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.