE bit that made Adager run on the HP3000 Series 930.

As that summer of 1987 wrapped up, the Series 930 was the test-pilot aircraft of the overdue PA-RISC fleet. Only a handful were ever shipped, and HP replaced every one for free with the more capable Series 950.

By the time my MPE III guide was in heavy use, the community had another wizard, this one a wunderkind revered by veterans and novices alike. Eugene Volokh co-created the MPEX utility along with his dad Vladimir. House was on the scene at HP in those times. House was also part of the HP 3000 history seminar from last summer. Steve Cooper, who founded Allegro Consultants with Stan Sieler in that era, chronicled the Eugene legend in this video from the meeting.

The story includes a note from Sieler about the novelty of the concept of a super-MPE with wildcarding capability. One engineer in the 3000 group, Walt McCullough, engineered a similar concept. But HP wasn't focused in 1980 on incremental technology that could become so vital as MPEX, Sieler explains

House was working on his book during the summer of that seminar; the book is only available today through Stanford University Press, and the Amazon UK Web site. But there are excerpts from the book available through House's blog. In one blog entry, he takes a break from his memoirs of the Bill & Dave HP era to note how much change has occurred in the boardroom of the modern HP.

In an entry titled Whither HP Now? House explains why he believes HP has made a habit of under-investing in creating technology.

HP, after spending 9% of revenues for 60 years, almost like clockwork, cut that to 6% under [CEO] Lew Platt's regime, and from the midpoint of Carly's time until now, it has been reduced by a cool 0.5% per year, until now it is only 3% of revenues, one-half of IBM's investments in its future. To cut R&D by two-thirds, to rework HP Labs to the point of only pursuing work that the divisions will market or that universities will support (huh, say that again?), is to sell out the future. Period.

One might confidently predict that the constant wellspring of "renewal" -- so long the hallmark of HP -- is running dry. The acquisitions had better work.

There is an HP which still lives at many HP 3000-using companies: the vendor who will supply replacement systems and environments as migration targets. Two paths can be followed: one toward technology in which HP continues to invest, HP-UX. The other path is away from software innovation and toward standards, following Windows or Linux advances. An HP which couldn't imagine why they'd need a Pocket Guide for any product will exist in the future. But looking to the past won't clear the crystal ball to reveal when that "day of the dry well" arrives for HP. A customer who invests in HP's future needs to see smaller, more nimble tech companies continue to join and create the Hewlett-Packard phenomenon.

For the customer who's always wondered what the inside of the HP Garage looks like, the workplace of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is on display over the Web. A video tour, led by HP archivist Anna Mancini, is online -- so you can see the head of that wellspring. At what the industry calls the Birthplace of Silicon valley, the garage restored by HP shows the era of HP's phenomenon when R&D was all the company could offer.

Itanium: Failing HP-UX futures, or more?

We take it on faith today that Intel produces most of the world's popular processors. Even Apple, once a Motorola and IBM POWER stronghold, now uses Intel chips in Macs. But the HP 3000 never got a real chance at having Intel Inside. Now that 3000 emulators are in the works and testing soon, it looks like skipping over Intel's Itanium might be a good thing for MPE/iX users.

This might come as heresy to the 3000 advocates who lobbied HP long and hard for a shot at 64-bit processing, the Valhalla of the journey via Itanium. But look at what HP-UX customers got for their waiting -- including the 3000 sites that migrated sooner than later -- and you can wonder if the delays were worth it. The 3000, and MPE/iX apps, are now more likely to find a future on an mainstream Intel chip.

This matters now, in the gray time of HP's Unix system migration. PA-RISC is old tech, but it's running a large share of the migrated 3000 sites. The Itanium failure to dominate relegated HP-UX to a niche market, a place HP couldn't imagine setting up shop. The 3000 was supposed to be the small market, even if HP didn't say so while Itanium was so new it was called Merced.

Since Hewlett-Packard plowed its engineering into Itanium, HP's Unix customers cannot host their applications on a standard computer, something HP sells very well (think ProLiants, and Linux or Windows). These Industry Standard Servers, as HP calls them, are so strong that HP is thinking of folding its printer business into a combined PC-printer organization. This would offer little help to HP-UX customers. The merger is supposed to jump-start HP's printer sales.

Back in the 90s, HP trumpeted vast plans for the chip that now represents the Only Home for HP's Unix. Then the market had its say. One PC columnist, whose last name is the same as a failed keyboard layout, asserts that Itanium hobbled more than HP-UX options, since it failed to live up to its promise. John Dvorak says the chip killed the computer industry.

Now Dvorak has been a splashy computer writer for a long time, which can boost a fella's readership nicely. (It helps to be published by PC Magazine, which recently dropped printing altogether to retreat to the Web.) Dvorak told his version of Itanium history this year as a cautionary tale. He reminded us that promises of world domination by any technology should be viewed as fables until the future arrives.

His column does a good job of summarizing the hubris of Itanium, nee-Merced-nee-Tahoe, a flight plan HP cooked up in its top-notch Labs but had to take on Intel as a co-pilot in order to fly. The flight of Itanium was as anticipated as any Spruce Goose test run. HP told all of its customers to expect all other chip architectures to evaporate. Who could take on the industry clout of Intel and the brainpower of HP's Very Long Instruction Word designs? And so by degrees we lost the Alpha, the SPARC, and more. Computers made by Dell, IBM and Sun would be powered with chips created by HP and Intel.

I've covered Itanium since these two companies were calling their joint project Tahoe in 1994, then naming the chip architecture Merced in '95. By '96, the 3000 community was eager to learn what Hewlett-Packard would decide about including the HP 3000 in the world domination party. Early in '97, the 3000 customers were told, in a special TV teleconference, that they weren't invited to the 64-bit party.

PA-RISC, said HP in 1997, provided plenty of processor for the 3000s future. As it turned out, HP sold PA-RISC to all of its MPE and Unix customers for another 6-11 years. We wrote in 1997:

[HP] indicates a long lifespan for the 64-bit processor that now powers the 3000. Remember, Merced still isn't a tested solution anywhere, and few expect it to be available before 1999 in HP's processors. What's more, HP still hasn't shipped PA-8200 chips in either HP 9000 or HP 3000 systems. There's a lot of PA-RISC lifetime still left to live.

Only in 2007 did the number of HP-UX servers sold for Itanium/Integrity pass the sales of PA-RISC computers. HP stopped selling PA-RISC last year, 14 years after it crowed about Itanium ruling the marketplace.

Dvorak says that the high-water mark of the computer industry was 2000, and he adds that Itanium pulled the business into the basement in the years since then. It doesn't look like he's accounting for the Y2K swell that put your community at its crest. But he's right about one thing: The chip that hosts the future of HP-UX, the one that will give those users processor headroom for years to come, never came close to the $38 billion it was supposed to earn way back in 2001.

HP and Intel were late, over and over, in delivering something to beat PA-RISC. Hewlett-Packard was hoping for a repeat of the miracle of MPE. HP rolled out PA-RISC in 1987 and the 3000 apps written for 16-bit CISC processors ran in Emulation Mode on the new chips. That's why an emulator for the 3000 hardware will have traction and generate sales for a company that makes it available. Emulators have a good track record with 3000 enterprise customers.

What better not happen: A series of big promises and Itanium-like delays for these hardware emulators. That's why nobody, not Stromasys or Strobe Data or anybody, is promising when the emulator solution will be ready. It's worse to miss a milestone than to release no schedule. People budget for products months and years in advance. Changing your mind is often expensive, and IT expenses remain on many chopping blocks.

Itanium has carved a niche for some apps, so it's not an utter failure. It provides the fastest engine for HP-UX, although there's no chip even racing in second place. No amount of cheery industry measurements can pull the only current HP-UX processor into the mainstream market. Such a market is important to a future without costly changes. HP 3000 owners have learned that business practice from Hewlett-Packard. Sales and market share make at difference at HP. Perhaps any project to emulate PA-RISC on industry standard Intel chips will have an even bigger set of customers: HP-UX sites looking for a longer future for their PA-RISC investments.

Our 3000 reports move into a 15th year

The 3000 NewsWire celebrates its birthday today, tying a bow on 14 years of publishing which began in 1995. In the fall of that year my partner Abby and I began our delicious journey through your community, one that remains without an end in sight. While we move into our 15th year, I remember some in the community wondered how we'd find anything to publish in Issue 2.

The NewsWire's pages, both printed and those we flung onto the fledgling World Wide Web, had to prove the concept of a 3000-only publication. We promoted the platform by highlighting the changes to its solutions. HP was already calling the HP 3000 a "legacy" system during 1995, even while people in the 3000 division worked to bring the platform up to date.

In October of 1995, HP was just starting to embrace the idea of serving small customers with the 3000's fastest technology. We called the Series 9x9 servers Kittyhawks in our Page One article, using HP's code name. (Click on the image above to read that front page.) System configurations were a major part of a 3000 customer's duty in that day, so we reported HP was finally adding an 8-user MPE/iX license to the entry model of the 9x9 line. HP said you could get the latest generation 3000 at under $50,000, we reported with an asterisk,"before disks, console and networking cards are added." Most customers needed to add one or more of these elements, but HP was still trying to improve the image of the 3000's value.

Another kind of image was important in that first issue, the 3000 database of the same name. We launched our first at-deadline issue of the FlashPaper with a report on the new leader of the IMAGE/SQL lab, Tien-You Chen. The vendor community was pleased with the move, since it looked like the database group was getting a leader devoted to results rather than policy.

Chen has a can-do style. In a meeting with several partners over TurboStore integration, someone in the meeting suggested that “an HP file system engineer would really help us here.” Chen excused himself, got up and came back with the engineer.

Of course, much of what seemed novel and important 14 years ago has aged into history. We looked over the first issue's story lineup to see that top HP executives (like CEO Lew Platt) were still praising the platform in public, when pressed. HP could show a wrinkled side of its image to the 3000 faithful, too: 3000 division executives made a show of taking off their jackets en masse at an Interex conference roundtable. Although roundtables and HP executive comments on the 3000 have evaporated, our first issue carried news that resonates in today's community. A powerful object-oriented compiler was being launched, C++, "which promised better products sooner" for the 3000. It remains a key tool to keep the 3000's future smooth, no matter how long you've decided to remain on the computer's path.

HP once operated a repository for the 3000 version of GNU C++ source, hosted on the Invent3k public development server. But when HP closed down Invent3k almost a year ago, the compiler had to find a public home. OpenMPE will include the compiler on its invent3k.openmpe.org resource, opening later this month.

This open source tool will be needed to keep the more modern ports to the 3000 up to date in years to come. It's so essential, said our columnist John Burke, that

Without Mark Klein’s initial porting of and continued attention to the GNU C++ compiler and utilities on the HP 3000, there would be no Apache/iX, syslog/iX, sendmail/iX, bind/iX, etc. from Mark Bixby, and no Samba/iX from Lars Appel. And the HP 3000 would still be trying to hang on for dear life, rather than being a player in the new e-commerce arena.

And our first issue covered a new HP initiative to spark integration in the manufacturing sector, carried out by six North American partners.

The integrators will offer customers one of three strategies to assist them in examining their information infrastructure, with the goal of implementing Customer Oriented Manufacturing Management (COMMS systems):
    1. To retain systems while expanding use of software features and increasing processing power using strategies such as COMMS;
    2. To supplement systems such as MRP II with more comprehensive software on current computer platforms or additional environments; or
    3. To migrate manufacturing systems to newer “Choices Approved” software solutions such as Ross Systems' Renaissance CS or  Spectrum's PointMan.

So even while the first NewsWire was hitting the mailboxes of October, 1995, this newsletter was acknowledging that migration was one choice in moving ahead. Something else hasn't changed since that month. One of those six partners remains vital in the 3000 community: the Support Group, inc.

Like a lot of your world, tSGi is concerned with continuity. Today the company's president David Floyd, son of the founder Terry Floyd, celebrates his birthday while tSGi leads customers into both homestead and migration futures. We're happy to share a birthday with him, while we work toward "many happy returns of the day." Thank you for reading us for 14 years, and for the support of our partners and sponsors into another generation, starting with today.

'84 computing recalls conventions of 3000s

Editor's note: In late summer of 1984 I started my career covering the HP 3000 marketplace. To help commemorate those 25 years, I asked more than a score of community members from that era to recall what their 3000 careers looked like back then. This is the second part of their reports.

Jason Goertz, HP support engineer, Orbit Software developer, Chronicle columnist, consultant and HP engineer - I remember Vesoft's Eugene Volokh speaking at the Interex conference in Anaheim, a newly minted UCLA graduate at age 16. I remember going to a talk about the latest COBOL standard. I also remember going to Eugene's talk and realizing that he could barely drive but had graduated with a degree. I left HP in May and started my job at Generra Sportswear as Manager of IS. Around that time the Response Centers were going into operation. As I was leaving HP, there was talk of this, and people started to go down to California to work a shift there, and the regional PICS phone support centers like the one we had in Bellevue, Washington were being shut down.

    The Series 64/68 was out at this time, as we had one when I went to Generra in 1984. I remember a problem that we were having at this time. The microcode was loaded at boot time (unlike any other machine up to that point) into fast memory. There was a class problem with the machine that every so often, at a totally random interval, the microcode memory would glitch and bring down the system. They finally figured out that it was some sort of background cosmic radiation that interacted with the molecules of the memory, and caused effectively a parity error. HP never solved the problem, as by that time they were working on PA-RISC (which of course had no microcode) and that attrition would solve the problem.

Jeanette and Ken Nutsford, consultants and developers, software resellers, Interex SIG chair volunteers - 1984 was a year of continued great fortune in working with the HP 3000 and enjoying the comradeship of so many wonderful HP 3000 users and HP 3000 staff. We were running a Timesharing Bureau in Auckland, New Zealand on an HP 3000 Series 33 (configured as a desk) with a number of charities as clients. We had written a software package for Fundraising and Direct Mail Marketing for Charities, using COBOL and IMAGE, and were the total DP staff for a number of charities.

    In February we flew to the US to attend the Anaheim HP 3000 Users Conference. This was the fourth Interex conference we had attended, with the first being in 1980. We especially remember that this was the last time we saw [SuperGroup founder] David Brown before he disappeared. He used to run a toll-free call center using HP3000s in Ogden, Utah.

Ken Sletten, SIG-IMAGE chair, developer for US Navy, OpenMPE director - I ordered one of the first HP 3000s at what is now the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division Keyport. It was a Series 42 and we thought we were really getting a powerful machine, because we ordered it with 2 MB of memory (he says sitting at his MSI laptop with 2,000 times more memory), and two of the old 404MB Model 7933 ''washing machine'' disc drives (he says as he contemplates the tiny 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro external drive for my laptop, and the mirrored 1TB drives in my new quad-core desktop that I just had custom-built for me).

     In 1984 the consolidated data systems team that I worked on for 23 years took delivery of a Series 58. That was the 3000 that was not a ''desktop'' machine, but rather literally an entire desk in itself. It was ordered with four of the then-brand-new 571MB Model 7937 discs. Since four of these didn't take up much more cubic volume than one of the old 404MB 7933s, we thought this was a big step forward.

     The above was the start of a LONG run for HP e3000s at Keyport. We ran a string of HP 3000 model computers continuously from 1982 all the way up through the early part of 2005, when our production shop data system was successfully ''migrated'' (i.e. completely re-written) off our last PA-RISC box, using C# on MS SQL Server. The 3000 gave us just a couple years short of a quarter century of service.

Mark Klein, independent developer and consultant to HP, manager of the Orbit Software lab team, OpenMPE director - I'd already started consulting full time by 1984 and I know I started writing DBCHANGE for HP around that time. I spent most of 1984 consulting to the database lab and think that was about the time that DBRECOV introduced rollback and start/stop recovery. I had a hand in both those projects based on my work for Abacus Systems doing their database recovery system called Recovery/3000.

    Vision had been canceled by then and the PA-RISC work was under way as I started working on portions of the initial TurboIMAGE CM wrapper (I think it was called something like Onion Skin at the time) around then. I do remember all the excitement in the labs in those days and looked forward to going down there to be part of it. Besides, HP still served donuts and coffee on the house each morning.

Rene Woc, co-founder (with Alfredo Rego) and CEO of Adager - It certainly was a busy and exciting year. Lots of user conferences all over the world, in addition to all the user group meetings in the US. The Anaheim keynote in February was, of course, a great beginning for the year. Alfredo gave talks in many user groups; among them were New York, Cupertino, Vancouver, Ottawa, Exeter, Paris, Innsbruck, and Johannesburg. Also, by 1984, Adager was already an HP-supported product, listed in the Corporate Price List. News of the cancellation of Vision was soon overtaken by the news of the Spectrum Project.

Dave Wilde, HP's 3000 lab manager, e3000 business manager - Having worked with the HP 3000 (and other systems) doing data entry at a department store in Chicago during my high school years in the late '70s, and having used HP calculators and some HP workstations and VLSI design software (PIGLET) at the University of Illinois, I was thrilled to have just graduated and joined HP in June, 1984. I was working at the HP Santa Clara Division on a new IC test system HP was developing. That system was later cancelled, and in 1986 I moved over to HP's ITG group to work on the databases for HP's soon-to-be released first PA-RISC systems (then called Spectrum internally). Those were indeed exciting times in Cupertino, and it was then that I was re-introduced to the HP 3000 that I had worked on during my high school years.

Terry Floyd, ASK Software account rep, independent 3000 application developer, founder of the Support Group inc MANMAN consultancy - In 1984 I felt like HP was doing great as Big Brother, the middle of the glory years. I was working for ASK in Houston and we sold a lot of HP 3000s that year. Compaq was our big account and they were demanding a lot more from MANMAN than any of our other customers. My son David and I won the egg toss at the Compaq annual picnic that year. The only Interex Conference I ever missed, since my 3000 start in 1978, was in Anaheim that year. Life was good.

Shawn Gordon, 3000 software developer, NewsWire columnist - I was 21 at the that time, just graduated from a computer trade school and got my first job on a Series 44 for four months as a temp for a woman who went on maternity leave working for the city of Santa Fe Springs. I was just doing operations and data entry and then started BASIC coding on another Series 44 for an electronics component manufacturer, but also had to do operations. It was a one-man shop. Just before the temp job I worked for Pleion in marketing and they had a Series 44 and we were one of the first Speedware clients. That's also where I first played Adventure on the HP 3000.

Bob Green, Robelle founder - In 1984 The IMAGE/3000 Handbook was published, written by myself, David Greer, Robert Green, Alfredo Rego, Fred White, and Dennis Heidner. Marguirete Russell edited another project that I was working on , so I asked her to take on the Handbook as editor. Turns out it was quite a handful for her, but we got it done in about nine months. Then I turned order fulfillment over to her, since Robelle was busy. While she wasn't really that great at selling books, the book sold itself, and since the price was $50 each and we paid for the printing, she had a nice extra income for the next few years

Industry veterans mark 1984 milestones

Editor's note: In late summer of 1984 I started my career covering the HP 3000 marketplace. To help commemorate those 25 years, I asked more than a score of community members from that era to recall what their 3000 careers looked like back then.

Alan Yeo, ScreenJet founder - In 1984 I had just gone freelance for a contract paying “Great Money” and spent the whole year on a Huge Transact Project. Actually it was the rescue of a Huge Transact Project, one that had taken two elapsed and probably 25 man-years and at that point was about 10 percent working. A couple of us were brought in on contract to turn it around. We did, and we used to joke that we were like a couple of Samurai Coders brought in to Slash and Burn all before us. (I think Richard Chamberlin may have just starred in the hit TV epic Samurai at that time.)

    We were working on a Series 70, configured as the biggest 3000 in our region of the UK (apart from the one at HP itself). We used to have lots of HP SEs in and out to visit -- not because it was broken but just to show it to other customers. That was the year we started hearing rumors of PA-RISC and the new “Spectrum” HP 3000s. It unfortunately took a few more years for them to hit the streets.

    I have lots of good memories of HP SEs from that time. HP employed some of the best people, and a lot of them were a great mix between Hardware Engineers, Software Engineers and Application Engineers. Great people to work with who sort of espoused the HP Way, and really made you want to be associated with HP. Where did they go wrong?

Doug Greenup, Minisoft founder -- In 1984 Minisoft was just one year old. We had just begun marketing our first product, a word processor for the HP 3000 known as Miniword. At that time a lot of HP 3000s only did 2400 baud, so typeahead was pretty important. Users were losing characters because they typed too fast. Typeahead helped to solve that problem. Because the HP 3000 did not have typeahead we had to manufacture a little box that sat between the HP3000 and the terminal we called a “SoftBox.” One of our best moments was when we were able to get 9600 baud on a serial connection.

    Also at that time we were timesharing on an HP 3000 Series III with another company called Western Data. The spinoff of that company became Walker, Richer and Quinn, the makers of Reflection. Marty Quinn came into my office one day complaining that he couldn't develop from home. He had this piece of hardware called an IBM PC. I remember laughing at the thought of making this IBM PC look like an HP2622 block mode terminal. Marty went on to develop PC2622 which became Reflection.

    Minisoft 92 came about in 1986 when a fellow from England named Peter Gofton called me up and wanted to know if we would be interested in marketing his HP Terminal product. We saw the WRQ success and thought there might be an opportunity to sell a less expensive connectivity product. It turns out there was a nice market for a HP terminal emulator for around $95 per copy, the price we sold it at back in 1986. Reflection at the time was about three times the price.

Denys Beauchemin, MIS manager, backup vendor, developer and Interex chairman -- By 1984 I had been working on the HP 3000 for over seven years. I was at Northern Telecom in Montreal with a pair of Series 70. The Spectrum project was announced by HP at the same time as the cancellation of the Vision project, and the Series 70 got an upgrade to keep it viable for a few more years waiting for Spectrum.

Donna (Garverick) Hofmeister, SIGSYSMAN chair, Longs Drug developer/analyst, OpenMPE board director -- By 1984 I was two years out of college and working for the Army, tracking equipment readiness on a 3000. It was replaced by a Series 70, just about as soon as the 70s came out, too.  We were very proud of that system, because at time of delivery we were told it was the biggest 70 ever made.
    Over the years we pushed that box pretty hard. It was very much a case of “if you build [the application] they will come.” We gave weapon system managers on-line access to their data - something they had never had.  And when we started graphing the trend data - oh boy! You'd think we had built a better mouse trap! I was particularly fond of the DSG/3000 decision support graphics application. By the time the Army and I parted ways, I think we had a grand 6GB of disc attached to the system.

Chris Bartram, 3k Associates founder, NewsWire Webmaster - In 1984 I had just taken a fulltime system programming job on the 3000 after deciding to give up on college for a while. My work there inspired me to start 3k a few years later in 1987. That was the year when I bought my first 3000, a 3000/37 Mighty Mouse which cost me about $10,000.

Gilles Schipper, founder of third party support firm GSA, NewsWire columnist -1984 was one year after I left HP and started out on my own. At that time, MPE/VE was starting to be out in full force after HP had just announced the 42 (as well as the 48 and 68). Shortly thereafter, as regular contributor to The Chronicle, I wrote an article entitled “The HP3000 Series 41?” in which I suggested that lots of HP 3000 users were being shortchanged by HP with the Series 40 to 42 “upgrade kit,” because it did not include the necessary CPU board replacement that actually made the upgrade complete.

Guy Smith, Chronicle columnist and founder of Silicon Support Strategies - Wow, where the hell was I in 1984?  Who the hell was I in 1984? I was running a couple of boxes at Canaveral Air Force Station at that time. 16-bits and many megabytes of RAM were considered serious hardware (which my laptop that I'm writing with mocks, smugly superior with its two 64-bit CPUs and 8GB of fast RAM).

    Important at that point in time was the growing number and sophistication of HP Users Groups. The Florida Users Group was particularly vibrant and was a great feeding ground for young and hungry bitheads like me.  They were small, intimate and high powered, allowing me to meet and discuss HP 3000 innards with the likes of David Greer, Vladimir Volokh and other gurus. Interex later became the locus, but regional groups were the launching pads for most of us in 1984. NASA at Kennedy Space Center and neighboring Cape Canaveral Air Force Station had many HP 3000s. I know the concentration of machines and talent there influenced FLORUG.

Jeff Vance, HP developer for MPE, community liaison - In 1984 I was working in the MPE XL (probably really named HPE at the time) lab. It was the year that Spectrum (which became PA-RISC) won the battle over the Vision architecture, and we re-wrote much of the low-level OS to Spectrum, while simply porting the higher level code.
     The “HPE Cookbook,” written by the late Chris Mayo, was “published” May 15, 1984. The table of contents shows: Development Environment Map, CookMOM - How to Build “Hi Mom,” CookHPE, Useful Directories, User Information, Spooling, Customizing Makefiles for HPE, and RDB - The Remote Debugger.

Viewing the IMAGE of Community's Labors

Ed. Note: We're running a series of remembrances from members of the HP 3000 user, vendor and advisor community, each marking the year 1984. Today in the US we mark Labor Day, a holiday that celebrates the earliest efforts to build a working-class labor force. On this day it seems fitting to share the state of the 3000's world in '84, a time when the deepest roots to serve your labor, IMAGE and the tools to wield it, were taking hold.

By Charles Finley

    By 1984 the accepted definition of best computing practices had evolved into using systems that employed interactive terminals and databases. Applications were usually written in languages like COBOL, RPG, PASCAL, PL/I and FORTRAN. In mainframe environments, the most widely used applications were batch, datacenter-oriented applications. For mainframe users, online interactive database-oriented systems were extremely expensive.

    The datacenter structure for these mainframes consisted of developers (programmers and systems analysts), network and database systems programmers, data entry (keypunch) personnel and computer operators. These systems required paid staff in attendance at all times.

   Smaller and medium-sized companies during that time, who would only purchase what IBM offered, were mostly relegated to the IBM System 32 and System 34. which were designed to replicate the kind of capability that was available to mainframe users. However, some IBM customers were using the System/38, which had something like a database and was somewhat more terminal-oriented.

   For medium-sized customers, there was another class of minicomputer such as the HP 3000, Prime, Perkin Elmer, or Data General Eclipse that offered terminal-oriented applications with languages such as COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN and RPG. These were mainframes competitors. However, the HP 3000 was the only one of these systems that included its own database, IMAGE.

  

What the HP 3000 offered, in addition to this built-in database, was a number of tools and utilities and a style of operating that did not require traditional mainframe staff. Compared to the IBM mainframe environment, it also offered a relatively simple means for application development. I came from a mainframe background and noticed that a developer without much experience could develop an online interactive database application, in some cases in maybe as little as one hour. A similar mainframe application would take much longer. Also, to this day I don't believe I have ever met a TurboIMAGE database administrator.

    By 1984, the HP 3000 had been around for long enough that it had an established third-party software community. This included companies such as Cognos, Robelle, Vesoft, Adager and, also importantly, it had attracted applications ISVs such as Smith Gardner Associates (Ecometry), ASK (MANMAN), and more. By 1984 many companies who were formally thought to be only candidates for mainframes - such as State Farm, 3M, Ford Motor Company and Rolm - were using the HP 3000 in very business-effective and cost-effective ways.

    I heard one story in 1984 that illustrates the value and sharing in the community 25 years ago. I overheard it at lunch at a SCRUG conference. One developer was talking about a dog licensing system that he developed for a local Southern California city in one afternoon. He offered to give it to another city. I had been involved in the mainframe development of a CICS/IMS dog licensing system that cost a local city $200,000! The developer described an afternoon when he had no assigned tasks, and he had heard a user request the dog licensing system -- so he just built it in his spare time.

Charles Finley founded HP 3000 reseller ConAm and headed the Southern California Regional User Group (SCRUG) for 3000 users

Quarter-century on, 3000 gurus recall

As part of a celebration of my first 25 years of HP 3000 coverage, we invited community members to talk about what their 1984 experience felt like while working with the 3000. Here's our first installment to show how far the community has evolved -- and what sorts of challenges we've left behind.

User groups plus the press lifted the 3000

By Steve Cooper
Allegro Consultants

    I started my career on the HP 3000 in 1977. At that point, the Series II was mature enough to build “real” systems on, but reliability, performance, and bug-free software were attributes we could still only dream about. Much of our dream did slowly get realized, and by 1984, we reached a point where the HP 3000 family of computers truly represented a viable platform as a general-purpose business computer. Now an actual family of computers, one could select from small to large systems, finding the price-point that one could justify (and afford). Systems that used to only stay up for days were now staying up for months at a time. And, one could build complex business systems in COBOL and Image on top of MPE, and not run into insurmountable bugs.

    But equally important was the emergence of the rest of the infrastructure necessary to confidentially choose that platform for your company. Third party software companies continued to spring up, but now they were showing the strength and perseverance needed to convince companies that they were in it for the long haul. “Maybe we can actually trust this Guatemalan with a privileged-mode program that manipulates databases,” we believed, “and maybe we can trust this Canadian company with an editor that makes the 3000 so easy to use.”

    Of course, an essential part (perhaps THE essential part) of this infrastructure was an active and vital user community. This took shape in two forms: First was the User Group, eventually called Interex, and the affiliated RUGs (Regional Users Groups). Now, kindred spirits could get together and meet face-to-face, to share best practices, horror stories, and programs they had written, to learn about these new third party products, and to present a common front to advocate to HP on the direction we hoped they would take the 3000 and MPE.

Second was the press. The 3000 and its community had reached a point where things that happened here were actually “news” and we had “reporters” reporting on them. And not just snippets in ComputerWorld. We had entire publications devoted to the HP 3000, and journalists like Ron Seybold, reporting the news and sharing their observations on it. These two additions to the community gave a legitimacy and empowerment to the community that can't be underestimated.

   1984 was also the year that Stan Sieler decided to leave HP and join me in forming Allegro Consultants. I wanted to keep doing what we were doing at my old company, even though that company now wanted to go in a new direction. I thought we had an understanding of “things 3000” that would allow us to tune systems around the world, and produce software products that could make the 3000 do things that had it had never done before. We must have done something right; we're still doing it 25 years later.

Generating your Legacy to Improve

NewsWire Editorial

This summer has been a season of celebration for me. I finished my first novel, Viral Times, and I marked 25 years of writing stories about the HP 3000. But between those highlights arrived the sweetest event, our first grandson. Baby Noah Seybold was born into his grandparents' lives on July 19. Noah, a marvel in miniature as elegant as any RISC chip design, is a chip off this old block, a generation I think of as Seybold 3.0. (From the left in the picture, there's Seybold 1.0, Noah, and Seybold 2.0, our son and new father Nick.)

  Noah's beaming dad was not yet two years old when I started making HP my life's career. I might say that journalism has been my life's work, but the tender cries and hummingbird heartbeat of a newborn boy that I heard once again give me perspective. My partner Abby and I -- well, all grandparents -- might see their life's work as generating a legacy, improving one generation at a time.

  Technology is as different in the birthing room as it differs in your computer room, comparing the mid-1980s (Nick's birth) with Noah's 2009 debut. Being born is improved in its integration of family (like your networking), where the whole clan of Noah's mom Elisha's folks and Nick's family could visit the little boy within two hours of his arrival.

    There was the in-room warming table, the more precise monitoring (not an HP instrument anymore), the in-room staff chosen for emotional coaching as well as medical savvy. A midwife and a duola coach brought this boy into our world, with nary a doctor needed (but one on call).

   After our glorious tears on Noah's first afternoon, Abby and I floated back home (a car was involved, I think) to embrace what sparked the pride and joy of the day. We brought up Nick with attention and ardor to hope for this day when a new generation would join us. Our lives have swelled with a new understanding of the word legacy, a word used as an epithet during the years of my career.

   As leaders, creators and devoted humans we all strive to leave a legacy. It must be something of great value if so many pursue it. But as you may know from either grand-parenthood or a life working through change, a legacy must contribute to whatever follows. After 25 years of learning computing, and teaching it through stories, I understand how we build a legacy one bedtime story, program design or midnight support call at a time. Generations grow stronger when they're lifted onto an older shoulder. Older clears a path for newer, which enables the latest.

  The meaning of accomplishments long past can elude any of us, until we grasp the long view. What sounds like Geezer IT Talk -- with fables of punch cards, tiny baud rates, or 11 platters to make up just 74MB of 3000 disc, is one kind of promise from the past to the future. We created those solutions, the veterans say in this issue, and you will solve similar problems too.

    Perhaps as the grandparents of new tech we have some fundamental to pass on for consideration. Abby and I visit the tiny lad in his nursery and relieve his mom, change him with practiced hands. We believe his little cries will subside because we remember our own success with babies. The greatest legacy we can leave, it seems on those days, is the certainty that life will work out alright even when it's an unfamiliar puzzle to be solved.

    Seeing a family into a fresh generation is more profound than carrying computing from into cloud services. Those machines don't have souls or hearts or dreams, except for whatever we vest them with while we grow wiser using them. In time, the technology advances on a pace outside our control, just as independent as any young adult seeking love and adventure through scrapes with trouble and life lessons learned. My generation and yours believes we started the life the world's youth will know. But in truth, we too grew from a legacy left to us from elders loud, stubborn or wise.

    It was that word wise that made my voice shudder and my tears flow on our first afternoon in Noah's nursery. While he cooed and napped and stretched in my arms, I found a cherished story written by Margaret Wise Brown on his shelf. Her book The Runaway Bunny has never been out of print in 67 years, a continuing lifespan as remarkable as the HP 3000s. The story's simple words echoed while I read them to our grandson for the first of many times to come. Words, the fundamentals of any storyteller as well as basic units of data in the earliest 3000s, connect legacy with life or technology just unfolding. Believe in the value of your ability to learn while you practice sharing what you know. Such faith might form the older, steady shoulder that can help newborns grow.

Marking up 25 years of 3000 stories

Editor's Note: This month marks 25 years of my career covering the HP 3000. From a company that posted just $6 billion in sales in 1984 to the juggernaut that now sells that much in less than a month, HP and its customers have been a delight, passion and challenge to chronicle. I'm happy to still call this task a big part of my life's work.

Over the next few Fridays (and a Monday or two) I'll be chronicling the history of 1984 in the 3000 world. I began to report and edit on the HP 3000 in a busy year, when the first office-sized 3000 was unleashed (I got scooped on that Mighty Mouse release), the HP LaserJets first appeared, and HP had to re-start its project to create a 3000 system that could catch up with DEC VAXes.

Now HP owns DEC, the PA-RISC goal of that mission is aged technology, and LaserJets run far behind  InkJet business that generate HP profits in consumables. What has not changed is the dedication to business IT skills that your community holds dear. By seeing what HP 3000 life of 1984 looked like -- as told in forthcoming stories by 3000 veterans -- you can set a bar at a reliable level for future IT environments you choose.

  1984's summer started this young journalist on 3000 road. After a quarter-century covering your community, my 25-year gold watch is getting to keep my job. Since 1984, HP 3000 users have taught me they're not a retiring bunch.

    They've also schooled me on how the computer industry works, starting in a summer when HP's printer and PC business was just growing up while HP 3000 computers were growing smaller than ever. I brought three years of newspaper reporting into the offices of the monthly HP newspaper The Chronicle on Aug. 21 of that year, but I knew nothing about HP computers. A handful of college courses in Pascal, BASIC, Fortran and RPG let earn a computer science minor. IT work was called data processing back then; one course titled “Introduction to DP” filled out my University of Texas degree. To replace the slide rule that I retired along with my designs on an engineering degree, I bought a flowchart template.

   I came to your community at age 27, so my 25 years of reporting and editing in the 3000 world has spanned nearly half my life. The year 1984 was a milestone for me, but it was a watershed for your community as well. No commemoration of my quarter century would be complete without your contributed memories. You've already been generous, but I invite you to reply with even more.

    The year was important for your communication as well your cradles of community. The user group nurtured by customers as well as Hewlett-Packard was changing its name from the International Users Group for HP3000 to Interex. The annual conference was held in Anaheim, Calif. to take advantage of two resources: Hundreds of manufacturing and distribution customers using 3000s in Southern California. And there was Disneyland, too.

    HP sent its first CEO not named Hewlett or Packard to the conference in 1984, and John Young had to tell customers a familiar story about the 3000's future. Improvements were going to be delayed. The plan to boost the 3000's architecture from 16 to 32 bits was being cancelled. The dreams of Vision would be replaced with the Spectrum Project, but HP would paint few technical details in 1984 about the engineering that would launch HP Precision Architecture Reduced Instruction Set Computing (PA-RISC).

   I arrived in the Chronicle offices with those echoes of Anaheim written into the nine back issues on the shelves. Anaheim's show was the debut for Wilson Publications, the company that created the Chronicle. John and Mary Wilson told us stories of their struggle to exhibit at the Anaheim vendor show that spring. It was a modest affair of 1,600 programmers, vendors and HP engineers. But it gathered a community with enough potential to spawn three publications by that year, as Interact Magazine and SuperGroup Magazine competed with us at The Chronicle.

   Coming from community newspapers I was used to competition, but I started my part of that competition by getting scooped. The 3000's biggest product rollout of the year was the Series 37, HP's first minicomputer built to operate outside a specialized computer room. HP called it the HP Office Computer and the users called it the Mighty Mouse. I called out something else when I learned about it. Arriving without any contacts, I didn't know it existed when we sent the latest Chronicle to the printers without an inkling of the 37. Interact arrived in the mail two weeks later to break the news.

    Once I began to find my sources, HP news flowed faster. There was plenty to learn in a year when HP rolled out the InkJet, the LaserJet, its first portable PC, and a Touchscreen PC along with the Mighty Mouse. The 3000 was growing small enough to get into offices without raised flooring and computer room cooling. The hum of secrecy and hope of invention filled that first year. Getting people to talk meant earning their trust around a time of Non-Disclosure Agreements.

   “The mid-80s were a time of transition, endless NDAs and uncertainty in the HP 3000 world,” recalls Denys Beauchemin, a chairman of the Interex board who already had seven years of 3000 experience by 1984. “You got in at a very good time.”

    It was an era where attending a national Interex conference cost less than $100 a day. All eyes were looking toward HP's updates promised for 18 months after Anaheim. HP needed Spectrum desperately to keep pace with DEC, which was already selling a 32-bit minicomputer system.

   HP kept expanding the 3000's mission to help it get traction as a general purpose computer. Jim Sartain, who'd become IMAGE lab manager in the '90s, started at HP that year working on HP 3000 graphics products including EZChart. “At the time, there was no easier way to create a chart that displayed business data represented as a bar, line, or pie chart,” Sartain recalls. “This was before there were any easy-to-use PC programs for this purpose.”

    There would be no 25th anniversary for me to celebrate with you without my 14 years at the NewsWire - and no NewsWire without my partner in life and creativity Abby. Together we're thankful for all the fun and learning that began in the storied year of 1984, a year full of 3000 milestones.

    “There were so many things going on that it's hard to pinpoint individual events,” recalls Adager's Rene Woc. “You certainly started covering the 3000 world at an exciting time.”

Fiorina flips hat toward Senate rack

Align these three compass plot points, if you can, all announced within one week:

1. HP announces its toughest quarter in five years
2. Former CEO Carly Fiorina announces an exploration of a run for US Senate
3. Sentencing is delayed on the '06 HP phone spying case

The HP 3000 can provide a path across all three. Migrations are afoot or finished by 3000 owners because of Fiorina's business strategy. Not any specific swipe she took to cleave the 3000 from HP, but the natural evolution of shedding legacy business. Growth across all HP businesses was the 2001 mantra, increases that the 3000 community would not provide for the HP bottom line. "If it's not growing, it's going" was the mandate handed to intermediate managers.

Growth at HP in 2001 led to pruning the enterprise computer line by one notable system. Eight years later, enterprise servers and storage run a weak fourth to Services, PCs, and Imaging/Printer businesses. Three of the four legs of HP's chair are wobbling this year. It's the first genuine challenge CEO Mark Hurd has faced since he was brought in to replace the fired Fiorina. Enterprise solutions that are rich in profitability offered a profound sticky loyalty like the 3000, but they won't lift enterprise fortunes now. HP's moving away from hardware and proprietary environments in favor of services through The Cloud.

Fiorina told 3000 customers at a summertime HP World conference that HP “had never stranded a customer on legacy technology,” the only reference that even came close to a mention of the HP 3000 customers’ transition. Seven years later, HP World is gone forever, but Fiorina is mounting a comeback despite her legacy.

Despite what some community members believe, Carly Fiorina didn't arrive in the HP boardroom to take marching orders. She was hired to be a star CEO whose highest glam moment was sharing the stage with Gwen Stefani. Facing down the HP board's expectations, and marshaling support across a company rich in HP Way heritage -- these were not her strengths. A seat in the US Senate will require campaigning to win the votes of the little people, as well as casting off old millionaire's habits.

Being rich in 2009 -- HP gave her $21 million cash to leave in '05 -- can distance a candidate from people suffering through layoffs and pay cuts. That's one tough quarter that HP just reported, if you think of the company like 3000 users used to: a systems supplier. If not for the ink and services profits, HP might be looking tanked in the middle of this recession. Legacy systems supply long-term support profits, but the vendor is out of that business. No love for 3000s, little for OpenVMS -- it all adds up to making a business relationship out of serving instead of supplying.

Fiorina had to win boardroom fights to edge HP out of the last vestiges of its HP Way. People forget that she championed a merger with a massive PC maker that eked past a shareholder donnybrook. The next plan was to buy Price WaterhouseCooper, a step into the services business. The HP board didn't want to pay that much for a services entry. That same boardroom asked few questions about eliminating a 27-year-old business server line.

Within a year after the PWC failure, storm clouds were mounting around Fiorina. PCs hadn't delivered profitability, even while HP was selling more ProLiants than RISC servers. When the board fired her over an inability to take direction, the messy details were reported out of the boardroom and into the business press. This kind of insight on HP strategy would have been useful to 3000 owners in the year after Y2K. In trying to determine what HP might do about its declining server business today, insights to the past might help.

HP vowed to unmask the source of leaks from its boardroom after exchanges appeared in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, the kind of communications control craved by corporations of a certain size. HP ran roughshod over privacy rules in a phone scam afterward, paid $14 million in penalties, and gave new CEO Mark Hurd something to campaign on in his first year: The Return of HP Integrity.

No, he wasn't referring to the HP servers of the same name, but instead being able to believe HP could respect privacy. The final defendant in that spying case just had his sentencing delayed again this week, more than two years after Mark Wagner testified against HP.

Weak strategy from HP's CEO, focusing on commodity hardware and services, leads to a boardroom fight that gets Fiorina fired. The HP 3000 never has a chance in that kind of future. Illegal phone spying gives HP a black eye that still isn't fully healed two years later. And while the services business that Fiorina couldn't sell to the board now keeps HP sales afloat, the former CEO wants to represent California in the US Senate. Nothing ever seems impossible to the only HP chief who was ever forced to resign, until her designs hit the wall. While HP 3000 customers explore options to migrate in an era with frozen budgets, Fiorina will be looking for funding to capture her next job. Like HP customers, she'll need support that doesn't hold her legacy against her.

What's Missing This August

Late summertime once signaled face-time in your community, the opportunity to network at an Interex user group conference. The user group has long since folded, in part because it became a pulpit for the people who purchased HP 3000s when HP still sold the system: small and mid-size companies and partners, for the most part. Some voiced displeasure in conference sessions that HP grew to deplore.

Conference sessions today are without contention at HP's meetings. The candor has been replaced with civility, but summertime used to be prized for its hot exchange with the vendor. It's unlikely we'll ever see a civil demonstration like the football-field-sized poster above, unfurled in August, 1996. This month used to be hot in more than climate. HP customers could reclaim this heritage to get action from their vendor.

This part of August has a lot of memory attached to it, something like a 3000 internal drive with most of its sectors filled. With the summertime's quiet now well upon your community, it's easier to hear those echoes of input from customers. During one week of August in 1990, and another 12 years later, 3000 customers spoke their truth to HP's power. The 1990 week marked the turning point for Interex, a shift from communication to advocacy. The 2002 August included a rising tide of protest over HP's decision to exit the 3000 business -- a strategy then nine months old that had to endure its first customer response at Interex's HP World conference in LA.

August of 1990 brought a Interex meeting of the IMAGE Special Interest Group, a session with HP that came to be known as your community's Boston Tea Party. HP had announced its plan to sell 3000s with no IMAGE included to try to capture new customers -- but that plan would orphan 3000 vendors and customers dedicated to 14 years of bundled IMAGE. The Party has been celebrated by some of the system's homesteaders as a victory over unbundling. HP changed its mind about the strategy for 11 years, but ultimately tilted its game table toward Transition. A leading -- and now late -- advocate for the 3000 wanted the system and MPE/iX to roll off HP's plate and into independence in 2002.

Wirt Atmar of AICS Research stood at the center of both August incidents. 1990's Tea Party flowed from two years of despair about enhancing IMAGE, in constant use on more than 50,000 systems at the time. Unbundling IMAGE would have kicked the database into a ghetto, an act that would damage both the third party community as well as customers who relied upon it. Atmar wrote "An Open Letter to HP" and "The World's Oldest Enhancement Request" for The Chronicle and Interact magazine respectively, articles timed to coincide with the Interex Boston conference. He recalled the revolution in a 2002 Internet posting:

These two articles ...  played some significant part in creating the ambience of the Boston Tea Party, an event celebrated in song by Sasha Volokh, the younger brother [of Vesoft's] Eugene Volokh. HP's reaction to the users' demands, from quotes overheard at Boston, was, "We'll rebundle IMAGE over my dead body," and "This is just a bunch of noisy vendors trying to save their own asses." Again, I was surprised by the vitriol and vehemence of HP's reaction.

But the revolt succeeded in getting new management at the HP labs as Jim Sartain took over IMAGE. A renaissance of features followed for IMAGE that protected the installed base, even while HP groped for new 3000 customers. The lack of new sites and slow growth of 3000 customers led to the 2001 HP exit plan. Just in time for the following year's Interex 2002 conference (by now renamed HP World), Atmar was cooking up another evolution for HP's oldest business computing product.

HP ought to part with the 3000 business that it was leaving, he offered. A spin-off division from HP could provide the least amount of operating room. (Atmar even mocked up a logo for the spin-off entity, above). Even more independence for 3000 customers was available if the 3000's operating system could be ruled "abandon-ware," he said, and move into open source status. After citing an article from Wired about game software slipping into abandon-ware, Atmar wrote in an August post called "The Future of MPE"

As a vendor, a creator and manufacturer of software, I am extremely concerned about intellectual property rights. But I don't see MPE as the exclusive province of HP. Because HP has always considered MPE a bastard stepchild, the evolution of MPE has been at least as much a community-based effort as it has been one designed and built from internal directives from within HP itself. In the case of the "abandon-ware" games mentioned in the Wired article, no outside user contributed materially to the creation or manufacture of any of the now-abandoned games, thus the legal rights of the creators seems more clear. But things aren't nearly as clear in the case of MPE.

Atmar pointed to a half-dozen contributions of his own to IMAGE. They were examples of a 3000 community that partnered with HP to create the 3000's success with such contributions of time and technique. August's conferences (the Interex shows were usually held that month, including one torrid meet in Orlando) offered advocacy in their angst. This sometimes was not the exchange that HP desired to air in public. But it was good for the future of the system. As to what was said to incite the Tea Party, Adager's Alfredo Rego recalled the moment of highest revolt.

Fred White (co-author of IMAGE and at the time Senior Scientist at Adager Labs) addressed Bill Murphy (HP’s Director of Marketing) from the floor and complimented Bill on his tie. Fred then explained how stupid it was for HP to unbundle IMAGE. Fred continued by describing the negative effects in products that depended on having IMAGE on the HP 3000. Fred also provided some historic background by relating how Ed McCracken (a previous 3000 General Manager) had made a success of the HP 3000 by bundling IMAGE in the mid '70s. Fred was firm but courteous. No tomatoes (err, tea bags) were thrown. Perhaps the whole “Boston tea Party” legend started because Fred used the word “stupid” in public, applying it to HP’s management, with no apologies.

This summer includes no August conference with controversy, no more Wirt Atmar, no SIG-IMAGE. Nobody would bother to call HP management stupid in public, in part because the vendor's management might struggle to understand what they might do to rectify it. But Atmar noted that Harry Sterling, who went on as HP's 3000 GM to champion the system through the advent of Y2K, was grateful for the another August showdown, The World's Largest Poster Project. HP could behave like a company without monolithic practices, he wrote in August of 2002.

HP has never been a monolithic organization. It’s always been populated by people who have cared about their customers as well. In the end, Harry Sterling vigorously shook my hand, grinning ear-to-ear, and said “Thanks, Wirt.”

August used to be about advocacy in the 3000 community. The concept still remains ripe and ready for those HP customers who migrate to and use environments controlled by HP, the HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems. In an era when system vendors rarely mention hardware or operating environments,  and train their eyes on the clouds, customers who need to see product enhancements might study what a community of savvy rebels did in Augusts gone by.

Databases rise from ashes as open source

Imagine a chilly hotel meeting room 15 years ago, across the river from New York City. Databases of the day are having a showdown in there, where the communication technology is type from flimsy plastic slides, foils projected on a wall. Oracle has sent a representative, along with Sybase and Ingres -- the Big Three of databases, although a complete count would include IBM's DB2, to comprise a Big Four. But IBM isn't at this showdown. The HP 3000's IMAGE is, however, touted by Adager's Alfredo Rego.

HP didn't feel the need to attend this meeting of the Greater New York HP Users Group and represent IMAGE. Rego asks a question of all assembled: What happens if a plug is kicked out of a Big DB database server? Will the database survive? They scratch their heads and offer no answer. Built-in recovery is as much a mystery outside the 3000 world in 1994 as the price for 100 seats of Oracle. I was there in that room and heard no answers.

The amount of swagger from the Big Three in the room and in the market was palpable, thick as the icy fog outside on that day. No one could see a future where a database might be offered without a license fee and be suited for enterprise computing. IMAGE sat closest to such a proposal back then, because HP includes the database with every 3000 it sells.

Shoot the clock forward to this hot summer and a database free of fees is common as a dog at a junkyard. Earlier this week we talked of Postgres as a potential open source solution, now bolstered by add-on engineering to become commercial open source. But there's a handful of other candidates for data management that don't require any relationship with a Big Vendor. Among the now-free alternatives are Firebird (tip of the hat to Bruce Hobbs), and one of those Big DBs, Ingres. Both these open source databases collected license fees 15 years ago. Firebird was created out of the ashes of Interbase.

In the economy of today, a database never goes away, whether it's IMAGE being supported by a 3000 homestead community or a Big DB solution that now steps with a lot less swagger. Open source offers a second life for databases with closing markets.

Oracle's fate in those 15 years is best known, unbridled growth that let the company swell enough to buy up open source competitor MySQL. The purchase was part of the Sun acquisition that Oracle wrangled this spring, a clever move to add a free entry to the Oracle lineup. MySQL, Firebird, Ingres and Postgres all line up on the open source side of the database menu today. Standing in a center column is Sybase, still holding on to the dream of an independent database solution -- one not controlled by any vendor of servers or operating systems. Another notable independent entry for HP 3000 customers: Eloquence, created by Marxmeier Software.

Sybase has been around long enough to spin off its own competition. Today the most popular databases in the non-3000 world are Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server. But when that showdown took place in that chilly hotel, Sybase had just licensed its technology to Microsoft, which rebranded the product as SQL Server. Oops. Sybase still sells enough to host a TechWave training conference, and its technology licenses run beyond SQL Server. For example, Sybase now owns PowerBuilder, the application development system for Windows clients. Among the 3000 community's experts, Pivital Solutions can consult in PowerBuilder development. PowerBuilder was popular among HP 3000 manufacturing customers.

HP 3000 ties wrap around Sybase in other ways. Within the Sybase community, database management vendor Bradmark Technologies sells tools such as Surveillance for Sybase IQ 15. While Bradmark made its bones selling TurboIMAGE management solutions, management of many databases is the company's current mission. Surveillance identifies and eliminates problems with Sybase databases.

And Ingres? The database that lost its place to Informix was purchased a few months after that icy meeting by ASK, which created the venerable MANMAN ERP software still running in the 3000 community. After a decade of stumbles running up against SQL Server, DB2 and Oracle, Ingres entered its open source life in 2004. Now the commerce for the new Ingres Corporation flows from support and services for the database and its OpenRoad development tool.

Support and consulting, after all, are the most durable of solutions in computing: the know-how companies need to continue to rely on what they purchased long ago. So long as a company such as British Rail deploys the rebirth of Interbase as Firebird, or IBM purchases Informix to offer it alongside DB2, or Sybase spins itself out to Microsoft and somehow survives, there's no reason to believe any enterprise-grade database will ever see its life end. There's always the fall-back to a new solution for an old problem of "we're out of money." Ingres tells customers that "Ingres is driving the New Economics of IT, where open source technology is delivering better, new ways of doing business in tough economic times." Free software is an attractive starting point whose value gets calculated, in the end, by the cost of hiring the know-how to use it.

Four years on, dust of Interex demise suggests virtual meetings

Four years ago this week, the Interex HP user group slammed its doors shut in a stunning implosion. The organization that grew out of the HP3000 Users Group in the 3000's earliest days declared bankruptcy after 31 years. The anniversary of the demise is a reminder that no amount of legacy or laurels can permit any institution to rest comfortably.

When Interex went down it didn't close up like HP 3000 customer Circuit City, lingering and selling off assets in months of public auction. Instead, in mid-July of '05 it was as if someone kicked out the user group's power cord. A Web site went dark overnight, millions in conference sponsor deposits vanished, and thousands of members learned their conference fees were worthless.

This teardown of a portion of the 3000 community is more than a history lesson, however. Four years ago one suggestion for a virtual conference got a few days of consideration, and it's worth reviewing in the light of 2009's better networking bandwidth and tighter travel budgets.

HP teased out a first few steps for a virtual conference a few months ago. It put up a series of talks on the G6 models of the ProLiant systems, using a fresh interface and offering a way to collect information from fellow attendees. Perhaps the vendor will see more need to push its investments into video and networked data.

The venerable Wirt Atmar stepped up in 2005 with a concept for a virtual conference, one that could replace the annual meeting which kept Interex afloat for decades. Atmar's $249 QCShow software (free 30-day trial available) from his AICS Research company could bring speakers who have PowerPoint or PDF slides to any user's desktop, complete with audio. It's an idea that might appeal to 3000 customers who don't need to research a migration platform at a conference and need training for homesteading systems. Atmar said:

Given the technology we have at hand, it would be entirely possible with QCShow to create a virtual Interex meeting -- but even better, at a substantially reduced cost as compared to Interex’s traditional fees. AICS Research would manage and host the process.

The way that I envision the process is that for the “meeting,” 30 talks would be selected. The talks would range in length from 30 to 45 minutes, at the speaker’s discretion (there is no one standing by with a hook to pull you off-stage in this medium).

The process of selecting the 30 talks from those submitted would be highly selective, but that selection process wouldn’t be done by us. Rather, after a submission deadline has passed, all of the submitted talks would be posted on a web page so that everyone could vote on their top ten choices. After all the votes were tallied, the top 30 vote-getters would be announced.

The speakers would then narrate their talks at their respective locations. We’ll provide the recording software and substantial hints on how to create a quality recording. Once the recordings were done, the speakers would send us their PowerPoint or Adobe PDF slides and their WAV files on a CD (the raw files will generally be in the 100-150 MB range). We would then synchronize their audio tracks to their slides and prepare their presentation for low-bandwidth delivery over the Internet, at no charge to the speakers.

Speakers would also receive a complimentary pass to freely access all of the talks presented in this year’s conference. Non-speakers (ordinary registrants) would be charged $250.

In order for us to break even, at least 50 people would have to register for the conference. If that “attendance level” could not be achieved, we wouldn’t go forward with the process. But if it could, it would seem like an excellent way, given the technology that now exists, to continue the original idea of the HP 3000 user group from 30 years ago, where the motto was, “Users helping users,” while allowing a much broader reach than ever before.

A few customers at the time said they'd participate, some even after they'd invested in Interex attendance. Gilles Schipper of the support company GSA said "Too bad for me that this option wasn't available before I shelled out $1,700 to Interex." The next generation of a user group conference, in Atmar's view, would have some downsides to go along with more affordable costs. Representation would be direct rather than elected, but give customers more control over content.

In the model I imagine, we would change from a representative democracy, with elected board members, to a direct democracy, where everyone has a direct vote and there would be no necessity for an elected set of board members.

The upsides to the model that I imagine are these:

     o Everyone would have a say in selecting the content of the meeting.

     o The cost of the meeting would be enormously reduced.

     o Travel expenses would disappear, nor would you even have to be there on a particular day. The meetings would be permanently recorded, so you could view them at your leisure.

     o You would be able to attend every “session.” Conflicts would be eliminated.

The downsides to this format are:

     o Interactions with the speakers would be greatly to somewhat diminished.

     o The capacity to ask HP managers the hard-hitting questions characteristic of past management roundtables, and the capacity to get immediate, definitive, straight-shooting answers, would be reduced.

     o HP would lose its capacity to control the content of the meeting or suggest who the speakers might be.

Atmar passed away early this year, but AICS Research marches on with products and services as always. What has also died is the concept of a confrontational meeting of users and vendor reps. Whatever friction that sparked creative heat has been smoothed off by HP's goals for a meeting. Management roundtables don't air grievances or identify opportunity to improve product. Since that's already missing from a 2009 conference -- and reducing HP's control of content looks like an upside -- the virtual meeting would seem to only restrict interaction with speakers.

And there are plenty of new technologies, four years later, to let attendees interact online with speakers. One 3000 software developer, Tom Brandt, joked in 2005 that in a virtual meeting HP would also "lose the ability to toss accredited journalists out of sessions, depriving attendees of yet another reason to bash the vendor."

As a journalist who's been challenged at a couple of user conference doorways in 2002, and again last year, I wouldn't miss that part of the user conference experience.

Mooning Over Legendary Tech Marvels

You can see the markers of moon memories everywhere today, from the news remembrances alongside Walter Cronkite's death -- the ace newsman lionized NASA with reports like trying out weightlessness testing, above  -- to a special "moon movie" lineup on Turner Classic Movies, all in celebration of the lunar landing 40 years ago. That Apollo 11 mission is a marvel in light of its technology caliber, crude by today's measure.

But 33 years ago, technology emerged to launch the HP 3000 into orbit for good, the Series II systems that now act as museum pieces for avid collectors of tech. HP-IB, the peripheral interface that served HP 3000s for three decades, was created at the same time as the Apollo lunar landers. The oldest 3000s are as beloved to the leaders of the 3000 community as any moon command capsule. The HP 3000 has maintained its orbit over four decades, as much as the base of the first lunar lander that is still circling the Earth from the moon's Sea of Tranquility.

Those Apollo missions were made possible by men dressed the same as HP engineers of the era, fellows in wide ties, white shirts and dark trousers. The design aim was the same as well. From the start of the 3000's mission, the goal was to create a system reliable enough to send on a long-range space mission, far removed from the need for repair or replacement. Adager's founders created their database tools "as if they would be used on a remote satellite," said co-founder Alfredo Rego.

Back in the mid-1990s, Adager celebrated the confluence of such thinking by highlighting the Apollo career of James Lovell, American astronaut. Rego interviewed Lovell, who was the backup commander for Apollo 11, to emphasize the similarities between the legendary NASA and today's 3000. "They have a lot in common," Adager's Web page still says. "Reliability, resilience, a tremendous amount of attention to detail, and a superb team of people behind them whose motto is 'Failure is not an option.' "

While the roster of that team has changed over the past decade, the ambitions of those who homestead on the 3000 are served with even more expertise. In the 1990s there was no experience in the Web, thin-client development, worldwide networking standards, or the synergy of the open source movement. All have become a part of the HP 3000 solution since the Lovell interview.

You can still get a copy of that interview from Adager for the asking. Rego and the Apollo commander talk about "IMAGE/SQL, the high-performance and high-availability Database Management System." Their conversation took place when adding SQL to a networked database like IMAGE was still a new concept. Like the manned missions from Lovell's term to beyond the first year of the 3000, SQL has proven itself to be an essential tool the 3000 community has embraced.

To this day, humans have not returned to the surface of another planet, a kind of lasting tribute to the stature of that Apollo mission. You can report that HP has never built a computer system since the 3000 designed to be booted and set into orbit, with little regard for replacement. The model didn't serve HP's business aims as long as it has served some 3000 customers. Aiming high can often deliver resources that are built to last.

Poke into clouds with HP Labs paper

HP Tech Forum attendees were doused with cloud computing references this year. There's a certain level of buzz that might compel an IT manager or 3000 owner to know answers to basic cloud questions when the queries surface from top management. Within the rich confines of HP Labs Technical Reports, a good Cloud 101 primer is available for download.

This paper released this year is titled Outsourcing Business to Cloud Computing Services: Opportunities and Challenges. The writing in this PDF document is as straightforward as the title; the paper is only 17 pages long and explains differences between Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Database as a Service, and Software as a Service.

As it turns out, the paper's only table shows that only Software as a Service (SaaS) has any direct use for managers, business owners or business users. The PaaS, IaaS and DaaS are tools for the IT administrator or developer. However, the HP technical writers assert that the time is near for computer owners to be able to access most of their processing needs from the clouds.

Advances in service oriented architecture (SOA) have brought us close to the once-imaginary vision of establishing and running a virtual business, a business in which most or all of its business functions are outsourced to online services.

Cloud computing shares a common goal with the old concept of timesharing: A computing resource managed by a third party that provides storage, processing and administration for a fee. In exchange, the owners of a business or enterprise pursue their business, instead of IT planning and investments.

HP submitted its white paper to the Special Issue on Cloud Computing published this year by IEEE Internet Computing. The paper does include a reference in its back matter to a more promotional HP document about the cloud. But reading what HP Labs has written about cloud computing looks like its hype caliber has been dialed back to reasonable discourse.

Back in the days when timesharing was a common business solution, HP Labs papers came out once a quarter in the Hewlett-Packard Journal. You waited up to three months to receive them, got paper that had to be copied to be shared, and waited for a year-end index issue. Now you can read the history of the 479 issues of the printed Journal from HP Labs Web site, including the issue that unveiled breakthrough compiler technology for HP's PA-RISC systems. The latest Labs papers are online right away, just like so many seems other resources in our modern age. While this Labs research is usually inappropriate for briefings with non-technical management, technologists in the 3000 community can find clear-eyed studies of what's being buzzed about in conferences and airliner cabins.

34 summers ago, HP first Communicated

Working in the 3000 community to tell stories gets to be a richer job every year. People I've known since I was a young reporter sometimes pass on relics from the 3000's past. Last month I got such a gift from Steve Hammond, a 3000 veteran who's moved on with his employer to other systems but pursues history as his avocation. A modest white envelope that he gave me contained a piece of history: HP's first Communicator.

The document was HP's first shot into an open sky of communications to HP 3000 users of 1975. June of that year might have been the first summer that HP wanted to share updates about the HP 3000, since the computer had passed through the end of '74 and gotten into summer of '75 with consistent reports of reliability. Issue 1 of the Computer Systems Communicator included a section on the HP 2000 systems as well as the HP 9600 Measurement and Control systems. HP considered the three computers a complete solution to data processing needs of the middle '70s.

Only one of these computer systems has survived into this century, and HP identifies some of the credit for the 3000's longevity in this Communicator's contents: user groups, the first Communicator's theme. A HP 3000 user group was introduced with a board of directors and a mandate for meetings: "The meetings, open to all group members, afford an excellent forum for the exchange new techniques and ideas."

This Communicator also advised 3000 users about "Steps to Produce a Core Dump Tape" as well as an update to a bedrock program still used by every HP 3000 database today, FCOPY.

At 32 loose-leaf pages, the June 15, 1975 Communicator is a fledgling document. There was a good reason that the new HP 3000 Users Group met four times over 1974-75. 3000 technology was quick to change on this new HP business computer, and printed advice couldn't cover what a good talk could in person. Through 1975, two meetings were held in Palo Alto and one each in Chicago and Miami.

HP was also happy to report success for a customer who'd completed an HP 3000 internals course in this issue. "ESL in Sunnyvale, California is involved with various government agencies who as customers demand highly sophisticated applications, some of which are photographic image processing and display and land usage plottage." ESL was writing its own IO drivers and "saw a need for greater understanding of the internal activities of MPE." HP included a contact if customers wanted similar training.

To this day the Communicator continues to hold the internal advice from HP's labs to its more ardent 3000 homesteaders. HP is still making these documents available to the world from its docs.hp.com Web pages. The history there goes back more than 21 summers ago, to the Communicator issue that HP first sent out in 1988 with its groundbreaking PA-RISC MPE/XL 1.0 systems.

The final Communicator, issued one summer ago for MPE/iX 7.5 PowerPatch 5, features a pair of technical articles on IO options that might still be new to 3000 owners. Jim Hawkins, one of the last members of HP's 3000 labs, wrote pieces on High Availability FailOver/iX for FiberChannel Disk Arrays and Limited Support for Ultrium Tape on MPE/iX. A listing of beta test patches, and MPE support details for those arrays aren't available on an HP Web site any longer. (The 3000 community has several experts who can guide customers through installing the high-end arrays; Craig Lalley of EchoTech is the first who comes to mind.) Client Systems has posted a selection of HP labs whitepapers on its rehosted Jazz Web site.

Unix celebrates 40 years of choices

This summer the Unix operating system celebrates its 40th anniversary. The HP 3000's OS won't roll over to its 40th until 2012, but any Unix use back in 1969 would have to be labeled experimental, considering the environment was built for colleges, laboratories and government defense. HP's Unix, HP-UX, came onto Hewlett-Packard's product lineup in 1983. HP built its version upon the System V release from Bell Labs

Unix has survived at HP because of its popularity around the IT world. But being chosen often doesn't always confer superior technology. Unix holds the dubious distinction of having a book written about its shortcomings, The Unix Hater's Handbook, perhaps the only book ever dedicated to deriding an OS. But HP, along with vendors like Sun and IBM, have pumped decades of engineering into Unix to make it a business solution.

HP certainly did not start selling the OS with business in mind. The first versions in 1983 through 1985 were written strictly for engineering workstations, relics such as the HP Integral portable PC (above) and the Series 500 desktops. When HP bought Apollo Computer in 1989, advances such as Unix sockets were being integrated into HP-UX.

HP's Unix got the jump on MPE/iX in the first generation of the Precision RISC hardware releases (Series 800 and 900). In 1986 HP had to double back and revise its MPE port for the new hardware, while HP-UX, created using the same base MODCAL language as MPE XL, was ready first.

HP shipped Series 840 Unix systems to business customers before the HP 3000 Series 930 was ever ready. The 930, underpowered to start, had to be replaced with the Series 950, causing more delay. Some say the  3000 never retained any edge in HP's business computer line ever since.

What is misunderstood is the proprietary nature of Unix versions. Only the more recent distributions of Linux come close to the "open system" promises of those late 1980s rollouts. A look at a detailed family tree of Unix evolution over the last four decades illustrates open, closed and hybrid versions from Sun, HP, IBM and others. There's plenty of red "closed" versions in the chart above, including those being sold today by IBM and HP.

HP-UX was the first Unix to use access control lists for file access permissions rather than the standard Unix permissions system. HP-UX was also among the first Unix systems to include a built-in logical volume manager. In such advances the Unix vendors have given the IT community a way to distinguish between vendors' implementations. There are standards today for Unix implementations, a vast improvement over the Unix Wars of the 1980s, competition between the opposing versions of Unix.

Unix has been rich with choices ever since its inception, being developed by a community of programmers until vendors stepped in to differentiate features. But its glue is the common command set that gives administrators and developers a leg up on one Unix if they know another version. The commonality enjoyed perhaps its brightest moment came in the climax of Jurassic Park. To erase the threat of rogue dinosaurs, one character must take control of the park's computer. "It's a Unix system," says Lex. "I know this!" She then proceeds to navigate the files with the ease of movie computing to save the day.

User group survivors launch Treeware Project

Former members of the HP user group SuperGroup Association have announced a new project to preserve the history of the HP 3000, collecting and archiving the most durable medium for the platform: paper manuals.

"Since the 3000 performed its work for more than 20 years without even CD-ROM archive technology, we know where the good stuff lives," said Treeware Project organizer D. David Brown. "We're putting out a call to the entire 3000 community to send us their paper manuals and documentation, so we can erect a massive testament to the success of this system."

Brown said that even sales and marketing documents would be crucial items in the project's mission. "Most of the time HP's marketing materials gave the biggest clues to the 3000's true powers," he said. "We stopped publishing our SuperGroup magazine in 1989, once the vendor finally dropped its "cold dead fish" marketing practices."

Historians in the community such as Raul Paulerson were puzzled in their comments on the Treeware Project, apparently caught unawares by the bold, overnight move to catalog billions of pages of documents. "I'd estimate there's more than a million This page left intentionally blank sheets out there," he said. "These Treeware guys better have really good shredders to weed those out."

Project leader Brown said that he's designating a preliminary delivery address for donations: Hewlett-Packard's corporate headquarters, 3000 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304. "What else would HP have had in mind, ultimately, by setting up HQ at the 3000 address?" Brown asked. "We're grateful that the vendor has the platform's history and preservation at heart."

Packages of documents should be marked "Treeware Project" in plain block letters. HP DeskJet-generated barcoding will be accepted as well. Brown believes that the HP Development Company, keepers of all HP intellectual property, will insist on compliance with all US mail fraud laws.

The 3000 NewsWire would like to chip in on the Treeware Project. Since our office space is more limited than the massive HP headquarters, we're accepting any 3000 paper documents with a staple in the middle, as opposed to loose sheets. (An example is shown at left.) Our mailing address is 11702 Buckingham Road, Austin, TX 78759. We ask the community to please send no contributions postage- or delivery-due.

User group bankruptcy ends with pennies

HP's longest-standing user group finally experienced its death rattle this month when the Interex bankruptcy case resolved the outstanding debts to thousands of creditors. US government notices arrived in mailboxes of companies as large as Hewlett-Packard and as small as single members like the Hungarian News Agency. The March 18 notice was the last shoe to drop in a death dance that began in the summer of 2005.

Creditors who spent money with Interex received about 10 cents on every dollar owed, according to the latest documents filed by the US Northern District of California court in Santa Clara County, California. Hewlett-Packard took one of the larger losses, at $200,000, while a handful of major hotels across North America failed to collect six-figure deposits or never saw payments for hotel rooms which were either reserved in blocks or occupied during conferences.

Losses closer to home in the 3000 community came at software and services vendors who paid for booths at the suddenly-closed HP World show of 2005. Birket Foster of MB Foster said that "Interex took our booth deposit and kept it," he reported earlier this month. "We'll get a check for approximately 10 percent of everything."

Foster and others noted that the Santa Clara County tax collector got $8,700, then bankruptcy trustees, the accountants hired by trustees, and lawyers "all made out fine in this," since Interex assets and cash on hand went first to settle taxes and then to pay court officials. Interex closed its doors owing $4.1 million with assets on hand of less than 10 percent of that. The group folded up two weeks after its final deadline for payments for booth spaces.

The financial troubles mounted over more than a year at the user group that was founded at the same time as the HP 3000 was being launched by Hewlett-Packard. The vendor absorbed its losses in part because it created a user conference to compete with HP World. The first HP Technology Forum and Expo was scheduled to open just one month after the 2005 HP World. User group insiders said that HP's expo space was being sold as a vendor-sponsored alternative to HP World.

The Interex name was not listed as part of the assets sold to pay creditors. Even though the goodwill in that brand has probably evaporated after the group went broke and killed off its Web information overnight, some value might remain. Interex.com and .org now belong to the exhibit design and fabrication maker InterEx, while interex.net is the home of a designer selling capes, shawls and cloaks. The last user group to use the name, HP Interex-Europe, ended business under that title when it became part of the new Connect alliance of HP user groups last year. A computer cable company operates under the name, among other businesses.

Near the end of Interex's life, the group claimed to have 118,000 members. As debts mounted and the group chose to remain separate from the user group consolidation that HP desired — and took less sponsorship money from the vendor — even a large membership wasn't enough to keep the 31-year-old group's doors open. Unlike HP 3000 customer AIG, Interex was not "too big to fail."

Community members said in 2005 the user group’s management dealt itself mortal wounds by encouraging members to combat the vendor, rather than sparking close collaboration.

“The only chance Interex had to survive so long was through collaboration,” said Duane Percox, co-founder of K-12 school software company QSS and a volunteer at the Interex Solution Symposium conferences. “If you take a combative approach it will work for a short period, but then the vendor will tire of that.”

Percox was one of several in the 3000 community who cited HP Executive VP Ann Livermore’s advocacy as a reason Interex could let its users grill HP managers in roundtables. Some HP managers once had a bonus plan based on Interex advocacy survey results.

Interex had promised a “No Marketing” lineup of talks at the HP World cancelled. “This [closing] was an example of marketing beating the engineers,” Percox said. “People wanted stronger marketing from HP. Stronger marketing people don’t like it when you have independent user groups,” he added.

Connect operates on a different business model than Interex, which chose to manage all its own operations. Connect, and the Encompass enterprise user group before it, has contracted with Smith-Bucklin's user group management division ever since early in this decade. The group has named Speedware director of marketing Chris Koppe as president-elect for 2010 and vice president for the current Connect board. Kristi Browder, who served at Encompass president for several years, recently took over as Executive Director and COO of Connect.

Taking a Tour of IT History

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. has a wonderful gallery of gear on its floor, but tonight may be one of its more special evenings for HP 3000 folks. VEsoft founder Vladimir Volokh is in the Bay Area, visiting customers to consult on one of his multi-week tours. He's planning to meet with Allegro Consultants co-founder Stan Sieler after-hours at the museum, where Stan volunteers as a docent.

A member of the Interex HP user group's Hall of Fame, Stan will lead Vladimir tonight as two of the 3000 community's leading technology lights walk through the CHM's aisles of history. For any of you who wish they might be alongside to hear some of Stan's histories, we've got a few minutes' worth recorded from a tour he led last year. Take a moment to measure the passion in Stan's voice as he touts the merits of the most technically-advanced personal computer of 1974, the first year that the HP 3000 advanced enough to do serious computing. (He goes on to mention the CHM's donated Apple I — not anywhere near as superior, but the foundation of a company analysts are eyeing as a new member of the Dow Jones 30 blue chips.) What made the Intel 8008-based MCM-70 PC stand out was included software, the same kind of bundled resource behind the 3000's success.

Sad to say, as Stan notes, that technical superiority does not ensure commercial success. Hewlett-Packard created many advanced computing products during the 20th Century, including your community's server. As a for-profit business, HP measured its return on investment for each one. The company has a history of dropping low earners. But the 3000's value to the owners is higher than the value to HP. Your success with the 3000 doesn't require commercial embrace of your computer to continue its return on your investment.

History of computing is becoming an interesting study because so much has occurred in so little time. Unlike the span of governments and wars and languages, the leaps of computing have been observed within our lifetimes. It's hard to say how long something will retain value, regardless of when it was engineered.

As an example, Allegro sells a software product called Avatar, whose chief use is as "a disassembler / patcher / code-explorer" for software which was written for HP's Precision Architecture Reduced Instruction Set Computing (PA-RISC). Avatar hasn't had much attention since Allegro released an HP-UX version in 1997 to go along with the HP 3000 version. But Avatar remains in use today on porting projects to carry software from PA-RISC to other platforms.

Allegro still offers Avatar for 3000 developers, a component in its System Manager's Toolbox suite. The toolbox is sold by Lund Performance Solutions, one of the initial HP Platinum Migration Partners. For companies looking back into the history of their HP 3000 applications with eyes on migration — or those simply practicing good maintenance to sustain homesteading — the toolbox offers the prospect of a good return on investment. Plus, it's got a history of achievement, like the HP 3000's MPE/iX.

Memorial fund honors 3000 pioneer

Having contributed so much to the 3000 experience in his lifetime, Wirt Atmar wanted a simple finale on the occasion of his death one month ago. No eulogy, a cremation instead of burial, and no funeral. Accolades and thanks flowed over the 3000's Internet newsgroup to celebrate his life. But enduring gratitude, and recognition, still seemed out of reach.

The 3000 community has organized a fitting memorial to this important man. Wirt was a research associate with the famous Field Museum in Chicago. OpenMPE secretary Donna Hofmeister contacted the museum about establishing a memorial fund in his honor. Hofmeister received immediate assurance this was the best way to thank him for a questing mind that found and spread solutions for the HP 3000, like his Plan B for staying on the 3000 instead of migrating. Plan B is a good start for considering the complete set of sustainability decisions.

"Both Both Bruce Patterson," Hofmeister said, "Wirt's friend and colleague, and Sheila Cawley, Vice President Institutional Advancement at the Museum, think that this is an excellent way for us to both help the Museum and preserve Wirt's legacy." The HP 3000 and its community has earned that unique attribute, a legacy, so it's fitting that a memorial is underway. You can make a donation at www.fieldmuseum.org/annualfund and click on the "Join Now" link.  At the bottom of that page, click "Online."

3000 community members can associate their gift with the Wirt Atmar Fund by sending a separate e-mail to Cawley at the museum. One community member, Wyell Grunwald, pointed to the generous nature of this leader and took note of the continuing products from his ongoing company, AICS Research.

He has some extremely good software developed for the HP 3000. QCTerm was free to anyone.  Wirt and I have had many discussions over the years. I will miss his expertise tremendously.  I actually met him once at a INTEREX show. He was always very kind. Wirt had a very brilliant mind.  Perhaps the best thing that could be said of him was that he was very willing to share his expertise with the HP 3000 community, and always strived to educate others. His writing of several years ago about staying on the HP 3000 was excellent. I still work on the HP3000 every day for my job, and have two HP3000s at home.

Some of the best advocacy opportunities during Wirt's most active years came as an improvement on the Interex user group efforts. We'll have a report on Monday on the last shoe to drop in that user group's bankruptcy dissolution, more than three years after the group went dark overnight.

Enterprising IMAGE ideals arrived from outside

One month ago today community pioneer Wirt Atmar passed away, but his contributions to the 3000 user continue to keep the system sustainable in a world far different than the era when HP 3000 was created. The server did not include a database for its first four years of life, but when HP added IMAGE to the bundle, the computer took off for new heights HP had never scaled in the industry.

IMAGE beefed up to become TurboIMAGE as the 3000 shifted to the RISC architecture, but it took efforts led by Wirt to give this included database the technology to keep it included in IT models. Built as a networked database, IMAGE gained SQL. Jim Sartain led HP's liasion with the 3000 community in this period of change, and he reports that IMAGE/SQL started as an HP design, but the vendor wanted to segregate this enhancement from the user population by making it an add-on.

Wirt was a major influence in making IMAGE/SQL capabilities available to customers. HP had architected the solution and planned to offer it as an expensive product upgrade. The need to justify a capital purchase, plus the initial low installed base of users (which would have meant there were few tools or training solutions), and the lack of focus from HP sales on selling software would have almost certainly doomed the Image/SQL product to a short lifespan.

The SQL extensions for IMAGE ultimately gave the 3000 users a way to connect mission-critical HP 3000 data with databases and desktop tools on other platforms. Without SQL the database couldn't participate in ODBC connectivity or the Java links that succeeded ODBC: middleware that made 3000 data a mainstream player. IMAGE has propelled the 3000 through decades of waters because the database is included in every system. SQL needed to be as ubiquitous as IMAGE.

Sartain, who kept moving up from HP to Intuit, and now to Senior Director, Software Quality Engineering for Adobe, told us that a middle ground between free and for-purchase had to be found. It was the 3000's users, organized as a Special Interest Group (SIG), who devised the IMAGE enhancement plan, one that Wirt promoted with zeal.

The addition of SQL started in San Diego at an Interex user conference in 1991, Sartain says, beginning with a concept from Ken Sletten, a user group volunteer, federal employee working for the US Navy and a key player in the 3000 community:

In the same San Diego Interex conference where I met Wirt I got a great idea from Ken Sletten. Ken explained it was very difficult to get approval for any capital software purchases from the U.S. Navy. On the other hand, software maintenance contracts were approved nearly automatically.  Ken made the initial suggestion of giving away Image/SQL. We discussed this problem in a small SIGIMAGE executive committee meeting that Wirt was part of and came up with the idea to offer a no-charge upgrade in return for an increase in the IMAGE software maintenance fees from $0 to something more substantial.

Wirt tirelessly championed this idea with the user community.  The result was the HP decision to go forward with this. This was a complete win-win for everyone involved. Customers received the software that enabled them to transform their HP 3000 applications. HP received a revenue stream to support and enhance the product. Because the IIMAGE/SQL solution was now generally available a vibrant ecosystem of people who knew how to use it, tools, training, and applications sprang up around it. It is hard to overestimate the part Wirt played in causing this outcome to occur. After that my team and I frequently consulted with Wirt on our development priorities, and our architecture and design decisions.
 
The praise Wirt (and others) shared about the work my team and I helped my team to become one of the mostly highly motivated and productive in the Enterprise Systems Group (per two consecutive Group GMs). We had no attrition and we had strong people joining our team. The partnership we had with Wirt and SIGIMAGE was part of our great productivity and esprit de corps. Our collaboration with Wirt and some others allowed us to know precisely what customers needed from us. We saved lots of effort by not doing any feature work that was not of the upmost importance. One other outcome: the team received three software quality awards from HP’s CSY [3000 division] — Three releases in a row! The teamwork with SIGIMAGE and Wirt was part of all of this magic.

Community pioneer Wirt Atmar dies

Wirt Atmar, founder of 3000 software firm AICS Research and an inventive leader of the 3000 community since the computer's inception, died yesterday at age 63. He leaves behind his wife and business partner Valerie, a son Mark, millions of lines of programs and Internet postings, and a legacy of creation — one that flowed from a clear-eyed view of a world where he helped computer science emerge and flourish.

Atmar died of a heart attack in his hometown in Las Cruces, NM early on Feb. 5. It was a place where he invited everyone to enjoy a free enchilada dinner when they visited him. He quipped once that it was interesting to live in a state where the omnipresent question was about enchildala sauce: "Green or red?" He gravitated to new ideas and concepts and products quickly. Less than a month after Apple introduced the iPhone, he bought and tested one, praising its promise even as he exposed its failures, from the unripened state of its software to the signal unavailability.

It will work well if you go stand in the street, however. If I go outside and stand under one specific tree, I can talk to anyone I want. In only one week, I have felt on multiple occasions just heaving the phone as far as I could throw it -- if it weren’t so damnably expensive. The iPhone currently resembles the most beautiful cruise liner you’ve ever seen. It’s only that they haven’t yet installed the bed or the toilet in your stateroom, and you have to go outside to use the “facilities,” and that’s irritating even if the rest of the ship is beautiful. But can you certainly see the promise of what it could become.

The postings were classic Wirt: Funny and insightful, cut precise with honesty, and complete in needed details. A cruise through his postings on the 3000 newsgroup stands as an extraordinary epitaph of his passions, from space exploration to environmental science to politics to evolution and so much more. He was a mensch and a brilliant polymath, an extraordinary combination in any human.

Less than 24 hours before he died, Wirt posted an lively report on migration performance gains he recorded after moving an MPE/iX program to faster hardware running Linux. It was an factual observation only Atmar could have presented, an example of the scientific practice the community loses with his passing.

One of the 3000 founders who was best known by his first name, Wirt was respected in the community for his honest and pragmatic vision of the 3000's history and potential, expressed in his countless e-mails and postings to the 3000 newsgroup. But alongside that calculating drive he carried an ardor for the platform. His was essential in sparking HP's inclusion of SQL support in IMAGE, a feature so integrated that HP renamed the database IMAGE/SQL. In 1996 Wirt led an inspired publicity effort that brimmed with a passion for possibility, conceiving and executing The World's Largest Poster Project (shown above) with the help of hundreds of volunteers on a Southern California football field. He quipped that after printing the hundreds of four-foot rolls of paper needed for the poster, loading them into a van for the trip to California represented "the summer corporate fitness program for AICS Research."

Wirt's software company survives and perseveres, reports his widow Valerie, who's been AICS general manager since the company's inception, a start in a trailer with New Mexico State graduate students doing the coding in the early 1970s. AICS has evolved across more than three decades, its success and invention maturing and expanding around the HP 3000 user, ones both homesteading and migrating. Evolution has been essential to the company as well as its founder. Wirt lived a life that sprang from his career as an evolutionary biologist and research associate at the Center for Evolutionary and Environmental Biology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.

Wirt was no stranger to the realities of death, having worked for a time as a scientist calculating the fatalities from various throw weights of nuclear attacks. He saw the 3000's treatment by HP in 2001 as a death of the system, a step he was the first to publicize before HP had released the news, one he abhorred but accepted with an outsized effort to evolve onto a new platform for his company's software. In the process of that evolution AICS gave away one of the most substantial gifts the 3000 community has ever received in QCTerm, terminal emulation software which is still free to anyone who downloads the program.

As news of Wirt's death spread through the community over the past day, tributes and condolences poured in through message on the 3000 newsgroup he enriched with his writing. Words connected Wirt to the life of the community, since he seldom traveled to 3000 user events. His travels were reserved for his pursuits in science. The tone of the online tributes showed that he touched the members with a certainty of opinion white-hot in its passion.

Wirt's work evolved along with his views and beliefs. So AICS' QueryCalc software became QCReports in the years after HP announced its 3000 exit. He told the community in his final public message that he tracked the performance gains of the migration across 25 years, starting with an HP 3000 Series 33 system of the 1980s. He timed the improvement in value of evolving a QCReports process onto a Dell Linux-based system.

The Series 33 report ran in 22 minutes in 1985. The machine cost $165,000 in 1978 dollars, which I'll now estimate to be equivalent to about $500,000. The Dell Linux box cost less than $500 a few months ago.

The same report now runs in 3.1 seconds. That's a 412,000-to-1 improvement in price-performance over our original HP3000. Perhaps more importantly, that's more performance than we could get out of the largest and most modern HP 3000, regardless of price.

To assist in pricing used 3000s, his company created what remains the best performance comparison report on every HP 3000 ever released. The firm's Web site is another testimonial to what he created and what will go on in the years to come. It's a wonderful resource.

Last spring AICS considered its first cross-platform release of QCReports for the HP 3000, bringing the company's software offerings full circle. Wirt suggested in a posting that even though the HP 3000 had "died in 2001," there remained a place for a reporting app in the 3000's new generation as a server scuttled by HP. He made a case for life going on, even after death.

On one hand, you might ask why spend any money on a dead platform, and that’s certainly a reasonable question. But on the other, if you’re intending on staying with MPE for a little while longer, QCReports would be a way to significantly upgrade and modernize your capabilities with the HP 3000. And, if and when you do migrate, if you move to a platform which Eloquence supports, your total migration time for your database and reports will honestly be only a one or two hours. Other than changing the IP address of the new host, you’ll never notice a single difference.

Atmar's departure may follow a similar path for the community. His writing and instruction is spread all around the Internet and will live on beyond his days on the planet. His best memorial is what's captured on the newsgroup, really, and there's just no better way to know what's been lost to us than to read what Wirt had to say about himself and his world. He has such a body of work out there; it's safe to say that he's written 10 million words about the HP 3000 in the past decade and a half.

It might be fitting that one of the most heartfelt testimonies came over that same 3000 newsgroup where he held court for so long. Jim Phillips, a friend and client, reported that he'd enjoyed that complimentary enchilada with Wirt. Phillips shared a portion of a sermon from 19th Century English clergyman Henry Scott Holland, a message that speaks to the continuum of existence in evolving forms.

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Everything remains as it was.
The old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no sorrow in your tone.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without  effort
Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was.
There is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner.
All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting, when we meet again.

Phillips proposed that today, "everyone have an enchilada in memory of Wirt."

Like any death that arrives too soon, it makes me consider what I've done this week, and try to do more, believe more, love and enjoy more.

What's too soon? Definitely any week where, like Wirt, you're still pushing out faith, research, teaching or passion. He had all of these on offer this week. And today I regret never having visited him in his hometown to take him up on that enchilada invitation. A great reason to put more friends on your travel list. So death can move a fellow to do more travel, more sharing, and keep fit to enjoy many more years.

All I can add is a moment of silence in memory of a good guy's light winking out, and the hard fact that he can add no more to the bounty of teaching that has enriched the life of the 3000 community. His work lives on in AICS, in the work of his son Mark (a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur), and the emotion and thanks now flowing to Valerie. Our hearts are with his family on this evening, when my own partner Abby and I will enjoy that enchilada in memory of what he created.

Keep up with the 3000, and Vladimir

From our "Where Are They Now?" series

Vladimir Volokh has maintained his pace of travel through the HP 3000 community, even as this legend of the computer's software field turns 70 this year. The founder of VEsoft called to remind us that the HP 3000's date intrinsics will outlast those in Unix, so long as a program uses HPCALENDAR — correcting a detail he spotted in our printed 3000 NewsWire issue from November.

This month Vladimir will start his 30th year of travels through his base of customers. He carries printed copies of the NewsWire on the regular maintenance consulting which remains the backbone of his business life. He loves to visit a site for a single day of instruction, repair and maintenance of the 3000 and its administrators. January will find him on the road to North and South Carolina for three weeks.

Logfiles are his latest target for cleanup. "Either they always have too many of them, or they have too little. The customers never know what they log, or how to read them. I would say they lose millions of sectors of space to logfiles, but nobody looks at them, so they don't know." But last month, for the first time, Vladimir found an HP 3000 which didn't have any logfiles. Logfiles are useful for 3000s, especially to assist in security. And it's difficult to erase all of them. But as the saying goes, you can make a system foolproof, but not-idiot proof.

"They managed to screw up the system so the last file was shut, so even it couldn't have a logfile," he explained. He laughed, because his visit helped the customer understand and employ logfiles. "After 30 years I am still enjoying it, because there is one single way to do it right, but there are a hundred ways to do it wrong. With every visit I say, 'What now?' I asked them, what's worse than not having any log files? Not noticing it."

Like a patient professor, Vladimir makes the day of his visit entertaining and enlightening. Because the HP 3000 has not changed much over the past decade, he finds many of the same oversights and blind spots in administration and management, peppered with surprises like zero logfiles.

A generation grows proud of its grey

    This month I went to a supper of congratulations to celebrate my advent of becoming a grandfather. My son Nick and his wife Elisha are expecting a baby in July, a mitzvah that will launch a new generation of Seybolds. When I first wrote in this 3000 market, Nick was just a baby of 2. Now he and his bride are having a baby of their own.

    I don’t feel like it’s time to get a new job. This one keeps changing enough to remain fascinating and entertaining and enlightening. Change is most of what I’ve reported in this decade. The world of our industry has changed so much since Nick’s birth marked a new generation, the Millennials. Now his world doesn't even marvel at the Web, a word I hear less today as our online lives meld more into real life.

    The transformation of communication has helped your community. This season saw an historic election aided by the influence of the Internet, technology that all of you helped to cement into the world of 2008. If not for your long nights over the ENK/ACK debugging, finding the X.25 cloud, planning the networking protocol stack and tuning those Ethernet LANs, I couldn’t check on the vote predictions (remarkably accurate) at fivethirtyeight.com.

    Over this weekend, the NewsWire's co-founder Abby helped me celebrate my mom's 83rd birthday. Ginny Seybold has spent about as much time living in Las Vegas as the HP 3000 has spent on HP's non-strategic list, between the system's doghouse status as a non-Windows, non-Unix solution and the Transition Era of more than seven years and counting. Mom tells us she never figured to have a good run well into her middle 80s. Everything ends, but the matter of when is rarely something we know for certain.

   

It seems like every month there’s a new toy to be launched in a browser, another word that feels more like a throwback to the nascent days of the Internet. After my grandchild arrives next summer, I’ll have old toys that I’ll be eager to share, some like curious slot-car sets and others as redoubtable as Dr. Suess and Goodnight Moon.

    Each time I share the news about becoming an expectant grandpa, people ask if it makes me feel old. The happy event has more of an impact of pride, accomplishment, and faith in the persistence and luck of parenthood. People may be asking if you’re feeling old now that HP’s given up on the 3000, a good run of 30-plus years. But HP cannot create the next generation of 3000 use, a time when the vendor will only stand by and watch what will be born.

   I believe in the Afterlife, as I call it in another article this month, only because of the Internet. Were it not for the magic of file servers archiving across the planet, free advice delivered in minutes with detail, and the adoption of this technical chariot by your community, you would have declared your 3000s dead long ago. As it is now, the system that proves your accomplishments will go on further than anyone could have imagined in that year of 1984, when Nick was a baby himself. I consider what comes after HP’s 3000 time in 2010 to be a new generation of users, the ones who will toddle and then walk on their own without Hewlett-Packard to hold their hands.

   Consider sites like Facebook and Linked In and even Connect’s myCommunity as your cradles in these times of growth — plus the older outposts of newsgroups and mailing lists, and yes, even focused blogs like ours. Out on Linked In, the HP 3000 Community Group is now more than 90 members strong, full of advice and experience and a link to making 3000 skills work in new opportunities. Being older doesn’t become an insult when you’re rebirthing the rules for elder-hood. You gotta grow to gain that grey.

HP offers museum pieces

As part of its exit from the 3000 community, Hewlett-Packard pledged to give the Computer History Museum a chunk of the 3000's heritage, from frozen code to hardware that can still heat up a room.

MPE/iX software will become part of HP's donation to the museum in Mountain View, Calif. sometime next year, according to HP's latest update on its end-game decisions about the platform. Museum docent Stan Sieler reports that there are already HP 3000s of varying vintages stashed away in the museum archives, although none are on display for the hundreds of thousands of visitors.

HP intends, but hasn't made a full commitment, to make a donation to the museum "to help preserve the history of the HP 3000 and MPE/iX," said Mike Paivien. The contractor has been brought back to his old HP division to help sort out the final decisions about what HP will leave behind for the community. MPE/iX source code is among the vendor's donations, apparently in a format far different from the one which requires an application for third-party support companies.

"There will be hardware and some level of documentation across the HP 3000 lifespan," Paivinen added. "As with most donations, it's things that are old. We're not necessarily going to try to create a complete view of everything. But we're looking at everythign that we have on hand."

HP still owns HP 3000 systems that are churning out data processing for the company, and the servers are likely to be performing even while the vendor decides what to send off to the museum. But the definition of museum materials can be artistic are well as legendary, and at the least the key components of a legacy.

At this summer's meeting at the History Museum of 3000 software pioneers, one founder of this legacy pointed out what makes the 3000 a distinctive stop on a tour of computing history. "The history of computing is not the history of invention for the 3000," said Doug Meacham, the founder of the Interex user group. "It's the history of people coming together, like at the Denver user group meeting in 1978."

Community made the difference in setting the 3000's place in history, he said. The Denver meeting, less than two years after HP made IMAGE a fundamental part of the HP 3000 systems, featured talks from Adager and Robelle founders on breakthroughs in 3000 data management. The 3000 had three things going for it at first that gave the minicomputer a way to win a place in batch-ridden computer departments. It had IMAGE included, something no other supplier could even imagine. Meacham said "HP knew nothing about software" other than IMAGE, "so there were a lot of openings for third parties."

And the computer had a user group dedicated to it in Interex, one that worked alongside HP to help mature the 3000 into a business workhorse powerful enough to last more than three decades.

Moving Remembrances, Moving On

ScreenJet commissioned editorial cartoons in 2003 about HP's migration push

The HP 3000 community is moving onward this week, the first after the Nov. 14 celebration of HP's exit announcement about its e3000 business. But the news that changed the community's world first broke on November 5, 2001, when the vendor community talked openly about the rumors it heard during October of that year. ScreenJet's Alan Yeo shared his story of what receiving the news felt like.

I heard on Monday the 5th of November 2001. Interesting date, since in the UK it's Guy Fawkes Night, "Gunpowder Treason and Plot" as the rhyme goes. It is the day we English celebrate the attempt to blow up our Parliament. To be honest I'm never sure if historically the people celebrated "the attempt," or that it failed.

I started ploughing through email that day when I opened one from Wirt Atmar [of AICS Research]. It was an "open" letter to [HP's e3000 General Manager] Winston Prather (so I'm sure he won't mind me quoting an extract).

************
Dear Winston,

I have heard on Friday and Saturday through the grapevine the same basic story a sufficient number of times now that I believe it to be true:

“HP will announce on November 14 that the HP 3000 line is dead. Last sales of the system will announced to be November 2003, with support through November 2007, with some migration assistance to HP-UX being offered.” I can say that I am deeply shocked, saddened, and angry, but I’m not surprised.

Yeo answered in a reply on that Monday, "We have until the 14th to prepare for the Tidal Wave that will hit us from customers. And I know of several customer sites where just this hint will be all it takes to undermine people that have fought long and hard to keep their HP 3000s." He added this:

Representing a relatively small organisation, one of the questions that potential customers always ask is “How do I know you will stay in business to support us?” My answer is “You don’t, but as a small company we need to keep your business, and unlike large organisations we are very unlikely to arbitrarily drop a product because something else looks more promising.” I believe very good vendor support is one of the reasons that the HP 3000 has survived so long and has developed such a reputation for robustness. Little did I suspect that this would happen with HP itself.

So where to from here?

The 3000 community reported on its reactions to and directions from that day, as well as how members are moving on. Some have moved away from the computer, but only recently. Andreas Schmidt, CSC Computer Technology Specialist reports

Yesterday we switched off the last three HP 3000 servers we ran in Europe for DuPont: a 997-800, two K-Series 9x9s. Two containers of documentation went away as well... and an eye-full of tears with this stuff. We had a small lunch together with the few remaining people who know MPE (including one guy from HP).

Others are still using the 3000 while moving. And a significant number of customers are moving away from HP as a result of the vendor's exit. That away-from-HP transition usually starts with a new support source from the third-party market. Connie Sellitto, Programmer/Analyst at The US Cat Fanciers’ Association, reports

Hard to believe it’s been seven years!  I was basically right where I am now — at the Cat Fanciers’ Association, still coding COBOL programs for use on our HP 3000 A400. We have just switched hardware support from HP to a third party vendor — feels like I’m cutting the umbilical cord!

Al Nizzardini reported from his current job, as Director of Technical Services at Amtek, that Nov. 14 found him in the Windows camp, but still managing a 3000.

I was at a Windows boot camp. Like many others I knew this day was coming. A buddy on mine, also a "3000 guy" called and told me of the news flash. It was like I lost a family member. It became my version of "The Day The Earth Stood Still."

John Hurt of Baseball Express remembers only skepticism that HP would ever leave the market completely. He has also heard from a support supplier about US Defense Department 3000s which seem unlikely to migrate. The DOD still has vintage disk drives in these systems.

I can't remember what I was doing last week much less seven years ago, but if I could, I probably thought to myself... Yeeeeaaah, riiiight.

The Department of Defense has bunches of still-running 3000s, and as long as they do, HP will keep an eye on them. My hardware guy with Datagate tells me about having to go someplace in Georgia to service and preventative maintain a DOD 3000 that still has Coyote drives.

But whether HP moves away or not, customers report they've gone, just now, in the next two years, or some time ago.

Add Trinity Health to the list of former HP 3000 sites. We are decommissioning our three HP 3000s this month.

It's a bittersweet time as a large portion of my career revolved around the good ‘ol HP. Made a good living off of it and met a lot of pretty cool people. The last couple of years have seen my HP 3000 involvement dwindle as I made my way back into the 'wonderful world of Windoze' and client server applications. Nothing I've ever worked on was as rock-solid as our HP 3000s. I’ll definitely miss them -- Pat Shugart

I had to leave HP 3000 work February, 2008. Primary Health in Idaho is still running AMISYS on the HP 3000. The new CIO refers to it as the old dinosaur. It still does the bulk of their business, with no replacement in sight.

I am now doing Microsoft applications now.  I have learned a new phrase, “Best Practice.” It means the Microsoft way. The bulk of our work is done on a HP Unix box -- Kent Wallace, Business Intelligence Developer, Healthcare Management Administrators Inc.

Some community members report they expect to leave their skills behind, but they've been working on the system steadily since 2001. A classic reply came from Joe Dolliver, who had his own consulting practice at the time.

I remember exactly where I was standing. I was just outside the Amisys headquarters talking to my former employee friends about a potential deal I was getting in Virginia Beach when my phone rang. I got a message from my longtime friend Frank Kelly, who had an inside track to the news that was about to be delivered by HP. Amisys was just three days from its client conference in Bethesda MD for its user base. There were going to be many Amisys clients in the area in three days and I had to just sit and not tell anyone. It was hard for me then to see what the future was going to hold, since I had made the bold jump from full-time Amisys employee to my own business in 2000.

I knew my business was going to be a short-lived business.I kept thinking in the back of my mind that I had heard rumors of the HP 3000’s demise before and we just let it pass because we all knew that this system was not going quietly and business would still be good for many years to come.

I am still working on HP 3000 systems running QSS software, but times have changed. We will be migrating sometime in 2009-10, and my prediction of living on the HP 3000 through my retirement is just not going to happen.

John Burke, our technical editor at the NewsWire at the time, saw his plans to survive on his 3000 skills dashed, as well as his faith in that year's 3000 leadership at HP.

I remember exactly what I was doing. Wirt spilled the beans early — I don’t think HP ever forgave him — while I was working on my business plan for life as an independent consultant. I will probably never get over my bitterness toward the HP executives who lied to us about the future of the HP 3000 at HP World (or was it still called Interex in August of that year?). Another thing I will always remember is the hubris of those same executives who were certain everyone would just move on over to HP-UX .

I was very fortunate. I had another career path I could follow. Many were not as lucky.

Some independent vendors, however, are still on the job, like John Stephens of Take Care of IT.

I had to dig out my Franklin Day planner entry for what seems to be a normal Wednesday for those times. I was temporarily not a consultant, as one of my clients had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to be their IT Director. So my day planner notes for that day are things like “Do Hugh’s review”, “Fix end-date in QUKGNBH”, and a reminder to clean the DDS tape drive on the HP 3000, a 927LX, if I remember right. Six months later and the company would be gobbled up, and a year (and one “successful” SAP conversion) later, I was released back to permanent consultancy.

But no mention of HP’s bombshell announcement in my notes. I do recall the event though, and remember thinking something like, “Wow, I guess someday soon I really am going to have to find a career.”

Seven years later, I’m still waiting on that career, still muddling about in more or less the same way as I have for 26 years now. Meanwhile, I’m making a living, and not finding too much to complain about.

Anniversary week winds down, goes onward

This has been a remarkable week for anniversaries. First HP's Unix — replacement target for Hewlett-Packard's favored path for 3000 migrations — celebrates its 25th anniversary. Two days later, Microsoft toasts the 25th year of Windows, the less-favored but more-often-chosen target from the 3000. Today your community commemorates the 7th anniversary of the pullout that changed our working worlds, HP's notice it would quit the 3000 business.

As we've noted in years 2005 through 2007, the exit date for HP isn't certain, although this year's lab closing makes it inevitable. Hewlett-Packard will never re-open its development center for MPE/iX, so for the few of you who've been holding out hope, the SS Return to Business will never make port again. You're porting your systems and apps, or steering a course away from HP — or at least its support business.

We asked around the community yesterday, looking for a few remembrances of that chilly November Wednesday when HP froze out its futures in your market. The stories had an air of acceptance in them. On the Kubler-Ross Steps of Grieving, Acceptance is the last. It gives the survivor the permission to move onward. You've moved, even if many of your companies still rely on the HP 3000.

Doug Greenup, president of connectivity supplier Minisoft, gave us one of the best stories of how the pullout played out for him — days in advance of Nov. 14.

I was at my desk here at Minisoft and a Hewlett-Packard corporate type called me and said she was faxing me a non-disclosure, and that HP wanted me to sign it ASAP. I got it about 20 minutes later and signed a faxed copy back. A different HP corporate type called about an hour later and said they were exiting from the HP 3000 business. They made the official announcement to the HP community a week later.

To be honest, it was a really sad day for us. A lot of “what do we do now?” And a lot of other emotions that I won’t go into here. I hope everyone is doing well. We still have a large number of HP 3000 customers happily running on the platform today. It was and is a great hardware platform!

In contrast, one of the most placid rememberances came from former Robelle VP David Greer, who was already retired from that company and travelling on a two-year family journey through Europe, sailing the Mediterranean. He even incuded a link to his pictures.

I was in Arles, France where the Mistral wind was blowing down the Rhone Valley. I doubt that I heard of the announcement that day, but I know that I heard the news from Birket Foster and you within a day or two.

We got a message about the fallout, the work that followed to move away from that day, from Ed Harms of the Florida FRSA Self Insurers Fund.

Since the announcement we have gone through three vendors to rewrite our software. We are doing it in-house and should be done next year.

And one community member, Donna Hofmeister (who was Donna Garverick at the time), talked about being on the IT staff at Long's Drug, one of the biggest 3000 customers ever, and seeing the inevitable end for HP's Unix as well.

I was at Long’s of course.  I have vague memories, since this was more than yesterday ago,of rumors circulating before the actual announcement was made... but can’t attach them to anything more substantial. I do remember saying that HP-UX was next.  I still think I’m right — it’s just going to take longer.

We'll have more on Monday, the start of the eighth year since HP called off its 3000 futures. Many community members are going onward, beyond HP's now-firming exit at the end of 2010.

3000 goes in an open direction

More than 11 years ago, HP was teaching HP 3000 skills to the world. George Stachnik, an HP employee who communicated 3000 advantages to customers, wrote a series of articles for HP 3000 newbies. In an early part of his series that started in 1997, he summed up HP's view of the system's future (Where's the HP 3000 Going?) as the company saw it back then.

The evolution of the HP 3000 has been driven by the open systems revolution that swept across the IS industry beginning in the 1990s. By 1990, most new computer applications and technologies were being developed on (and for) Unix computers. This trend threatened to leave proprietary architectures like the HP 3000 out in the cold.

In response, HP began bringing industry standard interfaces from the HP 9000 to the HP 3000, focusing first on functions that were standardized by IEEE’s Posix committees. Version 4.0 of MPE XL was renamed to“MPE/iX” (the iX stands for “Integrated PosiX”). The Posix functionality made it easier than it had been to port software from Unix to the HP 3000. Other industry standards (BSD Sockets, SQL, ODBC, Java) have been brought to the 3000 by HP in subsequent OS releases. All this open systems functionality has continued to be enhanced on subsequent releases.

Of course, that Posix functionality remains in MPE after seven successive releases. HP has not eliminated much from the 3000's feature set after more than 30 years of development. Posix makes the HP 3000 behave like Unix systems. HP was betting in 1997 that this similarity could preserve the system. Even though HP shifted its bets four years later about the 3000, using the Posix shell is a way to get an IT staffer introduced to the 3000 from a Unix perspective.

Consider that this weekend starts the eighth year of 3000 survival after HP changed its bet. Adding Posix may not have had the effect HP intended for the vendor's 3000 business. But it edged the system into open source, which could be a key to surviving another seven years.

It's good to remember how much hope HP projected, as well as how much effort the supplier made, here at the end of the seventh year of The Transition. Keeping the system in growth mode was a challenge too complex for Hewlett-Packard to meet. HP had failures in the past with the 3000, like the abortive System 3000 introduction in 1972.

Stachnik explained how Posix would change interfacing with a 3000 in his article. But he underlined the design choices that make this computer a lasting value for those who are staying with it, as well as those taking longer than expected to leave it.

Many computer vendors say that their systems software is “tuned for transaction processing” but in the case of the HP 3000, this is no idle claim. A tremendous amount of R&D work was done at HP to understand exactly what kinds of stresses are placed on computer systems by commercial transaction processing workloads. And the payoff from this R&D was an HP 3000 that was tuned for the best possible performance.

HP got its payoff in open source applications not long after Stachnik's article, earnings that continue to deliver today in DNS services harder to hack than any "industry standard" system, Samba file sharing and more. It all began with an integration of Unix into the HP 3000, differences Stachnik explained in an accompanying article. Have a look at what he wrote, one of the "3000 for Dummies" lessons which continues to teach, here at the end of the seventh year of migrations. HP was directing this system out of the cold in the 1990s. It's still warm to the touch today.

The Afterlife, Now Stalking Its Sixth Year

The sun has set on the fifth year of HP 3000 life since its World Wide Wake in 2003. Across the International Date Line in Bangalore, India, where a few HP lab engineers still toil until December, it's already Nov. 1. All Saints Day, we used to call the date back when I was a boy in Catholic school. Some community members probably think the 3000's survival through 2008 is a miracle.

There are many saints who could claim some credit for the survival of 10,000 to 20,000 HP 3000s. There are also many systems that have been switched off, scrapped or dropped into deep storage over those five years. The HP 3000 system populace could only decline from its census numbers of 2003. However, it's easy to assert that more 3000s will be running after today — and into the sixth year of The Afterlife — than Hewlett-Packard or its partners ever could predict.

A good share of the populace is running because migration was no two-year matter, or even four-year project at some sites. In these companies the HP 3000 is earmarked for a decommission, sometime in the future, near or far. The Afterlife is a land which is rich in the unknown. We cannot know for certain who's still running, who's making migration progress, and who has put their IT futures in limbo. For some customers, they live in the Afterlife because there's no place else to go.

Oct. 31 is one of two dates burned into the memory of the community, and its shadow is smaller than Nov. 14. HP told everyone it would cease sales and manufacture of the 3000 on Oct. 31, 2003. The date was so widely known that ScreenJet's Alan Yeo organized a World Wide Wake, which commemorated the service this server delivered since 1974. (Note that the service provider above our 2003 story did not outlive HP 3000's utility.) HP sold this system over more than 30 years, counting the ill-fated launch of the System 3000 in 1972. Everyone who calls on 3000 skills and experience, or makes a living in this afterlife, wants to know how many more years of commerce remains. Approximately.

Some people lifting toasts at that wake believed the 3000s worldwide would run into the next decade. Some systems will. Others will fall off when HP stops collecting support revenues and delivering support services. So many of the still-running have separated themselves from HP's offerings, however, that there's little HP can do to nudge them along.

"Most people who have a 3000 would just as soon not change," says Bill Miller, founder of financial app supplier Genesis Total Solutions. Miller's company has helped 3000 owners move to new platforms with several new versions of the financials running in other environments. But the customers who are left today — here in Year Six beyond HP sales and the Wake — could be moving slower than a zombie picking its way across a graveyard (to use a holiday-induced metaphor.)

"They've invested time and money in it, and it's been quite a while since somebody's purchased a brand-new 3000," Miller says in our upcoming November issue Q&A. "If they've had it and it's working, and they're pretty satisfied with what their situation is, every change they would have to go through will cost them quite a bit of money, time and effort. "So they're generally not pressed to do something. HP still has service, and they can find third parties who will service the machines."

"I had one guy tell me that they'll have to pull the 3000 out of his cold, dead hands," Miller added.

There is gusto for going, but not as much satisfaction in staying. Some would say that's satisfaction only for the short term, while the gusto grows opportunity for new skills and greater flexibility and connectivity. I don't mean to insult anybody who's remaining a 3000 customer by comparing their actions to a zombie. All in fun, of course, because every manager who's being responsible knows their own timetable to tomorrow, or exit plan for the Afterlife.

But today, nearing the end of the seventh year since HP announced its exit, nobody knows all the plans, or even a modicum of them. We try to track trends here, like any journalism operation, but the evidence is more anecdotal than exacting. We don't think it will take a seance to communicate with the community. The Linked In social network just reached its 80th member of The HP 3000 Community Group. (Superdelegates, I like to consider these members. Most count more than one decade of 3000 experience, but all are welcome.) A similar number of members, with much overlap, is part of Bill & Dave's Excellent Machine group on Linked In.

We're big on Linked In because it's a way to trade skill resumes and approach members for employment, even if most of the new 3000 work by now is assisting in long-term migrations. There's a broader future out there somewhere, a specter of change for some people and an ascent into advancement for others. These days change is in the air, and it's far from rare. The only thing uncommon is a 3000 owner who is unaware of their vendor's 3000 status: on ice, starting in the cold of January. If development from the creator is evidence of death in your estimation, you're digging out instead of digging in. It may take another five years of afterlife to run the populace down another 50 percent. Our crystal ball remains cloudy on that prophecy. Welcome to Year Six.

Retaining 3000 value, by the letter

In recent weeks the 3000 community has heard from a new user who's discovered the HP 3000. The latest system which Paul Raulerson has been raving about to the 3000 newsgroup is a Series 918, the rock-bottom of the 3000 server line still considered modern enough to run the latest MPE/iX version. (Take a click on the block diagram at left to see the 9x8 design.)

Back in the 1990s, our good friend and ally John Burke was shopping for a personal HP 3000, something to support his 3000 consulting business. We talked when he had found a couple of systems, both used. One was a Series 917, the other a Series 918. The price tags, including IMAGE and MPE/iX, were both a bargain back in the late 1990s: $1,600 for the Series 917, $2,400 for the Series 918.

That same Series 918 system now sells, about a decade later on the used market, for $1,800. You might note that this computer which HP stopped building and selling has lost only one-fourth of its used market value over a decade. Try matching that with any other business computing system.

Retaining value has been a mantra of the 3000 community ever since it formed up 34 years ago. Systems built and during the 1980s are still running and working. A 14-year-old computer like the Series 918 is a relative newcomer — and more importantly, a system which can utilize the most current version of the MPE/iX operating system and IMAGE database.

Some say that this retention of value mantra was a death knell for HP's 3000 business. Not for the server, but HP's business. How much has HP forgotten about its system? Not so much that you cannot find an HP hosting an HP Labs article from the Hewlett-Packard Journal, circa 1995, touting "A Low Cost, High Performance Multiuser Business Server System." (Go ahead, download it from HP.)

Or if someday HP removes this documentation of its achievement, you can download it from us. HP recently advised the 3000 community that it should download the documents it needs, since the HP 3000 data will be pulled from Hewlett-Packard servers.

In seven years or so.

HP called the 9x8 systems the E-Series in their HP 9000 incarnations. The Low-Cost, Higher-Performance Features introduction said "the principal reason for achieving high integration and low cost for the Series 9x8 servers was the development of the PA 7100LC processor chip, which was being developed at the same time as our servers."

LC was a designation for low-cost, since HP said its Series 9x8 priorities were short time to market, low cost, and improved performance. Make no mistake, comparing this system to anything HP sells as a business server today would not favor the 918. The system is so rock-bottom on the HP 3000 chart that its performance is the base for the "HP 3000 Performance Unit" which HP used instead of the then-industry-standard SPEC performance marks.

Put another way, the top of the line HP e3000 N-Class 750 4-processor system is 768 times faster than a 918. (Thanks go to Wirt Atmar's HP 3000 Relative Performance charts at AICS.) You can purchase either the 9x8s or a beefy N-Class on the used marketplace. But apparently the Series 918, with only about 40GB of disk, can only fall so far in value.

HP recognized that its business model for business server sales was out of date, a discovery the vendor made during the reorganization of HP following the Compaq merger. HP knew it was selling far fewer 3000s than Unix servers, but it didn't act on this knowledge while the customers remained loyal and retained servers — and more importantly, support contracts.

Come 2001, just months after the merger was unfurled, and the 3000 got its walking papers from HP. I use the colloquial phrase directly, because getting walking papers is akin to being fired. When you're fired you can still work, just someplace else. Which is precisely what this Series 918, a la E-Class, is still doing today as it's being discovered by a new user.

3000 enters advent of a unique season

It's an old sweatshirt, but the HP giveaway is more than just a guy's worn-down garment to me, not just a bit of cloth burnished to a perfect feel. Somehow the blue all-cotton shirt had just the right heft, not too heavy to wear here in Texas, or too thin to survive 18 years of no-fuss washing. The shirt is blue, royal blue in the hue that HP wore in 1990, not blended with Compaq red. The shirt bears the color of a company that still rode unique, proprietary technology as an advantage, racing to give customers a reason to keep Hewlett-Packard wrapped around their companies.

I pull on my sweatshirt this morning because I have left open the window behind this flat-screen monitor in my study. The new season of fall, brief and delicious, crept into Texas yesterday and brought cool evening air through the state. I wear one of my best sweatshirts from HP because I will interview 3000 People at Hewlett-Packard in a few hours. I want to remember the heart of their intentions, so I have pulled on a editor's gift to wear over my own heart.

At the risk of becoming too maudlin, this season feels like the advent of an ending. Not the finale of the HP 3000. No, the 3000 and its users are following their own calendars to play out a future of transition. But what remains in the legends of the fall is a closing chapter in a story of innovation, neglect and renaissance, and finally the procession through a recession, arriving at the day HP ceases to create for a system it created. HP now has a business manager and some engineers, a lab director and cloud of support workers which know the HP 3000. Few of them use their stellar knowledge full time. The vendor has told customers they will lose their 3000 lab at HP in 75 days. There's no changing that, not any more than there's a chance the "CIMinar by the Bay" and sailboat picture on my sweatshirt will last forever. But another 18 years? Only with loving care, the kind of attention to detail which 3000 customers carry as a credo over their hearts.

Whenever I wear this shirt and work on 3000 news, I recall what Charlie from HP Press Relations told me on a stranded tour boat in the San Francisco Bay. "We look toward the day when we are not in the hardware business anymore," he said. Services, along with software, was HP's target we discussed on that junket. The concept sounded radical that night, but not now in a world of computing that has been rendered, rewoven and colored anew with every passing season. Change is apace, and computers are now piece-work instead of masterpieces. When I look beyond my heart on the sleeve of this shirt, I see aging hardware and aging masters of the 3000 arts — but all still useful and vital, years beyond HP's expectation. Still, old compared to most everything else.

I cling to my sweatshirt like I cling to the typical guy's mid-life dream: mature can be attractive, maybe even sexy, but surely loveable. Maybe gray can be the new royal blue.

Gray can be something new because we communicate so much more easily. We live in a world of factcheck.org and Politico, where we are connected with reality and spin at the click of a mouse, where we share our lives in front of flat screens in offices and living rooms, watching and learning and teaching. The lessons of HP's 3000 labs will not ever be lost, not with today's technology tools. Data, information, knowledge and then wisdom outlasts people, politics and policies.

In the United States we are learning to respect elders, we hope. At least I hope so at my age. Because even through anyone on the windward side of 50 can "screw up," as John McCain joked at his own expense last night on David Letterman's Late Night show we can also Show Up, over and again, practicing the disciplines born from decades of training. Even with that chance to choose an elder candidate over a younger one, we in the US face a choice that seems to beg more than one solution to a single challenge. Youth and age can serve together, just as Barack Obama serves alongside his competitor — where I hope that the elders can repeat maverick acts and the youths bring new ideas and ideals.

And so the HP 3000 will start its own Legends of the Fall this week, following the first in the last series of policy announcements around HP's end-game. It's appropriate to be talking today with Jennie Hou, Craig Fairchild, Jeff Bandle and others inside HP's 3000 redoubt, coincident with the advent of baseball's Fall Classic, the World Series. As last night's classic game between Boston and Tampa Bay proved, nothing is ended until the last at-bat, with many an outcome earned more on desire and discipline than any dead-certain advantage in early innings. We love comebacks of all kinds, the victory snatched from those jaws of failure.

13 years ago this month, my wife and partner Abby started The 3000 NewsWire with me, a cranky and curious reporter with a passion for critique and analysis. Abby brought the crucial spark to an ember that much of the world considered as long cold and dead. In time we found your energy to lift up our steps, proof of a renaissance we had predicted with few assurances. Obvious ones, anyway. Just as Cal Ripken was setting an everyday playing record of legendary length, Abby and I began to revere and record a remarkable team of experts, and a group of creations of people who came to play good every day. She came with her best stuff, as pitchers say, like the subscriber card at the left that uses the words of Willie Mays. She is the only reason our dream, now in a new life here on your screen, became a reality, instead of just a good idea too scary to risk. Life is a chance to leave no regrets, because you took every risk you could — maybe like the risk many have claimed you take by using your HP 3000 beyond the end of this season, this decade, and perhaps another 18 years.

No matter how you count them, there are many days ahead to finish that migration of yours, or retain the world-class value of your computers. But since we are connected as never before, you can count on your community, brandishing its colors of wisdom like the leaves on trees during this fall. Stand tall but together like trees in a forest. Take a risk, to leave behind no regrets. Whenever our end arrives, it is certain we won't say, "I wish I did not take so many risks." Even when we fall, it gives us the chance to rise up wiser.

Earning a select place on a best-of list

The 3000 NewsWire was born only because of a heavy-lifting partner. Even though our readers hear from me all the time, the spark of birth for our news service arrived from Abby Lentz, my partner in business and life. Thirteen years ago this month she nudged out oiur first paper issue, a venture some said would never survive. She believed even before I did. Today she earned a place in a best-of list of health providers. Her new career, along with the continuting advice from a publisher's chair, is teaching yoga to the overweight and obese. HeavyWeight Yoga, she calls it, a practice that Fitness magazine honored today in its first list of Fit 50 for 2008. She's even got a DVD to spread her practice.

Abby has been working toward her goal since HP announced its 3000 exit strategy. Stubborn and steady folks that we are, neither of us have abandoned this community, even when it looked to experts like it was a dubious decision to remain. Instead, we both got to work in leveraging what the 3000 and publishing had taught us, creating new acts for the long-running show of 3000 support and communication with community.

What we're doing here is adding rather than turning to something new, the same strategy which IBM has followed for its midrange, SMB solution the Series i (AS/400). Many of the contacts we encounter in your community have added to their skill sets and business since 2001, but remain devoted to the HP 3000. Just this week we talked with John Stephens, whose Take Care of IT is a one-man support company serving HP 3000 sites in manufacturing and healthcare. Stephens does MCSE Windows consulting, too, but it succeeds because of experience from more than 25 years of 3000 IT work.

Health choices which support special communities can be noble work, or feel isolated, or as steady as the Maytag repairman (who rarely had a crisis to solve, so reliable was his product). Whether it's supporting MPE/iX when nobody else in your metro area can do so, or putting the benefits of yoga out to a populace that doesn't look like human pretzels, specializing can be rewarding. 3000 support companies tell us that's so, especially with HP leaving the customer base this year.

I'm proud of what Abby has accomplished over more than four years of study and work, getting her message out there in much the same way we both have assured your community that the 3000's end is only as near as you desire. When you take up what seems like foolish case-work, only to learn that your community is hungry for something they can't find anyplace else, the effect is like finding lost money while cleaning the house.

The HP 3000 is just as unique as HeavyWeight Yoga or the infinite future of IBM's SMB offerings. It's not for everyone, but for a customer of a certain size, this system delivers the benefits of business in a way nothing else quite can: though integration, value retention and a mature, stable environment and community.

Be proud of yourself for stretching your investment of the 3000 across a mat that many say you can't reach with this elegant architecture. Abby says Awareness, Acceptance and Affection form the core of HeavyWeight Yoga. Being aware of how to sustain a system, accept that nothing lasts forever, and express the affection for lasting value, can be the credo to carry you into the next decade.

Programming Made Easier

Historic facts can expire, their sell-by dates causing what we know to become untrue. Take the history of the HP 3000's advances. In 2000, HP's pledge to take MPE/iX onto the Itanium architecture was already history, since the vendor made the promise several years earlier. Then in late 2001, well, that history became invalid, and to some customers, simply untrue. But some artifacts of history hold facts that remain true no matter what their date, especially if you own or operate a 3000 of any vintage.

Durable truth is hard to come by in the computer industry. So much is paved over every year that knowledge becomes arcane quickly in the name of advances. But consistency is also a value worth preserving, and so a good share of the 3000 community is still using the system HP built, then dropped from its 21st Century sales plans.

That constant use is what makes a recent addition to our archives more than a relic. Today we received a copy of the Using The HP 3000 "an introduction to interactive programming," circa early 1979. (Thanks to Roger Smith, IS Director of Tulare County Office of Education, for the addition; click on any photo here for a larger version.) In that springtime of 1979, the HP 3000 had two means of interactive access: the 2645A terminal and a hardcopy-only cousin, the 2635. But the commands from that MPE III version of the OS still run today, nearly 30 years later.

That's more than historic. It borders on legendary — but it's also why HP had to admit the 3000 business was too big for it to maintain. Too large in time-span, anyway.

HP wrote this book for the "professional computer programmer" as well as "someone who has never seen a computer before. And we know from experience that both categories are well represented in the HP 3000 user base."

To be sure, the last part of that sentence will be viewed as history. You may not be able to find someone who has never seen a computer before. However, it's not that hard to find someone who has never seen a business server before, and that's what kind of computer the HP 3000 remains today.

The manual is fun, and full of reminders of how much easier programming has become in 29 years' time. The sections on how to delete a line or characters within a line make me wonder how anyone had time to compete a project. But then projects deadlines were measured in months instead of weeks for most customers. Plus, completing a project on the first attempt was a genuine measure of success. Still, all that control-X and control-H had to slow down the creative process. Maybe it was like learning to finger the keys before you compose the concerto.

This document had some unfortunate choices of layout, the worst being the use of yellow type to indicate the HP 3000 responses to commands. Like everybody in 1979, HP was learning how to teach its customers about the use of this new tool. Interactive computing was the reason that the HP 3000 took off in an era dominated by IBM mainframes, and HP probably wanted to show how lively the interactive experience could appear. Later on, you could actually see yellow letters in HP responses, on certain types of terminals.

Each year from 1979 to the present, HP has worked to ensure the largest number of HP 3000s could run the programs crafted with the help of this manual and successors. That makes the 3000-using universe unparalleled among any computer launched in the 1970s. Rogers said that the software written in the 1980s ran during this century.

When I started here 1985 we had a Series III and a Series 44. We then upgraded the 44 to a 48 and changed the III to a Series 70. The next step was changing both to a 960. The last one we got was the 969KS/200.

We still had software we wrote on the Series III that was still running on the 969.  Amazing.

When it adopted a go-go grow business mantra in the 21st Century, HP couldn't find the motivation to keep up anymore with its 3000 legend. Perhaps a dedicated base of users, full of expertise and experience, can carry on into a fresh decade of the 21st, starting in 2010. Whether it's a manual for an HP storage device, or a programming aid written before Ronald Reagan took office, nothing seems to expire altogether in your community. How many others can claim that kind of history?

How many 3000s, how long: why care?

I have answered one question over and over during the 24 years I've covered the HP 3000 marketplace: How many HP 3000s are out there? The answer has varied from decade to decade, but the query has also changed, too. The tone of the question has gone from proud (the 80s) to curious (the 90s), to dismissive (2002-2004) and more recently, hopeful.

David Evans Jr., Chief Systems Security Officer at the San Bernadino schools' Superintendent's Office, asked the question again last week, and with good reason from a 3000 shop making its migration. I answered,

Steve Cooper of Allegro, who's been in the biz forever, said at this summer's Computer History Museum symposium that he thought a minimum of 10,000 systems are now in use, perhaps up to 20,000. At its peak, the installed base was at least 100,000 — that point being before Windows had released a truly-working version.

I agree with both of his numbers and defer to his perspective, since I've only been in the market since 1984. Steve pre-dates me by 10 years.

Evans was researching the question to get data on the support viability of the HP 3000 in the years beyond 2010. HP's already said it will shut down its lab operations in 14 weeks from now. Evans explained

We know HP has posted the December, 2010 date. [Our organization] doesn’t think our migration from the HP3000 to a .NET application is going to be done by then. Our application is a home grown financial/HR and there really is no off the shelf solution that will work for a County Office of Education’s needs. Off the shelf would get us maybe 70 percent, and we’d still have to write the other 30 and make it integrate. Plus the cost factor.

So my boss was asking how many HP 3000s are still in use. Ideal is our hardware support vendor and they are saying they can support our hardware until 2015. I would think that their source of replacement parts is going to be surplus HP3000s. So how many more are their left, and at what rate will they be consumed, is the concern. And I would think the other HP 3000 support vendors, are scouring the landscape to find HP 3000s to acquire for their needs.

Shops like the ones where Evans works are commonplace, not rare holdovers. Much of this 3000 community has in-house apps doing the work of IT, and moving to off the shelf is a disappointing choice for a migration shop. Moving an app takes time to do it right, whether it's a Windows migration like the one at the San Bernadino schools or a Unix target. The HP 3000 will hold its value for these companies even as they invest in the tools and expertise to leave the platform.

At this point there's no clue about whether HP's 2010 exit deadline will be moved. But if shops like this California customer are still out there, it's easy to predict that HP will continue to write contracts which are very private in nature. These same circumstances — keeping customers mum with Confidential Disclosure Agreements while extending support beyond deadlines — were used by HP during 2005.

Managing US easier than HP?

If you're feeling a little disconnected from the US Presidential campaign, good news: A former HP CEO has made it more interesting for you, the HP 3000 customer who has seen their system sent to the exits by that very same CEO's management.

Of course, we're talking about Carly Fiorina, the only woman on earth who can be called a former CEO of HP. Naturally enough, her name surfaced during her campaigning for Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin. In what may first look like a joke at Palin's expense, the TV network Current TV said in its comedy show Campaign Update that Fiorina stepped out to claim nobody running for either party is sharp enough to run HP. Because it's so hard, she explained.

The layoff — oops, restructuring — of about 25,000 employees won't make running Hewlett-Packard any easier in the near term, now that EDS is a part of HP. But the acquisition of a $44 billion company fulfills one of Fiorina's dreams: To become a services provider on par with IBM, or better. Although she couldn't get the HP board to swallow up PriceWaterhouseCooper, her successor served up EDS instead. Like a Lance Armstrong of the Fortune 50, though, Fiorina isn't riding off into the sunset, instead popping up on TVs and comedy routines this week. Have a look at the last 45 seconds of the network's latest "Campaign Update" to watch a lighter look at the high-flying CEO's latest.

Fiorina was never appreciated for her candor while HP's CEO, and her comment put her in the McCain doghouse. She was booked for several TV interviews over the next few days, including one on CNN. Those interviews have been canceled.

Fiorina's legacy is being carried out by a corporate chief more similar to the rest of HP's CEOs: white male, up from the boardroom of a computer maker. And if you survey HP CEOs before Fiorina and the current Mark Hurd, you will find they have another common element: All were engineers with an affinity for technology. Not your Fiorina trademark, which might have contributed to the 3000 landing on the exit list for the company during the last major acquisition.

When HP's directors fired Fiorina less than four years later in 2005, the author of Perfect Enough, biographer George Anders, said HP might have been better served with a chief in 2001 who understood technology. From a Washington Post article:

 I think of her as a bull-market manager . . . someone who was very good at expanding the business in boom times, but who didn't really have good instincts for efficiency in tough times. When she'd cut, it was with lunges that didn't satisfy either the workforce or Wall Street.

And HP is in some very technologically complex businesses. I think a top executive at such a company needs a deep understanding of the tech to be effective.

It's easy to disagree with Anders, if the goal is to shed computer creations (such as MPE and Alpha) while getting more airtime for the chief executive. Young, meanwhile, left HP to sit as a director on seven corporate boards: Novell (vice-chair), Affymetrix, Chevron Corporation, International Integration, Inc., Lucent Technology, Smith Kline Beecham plc, and Wells Fargo & Co.

You might argue that no leader of a corporation of more than $100 billion would steward something like the 3000, an integrated enterprise solution with a specialized operating environment. And you'd win that argument, so long as nobody in the room could spell I-B-M. Why this matters to the HP 3000 customer, or soon-to-be former customer: Hewlett-Packard is making its biggest push to be a services company selling computer solutions, instead of the other way around. It's up to the customers to decide if they should vote their dollars for that leadership during 2009.

 

 

Keeping HP up to date on 3000 history

   HP’s best efforts to curtail rogue thinking led to the system’s database, Fred White reported at this summer's HP 3000 seminar at the Computer History Museum. “If I hadn’t been kicked out of the file system lab, Image would have never existed,” he said.

   HP's founders had no ardor to create computers. HP killed off its Omega project, which would have created a mainframe competitor in the early 1970s, because Hewlett and Packard didn’t want to go into computing, said HP's Chuck House, director of engineering at the time.

    But even when the 3000 first shipped, it was saddled with problems in its first two releases. The computer crashed every 24 hours on initial shipments, then every 24 days on a second rollout. Only by the time the System III was selling, said Adager's Rene Woc, could HP compete with IBM. “There was still the small matter of making it work,” he added. Rumbles of laughter rolled around the room.

    HP benefited from its relations with these vendors in the days of 3000 growth. Harper Thorpe, retired from HP after his work in the channel, said that “There was no ecosystem for this system, and to a great degree, I think our partners led us there.”

   

The opportunities were exciting enough to drive brilliant engineers back into their college-day habits. Adager’s Alfredo Rego talked about how he took the bus as a university professor and “I had no money whatsoever, so [Allegro's] Steve Cooper and the AMS guys invited me to Thanksgiving. I packed some food, and it was all done totally informally with no financing whatsoever.”

   Rick Berquist of AMS said “they said that Alfredo guy came and fixed our database and slept on our sofa.”

    One pioneer after another confirmed that the HP Way and the excitement of leaping into a new kind of computing led them to the 3000 software world.

   “The HP culture circa 1972 and for the next five years was impeccable,” said ASK’s Elder. “Dealing with HP was a real joy,” added Martin Gorfinkel of LARC Computing, “compared to dealing with almost every other company.”

    Rego said a forced stay in Boston showed him that Data General and Digital isolated their engineers in a way that made Hewlett-Packard and the 3000 fascinating. “Bits and bytes have always been my focus, and I was able to talk to Fred White at HP in 1978 about them. So my reason for choosing HP was Fred White.”

    The history museum intends to have complete transcripts and a video available of the one-day meeting — plus its oral histories with pioneers like Rego — in less than a year. Many pioneers remain to be interviewed — legends such as Orly Larson, Robelle’s Bob Green, Ed McCracken of HP and the leaders of VEsoft and WRQ and Tymlabs.

    Nearly every story told in the history session about the 3000 had an HP angle or reference, an element which Allegro’s Cooper put in accurate perspective. “What bothers me is talking about HP in the singular,” he said. “You almost have to talk about which HP you were dealing with.”

    Cooper's annotation of "which HP" merits special attention today, so many years after the system's launch. One familiar HP 3000 group still works, at least through the rest of this year, in HP offices on the last bits of sustaining engineering. Another HP, ensconced only in support contracts and services, controls the future of the vendor's 3000 business.

History flows full at museum

When 18 pioneers gathered this summer for the first HP 3000 software meeting at the Computer History Museum, stories showed how far the HP 3000 has advanced from its earliest, buggy days.

But some tales that were told at the Mountain View-based museum illustrated that HP often saw third party and independent companies educating HP on what the 3000 could do. A good example came in a story from Martin Gorfinkel of LARC Computing.

LARC's Fantasia software wrote  — and still writes — to the LaserJet family of printers. "The 2680 was a way different beast, than a LaserJet," he told us after the meeting. "The 2680 was designed to work off the HP 3000, but the printer had a relatively short life. The TDP/3000 software  — HP’s renaming of the LARC Editor/Scribe Word Processing Software  — wrote to the 2680. That interface was done by HP in England."

"The Fantasia software writes to the LaserJet printers," he said, "and for the first several years that the software and the LaserJets were on the market, HP insisted that the LaserJet printers would not work with the HP 3000."

The concept of a third-party solution extending the 3000 beyond HP's plans and designs? Commonplace during the first two decades of the computer's life. Even today, this is the mission that OpenMPE continues to pursue. The only thing that has changed is the do-it-yourself habit of the computer customer. HP 3000 owners from the 1970s and 1980s learned to help themselves, then teach HP what was possible.

The technical horsepower in the meeting room at Mountain View, along with the start-up muscle, could have convinced HP to decide another fate for its HP 3000 business. Adager's Alfredo Rego reported on his efforts in 2001 to persuade the vendor to sell the system business, instead of shut it down. That's a history lesson whose first part is well known, and now being documented at the Museum.

The second part, the conclusion and legacy, remains to be written once HP returns the HP 3000 book to the community's library.

System 3000 pioneers launch volley of stories

    The talk in the room rang of software. For the cornerstone system of HP’s computer empire, the world’s Computer History Museum set up a ring of tables with two corners — and one open end. The HP 3000’s end may be neither near or clear, but a room of pioneers ringed those tables to talk not of an end, but all about beginnings.

   This summer produced the first meeting of the HP3000 Software Special Interest Group at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View. The CHM put out a call to the community to invite people who built the HP 3000 software foundation, the bedrock to the system’s — as well as HP’s — success.

    Few in the room had begun their HP 3000 career later than the 1970s. The meeting table was flanked with pros who cut the cloth of the software garment which clothed mewling 3000 hardware. Some, like Marty Browne working for ASK Computer in the early 1970s, reported a miserable summer creating on a computer of dubious reliability.

    

Browne was one of 18 “pioneers” called to download the historic beginnings of 3000 software, with most of the tales told out of the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Chuck House, who become HP corporate engineering director in the early 1980s, gave insights from the higher echelons of Hewlett-Packard. One of his more riveting comments was that HP “never really understood” software during that period when the 3000 was growing its reputation and customer base on the strength of MPE and applications from its ecosystem of partners.

    HP’s top-level ardor was never strong for the computer called the System 3000 on its first rollout. Phil Sakahihara, who led the development of the HP DeskManager suite which powered HP communication for more than 15 years, said that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard came down to the labs to see the 3000 underway “and they weren’t very happy about it.”

    House and Sakahihara made up a handful of HP representation among the invitees; HP archivist Anna Mancini couldn’t make it to the June meeting, but Harper Thorpe brought the insights of a founder of the value added reseller chain he helped build. Fred White recounted his time in an HP “black sheep squadron” to build the IMAGE database before he joined Adager. Doug Meacham, also an HP alum, gave reports on the founding years of the Interex user group he headed up during the 1970s and 80s.

     The symposium was moderated by Burt Grad, a 54-year vet of computing and CHM advisory board member. He asked the kind of fundamental questions only a 3000 outsider could to spark deep-seated examinations of how the computer became HP’s sparkplug for IT products.

    The attendees were select among the 3000 community, ranging from Brown and Nick Elder of ASK, the largest software supplier in the 3000’s nascent days; to Grace Gentry of Gentry Systems, Steve Dennis of Smith Dennis & Gaylord; Steve Cooper of Allegro, as well as his colleague Stan Sieler; Adager’s Alfredo Rego and Rene Woc; Jack Damm of Cognos, whose roots ran back to the days when the company was called Quasar; Mark Klein, representing the early days of Orbit Software as well as Abacus; Rick Berquist of AMS, and Martin Gorfinkel of LARC Computing.

    Nearly every pioneer had a story to tell about prodding the 3000 into impossible capabilities. “People were pushing the boundaries,” Mecham said.

Keeping up links to 3000 info

The Web is well-known for dead links, those Web addresses which return nothing but a "404 Not Found" message, or something more clever from some providers. The HP 3000 has been the subject of Web information for so long that its Web links bear some scrutiny these days, when parts of your ecosystem can go dormant. Some of the older information is on HP's Jazz Web server, where one dated page shows us how much has changed since the start of the century. (We'd like to see more "Not Found" pages like the comic one at left, an effort to spark vacating the chair in front of the keyboard.)

At a Web page titled "How to get HPe3000 information online, there's a good top half of the page with instructions on how to subscribe to the HP 3000 newsgroup/mailing list. But once you read beyond the link to 3k Associates' e3000 FAQ, the links get spotty. It begins with a reference to the HP e3000 Answer Line, an experiment hosted by the now-defunct user group Interex.

Another casualty that lingers in HP reference page is the 3kworld site, a venture started by Client Systems in the months before Y2K. 3kworld didn't outlive HP's first announced end of support date — but a major portion of its material was supplied by the NewsWire, so much of what was online is still available.

Perhaps a greater loss, still listed on the HP page, is the pair of e3000 vendor lists, solutionstore3000.com and the HP 3000 vendor directory maintained by Triolet Systems' founder Brian Duncombe. Of the former we know too much; SolutionStore was a NewsWire venture of the 1990s, until a Web provider went dark with all data. Duncombe checked in with a similar outcome for his labors, but his information survives at OpenMPE.

Duncombe did a cleaner exit than we managed with SolutionStore. He contributed the source of his vendor listings to OpenMPE last year at the request of director Donna Hofmeister and Webmaster John Dunlop.

The remains of the list are still online at the great Tech Wiki created by 3k's Chris Bartram, who still tends to the server hosting the archived articles of the 3000 NewsWire 1996-2005. You can look through a list by vendor category or vendor name at the HP 3000 Twiki site. Even update an entry, if you're so inclined to help.

Duncombe, who started his project in the 1990s and maintained it for nearly a decade, wrote several popular performance utilities for the HP 3000 during the 1980s and '90s. He then had to wage a lawsuit campaign against a series of companies to get paid for his most popular product, and finally prevailed several years ago after what seemed like a decade of court jousting and delays. Of his vendor list, cross-indexed and including hundreds of companies, Duncombe said

I was never able to generate more than an infinitely small interest in vendors keeping me up to date. The majority of the vendor list was generated by me from materials that I picked up at conferences or e-mail references. Most updates were likewise generated by me, although some were as a result of a complaint about inaccurate information by a user, and my [subsequent] research into the specific item. It was a labor of love that I had to end when I stopped going to conferences.

Google quickly finds Adager, Flexibase, RAC, QTP, MPE/iX 6.5, and so forth. The cross-referencing by subject was useful in my vendor list, but my suggestion [to OpenMPE] was that it is not worth the effort.

The path of my pursuit in this update of Web links turns out to be circular. I located that HP Web page that sports long-dead links (Interex expired three years ago) by searching with Google. To be precise, though, the HP page turned up in a search using Google Minus Google, an engine built around Google's that eliminates results from Google's Web sites like Blogger, YouTube and Knol.

As Duncombe says, Google turns out to be a great way to find HP 3000 vendors who you already know by name. But search results on "HP3000 vendors" start with the great hp3000links.com Web page, where a pull-down menu will take you directly to a 3000 vendor's Web page. Know the vendor, find their page. That site, coincidentally, is maintained by OpenMPE's Dunlop in another labor of love.

As for Duncombe, he's retired from his labors to found a chapter of Habit for Humanity, volunteering as well as "keeping busy getting back into photography and woodworking. I still lurk on [the 3000 mailing list] and see the messages from those still on the platform. I understand that for a small company that is perfectly happy with MPE, it is difficult to migrate, and that is a business decision that can be taken with the known facts."

History in the re-making, even today

Once or twice up here I've noted that I'm researching a history of the HP 3000 which I will write. This weekend I spent time catching up with a few of the better sources for 3000 histories — all while I was muddling through audio notes of my visit to the HP 3000 Software SIG meeting, held this summer at the Computer History Museum.

I'll have more to report on that CHM SIG meet, the first of which I hope will be many more. But for today, I'd like to point out a few bits of history the devoted 3000 user and devout HP Way worshiper might not know. For example, in Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company, Michael S. Malone includes a handful of pages about the HP 3000 saga. Malone has written a great HP book with just a dash of 3000 specifics. He notes that your system was the first product which ever embarrassed Hewlett and Packard in public — because it flopped so badly. The first 3000

...only supported two users, not the 64 it had promised. The computer sent was a pile of junk. It wasn't even finished, missing some key components. [Hewlett and Packard] heard about the dead-on-arrival 3000 from an article in Computerworld. It was the first piece of truly bad press Hewlett-Packard had experienced in 33 years of business, and the two founders... reacted ferociously.

It's good to recall history while trying to make some, like the efforts of the OpenMPE group to get a license to fix MPE/iX once HP has given up that business. Bill and Dave took measures in 1972 with the 3000 to ensure HP's reputation would survive intact. Some in HP will stand firm today to ensure no history can be written of a 3000 living and working beyond HP's involvement.

Every HP 3000 (called the System 3000) that HP had sold was recalled all during 1975, to be replaced by a Model 2100 computer for free if the customer wanted one. HP pulled the System 3000 off the market for the better part of two years.

It was bad enough to trigger an upheaval of talent. Tandem Computer — now the homeland of the HP NonStop server line — was born because of the HP 3000 flameout. James Treybig, Tandem's CEO, and his co-founder Mike Green came right out of HP's Computer SYstems division (that's the CSY you'll hear the 3000 group being called.) The two men founded a company that idolized the HP Way and opened up shop just down the street in Cupertino.

At the CHM meeting earlier this summer, a table of 3000 pioneers (the museum's title for everybody) talked about the scant uptime for the early 3000s. The computer which made HP a computer company, instead of just one of the world's greatest instrument and calculator creators, couldn't remain up for more than 24 days. Malone says the flaw was in the design, which overflowed a clock register. At the core of the problem was a gaggle of engineers telling HP that everything would be just fine with the 3000, instead of reporting what was well off schedule of being fixed.

Something very similar happened at the 3000's next debacle, when the server tried to become a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) and head toward 32-bit computing. HP responded in both instances with an enforcer. In the 1970s it was Paul Ely, feared by many according to Malone's book. In 1986, when PA-RISC was a 3000 bust, the muscle was HP's labs chief Joel Birnbaum, who said to us reporters in a conference at an HP user group meeting, "we expect that these problems will yield to engineering discipline."

Bad press prompted a fierce response once again, when the industry's journalists called out the woes of a long-awaited HP product. Like any good vendor, HP needs honest critique, told in public, to make the best products. If there had been only an echo-chamber with no stories, the 3000 probably never would have gone on to sell 200,000 units through the remaining 17 years of its HP lifespan, or become so durable that "between 10,000 and 20,000 of them" would still be running today, according to Allegro's Steve Cooper at the CHM meeting.

That's a message for HP to consider as it wants to control what can be heard and reported at the biggest meeting of its users. In a bit of irony, this summer Computerworld was being kept out of a Tech Forum roadmap meeting, along with the NewsWire. (We were the only reporters at the door.) The access problem was fixed, but I'm a little less certain about whether HP's intentions have been reset.

But it's useful to note that remembrance was not essential to this company's founders. Malone's book takes special note of the HP Way's devotion to sentiment, as in: None. Again from the book:

Hewlett and Packard had little nostalgia about the past unless it in some way enhanced the future. There were no sentimental stories about the HP 200A, the company's founding product [in 1939], by the 1950s. Once demand fell off, and all profits were wrung out of the product line, Bill and Dave jettisoned it with barely a glance back.

A generation later, the company would do the same with its most famous product, the HP-35 calculator. Had corporate publicist J. Peter Nelson not written, on his own initiative, a press release elegy of the device, its passing would gone unremarked.

Which brings us to a generation or two further along, and what seems like another kick to the curb for a foundational HP product. HP restored the founding garage in 2005 since the building was deemed the birthplace of the Silicon Valley by the State of California. Rebuilding a house and garage is one thing. Revering a product line is a step further, one HP's seems unready to take, or even chronicle.

HP Archivist Anna Mancini was invited to the CHM's 3000 meeting, but could not be counted among us. Perhaps at another gathering at the museum. But the HP Way was always dedicated more to profit as a chief objective, rather than undying devotion, as Malone says and the 3000's HP history echoes. A computer with enough history at HP to lead the company into the mainstream computer business — and from there to printers and PCs, and so to the Number One ranking among all makers — the 3000 didn't get treated any better than the 200A or the HP-35, once management calculated the 3000's growth days were at an end. And that too is the HP Way.

Anniversaries all around

Lapels and shirts all around the HP Technology Forum sported a jaunty badge this week. HP, having purchased Digital through its Compaq acquisition, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of VMS. DEC users who have endured wrong-headed management and unlucky timing on technology innovations should be proud. They use one of the last vendor-built operating environments, an OS with acolytes so ardent they gather for a Boot Camp each year in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Of course, the badges recalled the many pins HP 3000 customers wore with pride in the waning days of HP's 3000 business. Hewlett-Packard did not celebrate the 35th anniversary of MPE this year, even though the company uses the OS in its corporate datacenters to this very day.

This week's conference showed a lot of historical pros on display among much younger colleagues. Patrick Thibodeau called it the "salt and pepper crowd" in his story for Computerworld. You need salt and pepper to get to 30 and beyond. I genuinely wish more years to the VMS community. It perseveres on classic momentum, even while HP makes more noise about the IT strategies that do not revolve around operating environments.

And while the week celebrated something old, at least in IT timeframes, there was also a much younger anniversary. This 3000 NewsWire blog moved into its fourth year of service to our community and our committed sponsors. It's been a great thrill to be able to report within hours, like we did on Tuesday night, about 3000 news like the liberation of long-cloistered patches. The blog is a powerful tool for a journalist with loyal sources and a long memory. Thank you for your interest in our stories and inside information, data spinning ever farther from the home planet of HP.

At the Tech Forum we heard one VP anticipating another milestone, ready to celebrate the 25th anniversary of HP-UX. But the vendor putting HP-UX concerns up at the top of the keynote might have sent a mixed message about that history. HP was assuring the hundreds of thousands of UX users their environment isn't going extinct. As we noted earlier this week, Executive VP Ann Livermore reminded those salt and pepper folks that HP-UX still did $10 billion in business last year for HP.

But when technology climbs into the quarter-century and beyond demographic, it fights an uphill battle on a vendor's product line. These products fight to show growth, an attribute that a vendor desires far more than the customers of the product. There have been exceptions. IBM has made AS/400 and mainframe customers an indelible part of its computer legacy. Will HP do the same for HP-UX and for OpenVMS, or NonStop? The monetary momentum at HP is rolling away from vendor-built environments. Unlimited virtualization and its software gyrations, deep flanks of service experts, hardware built with industry standard components — all are ramping up much faster at HP than any of those environments which are old enough to celebrate.

Meanwhile, the chip architecture that started this revolution, x86, celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, too. HP still pays homage to the x86 designs in every Itanium processor it purchases from Intel. After all, the Itanium was built to float upon the vast sea of x86 code passed from DOS to Windows to XP to Vista.

The 25 anniversary of a mediocre design like x86 only proves that elegance and ardor are not the essential elements to longevity. Computing has been a business ever since it crawled out of university and government labs, and so what sells is what stays on to celebrate more anniversaries. Treasure and polish what you own, and care for its future. Only the community of an OS has the dedication to keep relighting the candles on the anniversary cakes.

HP and its users heat up Vegas again

There used to be a saying that an HP user group's hottest moment was the HP Management Roundtable, where HP executives took the heat from users. In the modern world of HP as the world's No. 1 computer company, the heat is all around this now-fixed meeting in Las Vegas, the Nevada desert's theme park for all manner of games.

The fourth HP Technology Forum started today with pre-conference training sessions on topics like the ITIL information technology practices, a kickoff expo floor reception and the meeting of media writers and the HP executives on hand. We writers and HP VPs come together in modest rooms deep in the innards of one of the strip's biggest hotel-casino-convention centers. Outside my window here in the wide halls between session rooms, a pool with a sand beach beckons under 107-degree sun.

That won't impress me too much this week, on a journey from a Texas where the Austin heat has soared above 100 every day since this month began. But we don't have the heat of meetings or the warm gathering of collegues and comrades that you find in a user group conference. Despite the overwhelming number of Hewlett-Packard attendees, this is still a conference of users. They are the reason HP turns out in a show of force unparalleled in the rest of its fiscal year.

The Big Three — CEO Mark Hurd, Executive VP Ann Livermore and Chief Technology Office Randy Mott — all speak tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, a volunteer who's not an employee of HP, Nina Buik, oversees the effort and engagements as the president of Connect, the alliance of user groups which will unveil its logo and some plans this evening on that expo floor.

HP 3000 partners, sponsors and suppliers take a place on that expo floor as well as in some of the session rooms. MB Foster, Speedware, Bay Pointe Technology, The Support Group, Transoft and DB-Net all have booths on the floor of varying sizes. Also on the floor are the suppliers Logicalis, Canvas Systems and Canvas Systems. Cognos is on the expo floor as well, maybe the only direct competitor to HP to show its wares. Cognos, after all, has been a part of IBM since this spring.

In an interview with Buik, who's heading up the user group for the third straight year, she noted that advocacy is a word that's been replaced with "community voice." It's a less confrontational approach in a world where a company like HP has been hundreds of billions of dollars large, while its special interest members represent a small share of HP's mind.

That mindshare grows large, however, while you consider how much of HP's solutions a customer could be using. Blade servers, storage, services ranging from enterprise product support to professional consulting a la EDS, the PCs and laptops, the software that HP has acquired (like Mercury Interactive) or built itself — it's a big universe out there.

So we can all grow nostalgic and wonder if the old model of user group meeting — with every attendee concerned with HP's business servers, HP 3000s or HP 9000s, pushing for advocacy of business and technology decisions by HP — was the better meeting to attend. So much has changed since then, from HP and the way the company spreads its technology across partners and throughout technologies and solutions, to the share of voice a few thousand customers could command with a company that was already more than $50 million large in the waning days of Interex conferences.

When you say "HP" these days you describe an organization of more than 200,000 employees, a group so big that Buik described it like her earliest days as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia. "That was a 30,000-student place," she said. "I was in a sorority, which helped me connect with such a large organization."

Connect — the alliance of Encompass, Interex-Europe and the ITUG user groups — intends to be that fraternity to help the "D-level" customer have a voice with HP. The D-level, director-level IT pros are Connect's "sweet spot," Buik said during a half-hour briefing with me. "Our sweet spot is with people in the trenches," so the user community will open up a social networking site created by Leverage Software, a company "which specializes in these kinds of online solutions."

Special Interest Groups (SIGs) will be a feature of the Connect online community, something a user can start up. So if you tick a box to report you use HP 3000s, the software is supposed to locate others on the site who share your experience. Best of all, sharing the community social networking experience will be free and open to everyone, regardless of Connect membership or not.

In part, the openness is motivated by the need for user-generated content. But Buik was also careful to point out that HP monitor chatter on the SIGs, much as does today on the HP 3000 newsgroup and mailing list. The difference might lie in the level of HP employee doing the monitoring and responding. Bigger groups, closer in partnership with HP, show a promise of results — although you need to take action, as Buik says, because "hope is not a good business strategy."

Why there are always parts available

Hewlett-Packard tells the 3000 community that the vendor can provide custom legacy support through 2010, but the offering will depend on parts availability and the age of the HP 3000. Older systems might have parts which are no longer on the HP warehouse shelves.

But no matter how old the HP 3000 might be in your shop, you can be reasonably sure that spare parts will not keep you from keeping it working. Last week Wyell Grunwald offered a "practically free" HP 3000 on the Internet newsgroup. All that Grunwald wants is the cost of shipping to send the 200-pound server onto its new home.

After a quip about this early '90s server making a good bookend, another community member said they could use the system for parts. Imagine, an HP 3000 PA-RISC server built in 1990 — yes, 18 years ago — still has parts available in your community.

The key word in that last sentence is community. Even when HP runs out of HP 3000 parts, the community can carry on the supply. This group got a lot of longevity when it invested in the HP 3000, as well as durability. The word "tank" is part of Grunwald's 922 description.

It's difficult to overlook how underpowered the Series 922 might be compared to any other HP 3000. After all, the entire PA-RISC line only started to ship in 1987, and only in significant numbers a couple of years later. Code-named SilverFox Low at its introduction, this is a very early model 3000, just three systems off the start of the PA-RISC line.

The harsh numbers: This HP 3000 has just five percent of the horsepower of the smallest Series 979 or HP's smallest N-Class server.

But while you would not want to carry a lot of computing on this swaybacked steed, the fact that it's still a parts repository in 2008 might give a homesteader some comfort. HP warned everyone in 2001 that HP 3000 parts were going to become scarce in five years' time. So long as your community stays connected and communicating, the Hewlett-Packard MPE support expertise is likely to get scarce before many 3000 parts disappear altogether.

Six years, five months, and forecasts for futures

This week the 3000 community will move into the month that signals six-and-a-half years of the 3000's Transition Era. It has been a period filled with dread, hope, opportunity and change. A good deal of all that was predicted from the very first day of Transition, but some events were not. 3000 owners who need to forecast events for the next 77 months, now that the first 77 have passed, can start by reviewing what's come to pass from predictions and what has not, and why.

On November 14, 2001, the day of HP's announcement of ending its 3000 operations, ERP and MANMAN advisor Cortlandt Wilson looked into his crystal ball and saw these events:

Up until Jan 1, 2007 service parts should be available from HP just as they are now. After that I expect that HP will continue it’s policy of selling service parts on a “best, available” basis.

Not only accurate, but accurate-plus: HP still offers parts and service on its support throughout this year, two more than HP figured. Also as predicted, the third party market and the vast field of identical HP 9000 hardware has made parts a non-issue to go forward with a 3000.

Q: Is it possible that someone will take over support of MPE/iX after HP stops support in 2006?
A. Yes. In fact the conversations are already well underway.  I was in on a phone call between HP and members of Interex’s MPE Forum just yesterday where that topic was discussed at some length.

We wish we could say this one was forecast accurately, but that swap-over front has moved slower than forecast. HP's decision on support for MPE/iX, tied to licensing source for some, outlasted Interex and that MPE Forum. The timing still seems to be tied to end of HP support. It's important to remember that HP made its discontinuance announcement from two spokesmen: Then-GM Winston Prather, and Jim Murphy, the latter notably of HP Support.

But HP did follow through on what it did promise for improving system, as predicted.

Wilson took a look forward on the dark November day for the 3000 and saw more HP work in the future.

It looks to me like HP is planning to go ahead and roll out the hardware and software improvements that they already had in the R&D pipeline. Furthermore, MPE/iX ombudsman Jeff Vance indicated to the Interex volunteers yesterday that "if anything, the next SIB (System Improvement Ballot) will be more important than last year.

Also predicted well, since HP has more than three-score beta test patches created after 2001, all waiting for general release.

Systems have flowed through the marketplace, more than four years after HP stopped selling the 3000.

I expect the already flourishing used systems market to continue to be there for many years. I
would add a caveat here. I would expect the used systems to be available after 2003, but perhaps not at the current prices.

Those prices are better than ever, and supply meets demand even for the latest class of 3000.

Most important to today's forecasters, Wilson's prediction of the 3000's utility have come true and continue well beyond the date everyone worked toward more than six years ago.

I don’t believe that saying that the HP e3000 is “dead” is an accurate description of the situation.  For some users today’s announcement may be one more reason to leave the HP e3000.  But many of you have looked at the options and have decided to stick with MANMAN and the HP e3000.  If that decision made sound business sense yesterday, I suggest that it probably still does today. And it may still make sense come January 1, 2007.

Or on April 14, 2008, too. Each company can migrate in its own time.

Learning about a missed opportunity

What would HP have looked like, or dreamed up, if not for a choice it made 30 years ago? We found this quote out in the IT enterprise trade journal world.

HP had a campaign for its new Touchscreen desktops in the 1980s called "Imagine." It even had a cute butterfly. So your vendor is capable of letting its corporate hair down, more so now than ever.

But not when it mattered, at least back in the days when choices were being made like Bill Gates bringing on MS-DOS. Here's the story, one that Steve Jobs may not tell next week at MacWorld:

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.' "

With Apple's stock now trading at almost three times the cost of HP's, Jobs still hasn't gotten through college. I don't believe Bill Gates has, either.

Apparently there's an education to be earned in many places.

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

What was done in 1990

In a matter of days, two of the 3000 community's greatest icons connected with me, contacts personal and public which drew my attention back to the start of the '90s. To say that decade was a different time for the HP 3000 simplifies a much richer story. What's more, there are parts of that decade's accomplishments that continue to serve the community to this day, for some customers.

The year 1990 was galvanizing for the 3000 community. I heard about the year for the second time this past weekend, when Adager's Alfredo Rego asked on the HP 3000 newsgroup, "What were you doing in 1990?" In a brief message Rego noted that 1990 was the launch date for the world's first Internet browser, created by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXT workstation. Rego pointed at a history page from 1990: www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html. Then Rego noted

Enjoy it (typos and all).  Be sure to click on the links to the screen shots. Ah... Memories. Fortunately, the NeXT ideas have survived (and thrived).  Just as MPE ideas have (not). Sigh.

But 1990 was a high-water mark in HP 3000 advocacy, a habit which works today to survive those 17 years. The HP 3000 has formed a community in way no other computer can claim, according to Wirt Atmar, founder of report solution provider AICS Research, creators of QueryCalc as well as QCReports and the free QCTerm. Atmar should know better than most about advocacy, for in the fall of 1990 he helped spark a charge that changed HP's business practices about the 3000 — changes which you might argue last to this very year. Especially if you're changing little about your HP 3000 stable environment.

In 1990 Atmar wrote an open letter to HP published in The HP Chronicle, the monthly news magazine I was editing at the time. In his letter Atmar chastized HP for the way it was relegating IMAGE to minor status among the 3000's futures and features, as well as the general treatment of a loyal customer base. Word was building in the community that HP had plans to separate the IMAGE database from the purchase of any 3000. The database had been included with the 3000 since 1976, a radical move at the time that sparked the creation of untold numbers of utilities and applications.

A programmer or development company could create an application or software for the 3000 community using IMAGE as the database, knowing that every 3000 out there would be able to make use of the creation. 3000=IMAGE was a formula close to being broken. The community reared up on its hind legs and castigated its supplier, using the Interex 1990 user group meeting as the forum for its dismay. SIG-IMAGE, a Special Interest Group of users gone dormant at the time, re-formed to organized the complaints and demand remedies.

In community lore, the protests around the meeting are known as "The Boston Tea Party," in part because they changed HP's course of conduct about customers. I recall Adager's Fred White as the most scathing critic of HP's myopia of the time, but a row of customers lined up behind and in front of him at the public microphones in a Boston meeting hall. This was a time when the HP Roundtable was the highlight of the conference, a chance to quiz the top executives of the company, right out in the open, about shortcoming and problems. The national IT press of Datamation, Computerworld and Information Week, all with HQ just up the road, were on hand that year to report the rebellious talk. HP looked chagrined and embarrassed fielding customer complaints — during a time when customer communities had a different impact on their vendors.

Atmar had contacted me to update a few links about him just days before Rego's message. The convergence felt profound. Atmar mentioned he couldn't help me in my current search for back issues of the Chronicle, because he had only one left on his shelves: The issue with his open letter, "which basically caused the [1990] Boston riot."

In the fall of that year the users not only stalled the separation of IMAGE from the 3000, but launched a "Customer First" strategy that HP used to retain its 3000 customers — a strategy which HP modeled in its other enterprise computer operations at the time. Glory indeed, even at the end of a pointed stick of sharp criticism and some disgust. But as Atmar pointed out, "it was a glorious moment, yes, but as the Roman slaves told the Roman generals, 'All fame is fleeting.' "

Customer First became a mantra in a new generation of HP 3000 division managers, the idea of customer delight: unexpected features, beyond commonplace requests. But at the same time HP became serious about creating a steady stream of HP-UX customers, using the HP 3000 installed base as an easy supply of converts. At the time of the Boston uprising, Atmar noted, HP was easy to take advantage of, because the vendor was afraid of negative publicity.

Far different times indeed than today, when the advocacy group OpenMPE must operate under a confidential disclosure agreement which keeps all of its HP communication under wraps. But one lasting benefit of the 1990 uprising was that Customer First ideal. In a lunch today with another HP 3000 vendor, I agreed that many vendors have excised computer systems from their lineups. Few indeed, though, are making a business model for future cancellations like HP is learning from its departure from your community. When HP's virtual CSY managers say, "We need to give the system the ending that it deserves," that's a result of Customer First, the vendor's finish to the 336 years it has sold and supported your server.

What some of you were doing in 1990 has echoes over the next few years of those secret talks with HP. I believe those kinds of talks would not be taking place without the ideals of Customer First, sparked by the 1990 uprising. How significant those ideals remain now, in the face of a new set of interests and vision from the HP Support group, remains to be seen.

Keeping HP accountable is so much more difficult in this century than the last, however. Impossible, indeed, under the provisions of a confidential exchange with the vendor that OpenMPE must observe. More might be observed about OpenMPE's success with that Cone of Silence removed. I sigh along with Rego at that removal's prospect, given the leverage HP retains with its stewardship of MPE/iX.

But as I said at the top of this story, the 1990s were a different time for your community. In the era when the computer was increasing its customer base and celebrating 25 years of success, I asked Atmar what the birthday meant to the customers.

Maturity. If you were a business owner or manager, I can't think of a single word that you would want to seek out and celebrate more than a mature solution, one that can easily demonstrate that it can do what it says it does. Immature solutions, on the other hand, are going to cost you an awful lot of money — and a growing segment of the business community is beginning to understand that. You can only be lead down the garden path so many times before it begins to dawn on you what it's truly costing you.