Community volunteers to extend EMPIRE

One of the original role-playing games for computers gained a home on the HP 3000 during the era of text-based interactive gaming. Reed College in Portland hosted the first board-game version of Empire (at left), giving the game a Pacific Northwest home that would lead it to the HP 3000. In 1971 Empire first emerged from Unix systems, created by Peter Langsdon at Harvard. It resurfaced under the name Civilization on an HP 2000 minicomputer at Evergreen State College, where an HP 3000 would soon arrive.

When that HP 2000 was retired, the source code to Civilization was lost -- but Ben Norton wrote a new version of the game for MPE, EMPIRE Classic, in 1984. Built in BASIC/3000, EMPIRE became the 3000's best-known game, in part because it was included in the 3000's Contributed Software Library.

While Civilization was having a graphical life on personal computers like the Amiga, EMPIRE on the 3000 is text-only, using prompts and replies designed to build eco­nomic and polit­i­cal entities, with mil­i­tary actions included. That's right, we mean present-day: the game remains in use today, nearly 30 years after it was first launched for MPE. Tracy Johnson, a volunteer with the OpenMPE advocacy group, sent along the story of how EMPIRE has gained a web address -- so now anyone in the world can join a multi-player game.

By Tracy Johnson

For about a dozen years in various incarnations, starting with an old HP 3000 922RX and later on a 957, IT management at my company Meaurement Specialties undertook a small, fun-time project: to enable some of the old Interex Contributed Software Library games written for the HP 3000 to run on the web. Notably, the game of Empire and a few others. The website needed something to hang its hat on, so the name EMPIRE was chosen to encompass everything at the site.

We also got in contact with one of the original contributors of Empire, Ben Norton, who started making enhancements to the game after 20 years.  Another programmer eventually picked up the mantle, and improvements to the game are still being made to this day.

Eventually, someone in upper management asked what our EMPIRE machine was being used for.

So all good things must come to an end, but it was arranged to port the game (and its website) over to the INVENT3K server.  By coming off an old 957 on MPE/iX 6.5 onto INVENT3K's four-processor 969 on MPE/iX 7.5, the move became a positive upgrade.  

The former host machine had no domain name. This made it rather difficult to promote the game, because any time you referenced website in an email -- http:// followed by an IP address -- all the heuristic spam blockers marked it as spam. Now it has a domain name, and you can put empire.openmpe.com into your Reflection, Minisoft, or QCTerm configuration.  Meaning of course I can now reference the website as http://empire.openmpe.com, and not get this the message treated as spam.

Porting the game and website was rather easy. The original site used Orbit+/iX disk to disk backups (courtesy of Orbit), and it was simply FTP'd to the new machine and then restored.  Additional assistance was provided by Keven Miller at 3kRanger to make the website fit in with the regular INVENT3K website. INVENT3K's website now has a button that links to EMPIRE. Both sites are hosted on the same machine where the games are running.

Roomy HP Cloud considers Unix vs. MPE

We're moving into a world where great-grandma's photo scrapbooks are virtual and HP proprietary servers live in clouds. With a little patience, one of those servers will be an HP 3000 this year. In an odd omission, this month the HP Unix servers don't qualify for cloud status with one supplier — Hewlett-Packard.

The HP Cloud (hpcloud.com) has been open in a public beta this month. It's a spot where Windows and Linux computing services are available using virtualized servers. HP's got ProLiant boxes racked up and sliced up into customer-sized computing pieces in HP Cloud.

No, it's not free — but the cost starts to approach the fabled "too cheap to meter" claims from last century's nuclear-powered electricity rollout. Especially if you compare it to ownership of the iron. A Standard Large Instance costs 32 cents an hour. That gives you a 4-virtual core system with 16GB of RAM and a 240GB disk for um, $230 a month. A server you won't pay to power up, or ever have to move. Add bandwidth charges and you get $300 monthly. So HP will put your 4-core server into its cloud. Just not an HP-UX server.

One well-connected PA-RISC developer explained that HP's clouds are pretty much a non-starter for existing long-time HP customers. You can't host HP-UX apps in HP's cloud, just Windows and Linux. Long-time customers have both proprietary and industry standard apps. HP has a chance to change this, though, so long as it can find a way for HP-UX to live on Intel Xeon chips in the cloud host. Maybe an Itanium emulator is required.

Meanwhile, the users of HP 3000 MPE apps will have a cloud option available to them by the end of this year, so long as Stromasys has its way with the new HPA/3000 Charon technology. The most affordable instance of this emulator is in a non-host configuration, run from a cloud. There's talk about using Amazon's EC2 as the computing host provider. Some 3000 managers are still leery of relying on security over networks so remote. But other companies will be keen to get the high-powered iron out of datacenters, even as they continue to rely on high-powered MPE apps.

The power of such a worldwide web of networks extends all the way to my mom's table in her room at the Franciscan Care Center in Sylvania, Ohio. It's a modest and comfortable place that I'm visiting soon, but there's a limit to how much space she's got for scrapbooks. And with three great-grandchildren all under age 3, there's a torrent of pictures to share. We once mailed her paper photos and handsome albums, but now we send it all to a digital picture frame, one plugged into her phone line. Updates of the latest grandbaby pictures arrive in that frame, one that needs as little infrastructure management as the very best cloud computer. Meaning someone else is doing it, and including the admin in the cost.

No, it doesn't mean the picture frame and the network will take those pictures of Noah, Bree and Paige. Or even that it will load them -- that's our job as grandparents. But it will do the rest, so we can share with less effort. My wife Abby and I can spend our energy creating those picture-worthy moments — like you might spend energy improving an application or extending its reach into wider worlds, up in the clouds.

Dell looks to acquire Quest's sharing tech

The HP 3000 community might be getting its first multi-billion dollar acquisition in its history. Quest Software, which makes one element of the BridgeWare migration solution along with Taurus Software, is reported to be a Dell Computer buyout target.

A report from the business website Bloomberg said the software company is in talks to become a property of Dell. One analyst firm says the stock could be worth as much as $28 a share, which would put the value of the acquisition at $2.4 billion. Quest has branched into many other markets, including Oracle's database. But the deepest roots of this company are the Shareplex software that has been used to cluster MPE systems since the early 1990s.

Quest's director of sales John Saylor continues to point out the company still sells solutions for the 3000 market. Not nearly as many firms can point to sales of software for the 3000 customer as did in the '90s, or even 10 years ago.  Maybe most important to HP, Quest has been a driver in getting Sun's customer base onto the rolls of Hewlett-Packard. BridgeWare is the latest part of that package, Saylor says.

"Not only is Quest’s BridgeWare is a leader in HP 3000 MPE migrations through its partnership with Taurus, but the company is also the market leader in platform migrations from Sun-Oracle platforms to IBM, HP and Dell-Oracle platforms." Databases have been the heart of Quest's enterprise for two decades by now. Most recently, the SystemBridger Bundle was bringing pre-configured PC hardware to 3000 sites looking for a reach into other databases, migrating or not. 

Oracle is a key component of what Quest connects with for commodity platforms. There's also This is how it became a public company worth billions. But the Bridgeware solution in the Bundle aims to bring non-IMAGE databases in step with the MPE data stronghold. Quest calls the software technology "to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments." Taurus President Cailean Sherman said the joint venture in Bridgeware adds analysis capability.

"Over the years we've been working with a lot of companies who are either homesteading, or taking their time migrating off the 3000," Sherman said. "But they also want to take advantage of all the open systems tools to perform ad hoc analysis."

This type of analysis wasn't feasible for some homesteaders, because the access took its toll on the production performance of IMAGE and KSAM databases, she explained. A combination of recent projects, BridgeWare enhancements and discounting led to the partnership with Abtech. The result is a data store, including the relational database license and hardware fully implemented, priced between $10,000 and $75,000.

Dell, for those who haven't looked recently, has been reshaping itself as a provider of enterprise IT, having virtually ceded the consumer market to HP. Dell has been making acquisitions -- five already in 2012 --  to add software, computer storage and networking gear to its lineup of PCs.

 

 

 

Paper passes on primers on MPE, and more

Imagine it's your first day managing an HP 3000. You don't have to travel in a time machine to find that kind of event. However, a magic carpet of the past ensures the delivery of time-tested fundamentals. The carpet is paper, where so much MPE lore first unspooled for your community. If not for articles on paper, much of the 3000's wisdom would never have made it to the web.

As for that first day, an IT manager at Disston Tools in South Deerfield, Mass. has had that date arrive just this month. He's a total newbie, taking over for a veteran who's leaving this manufacturer. Everybody's a newbie at something. It's just like publishing news: if it's something you didn't know, then it's news to you.

Not many Interweb resources call themselves publishers, but we do. We started with ink on paper, my partner Abby and I, initially for a cross-platform IT publisher before the NewsWire was first delivered from our own offices. This week we delivered our 155th print issue. The May edition will be available to our community newbie, as well as one veteran that community icon Vladimir Volokh scouted out in Los Angeles. Vladimir hand-delivers print issues on his consulting trips, much to our delight.

With all that print heritage, I took note of a retrenchment in printed news this week. The daily newspaper in New Orleans will be daily no more. The Times-Picayune is going to three times weekly in print and everyday online. This is a newspaper that won two Pulitzers for its Katrina reporting. Sadly, the caliber of content doesn't bulwark many publications anymore. Advertisers, like our fine sponsors, determine how often the presses roll.

In the alternative, of course, there's the Interweb. I use the jokey term for online news because it's completely pervasive and so up to date that the future seems like yesterday if you bury your head in links. Knowing where to look, however, becomes a great mission for printed publications. We always hear that people have found our reports for the first time when they get a print issue of the NewsWire. It's nice to have that outpost, and essential to who we are and how we deliver. But for printed pages long gone, it's great to have host sites that preserve things like George Stachnik's instruction about using files in MPE, and much more. It's one of 21 articles in a series he wrote for the now-departed InterACT magazine. All are preserved for the education of newbies, as well as the rest of us.

Chris Bartram at 3K Associates has collected Stachnik's articles, as well as many other papers, at the 3k.com website. (Think about how long that site has been around. It's so fundamental it's got a two-character domain name. Fewer than 1,300 of those in existence.) Our community is lucky to have the riches of several of these kinds of sites. Open source software, at mpe-opensource.org. Tech papers at robelle.com, adager.com, allegro.com.

But most of those papers started out on paper. Because MPE's preserved its roots, even an article like Stachnik's written more than a decade ago will be useful at Disston Tools. The company's covering its MANMAN support needs with service from the Support Group, Inc. Terry Floyd there gave us a heads-up about the new IT guy, and we're glad to send the new member our printed May issue.

Sponsors in your community still believe in the power of paper, even while they buy Adsense keywords from Google and build Twitter feeds and pursue Facebook Likes. We're always mindful that the NewsWire depends on support as well as new readers and faithful followers. We once led off with print reporting and archived it on the Web. But about the time Katrina was hitting New Orleans we switched out our lead horse -- with some exception. Every printed issue carries content that's only available in paper as an exclusive, for awhile. If you'd like your own printed copy in the US, we'd be glad to send it to you. (Click on the icon above to send us a message.) Our non-domestic web-only readers, thousands of them, have access off the page. Like the Times-Picayune, we're working with a blended model of the old and new, even as we link wisdom from the elders to our new readers.

Why HP Financials Should Remain Relevant

File this article under News You Can Use. I'm about to make a case for why the quarterly reports of Hewlett-Packard -- a company posting more than $125 billion in annual sales -- should still matter to you. If your job is to plan IT resource deployment, like who's learning what skill or where investments go in 2013 and beyond, HP's reports remain relevant.

We've been dividing ourselves into two camps since late 2001: those leaving the 3000 and those remaining. For the ones who are leaving, or have a migration right behind them in the rear-view, HP's profile in 2012 is even more important than it was a decade ago. Hewlett-Packard is probably driving your technology and services choices. The success of adopting its products in Unix, Linux, servers or even the cloud gets reflected in HP sales numbers. And HP still announces strategies when it talks to securities analysts.

As an example, the CEO Meg Whitman told employees in a letter yesterday, prior to the quarterly results release, that this round of 27,000 layoffs is going to be different from layoffs of 2005. "Another difference from years past is what we plan to do with the savings," she said in her letter. "The majority of savings [via employee cutbacks] this time around will be invested in the business. We'll be investing to drive leadership in the three strategic pillars – cloud, security and information optimization."

HP drove its previous layoff savings right out to the shareholders, not the customers. As a continuing customer of HP products, these words of investing are finally those that you want to hear. Cloud has little to do with HP's consumer business. Same for security and information optimization. This is an enterprise play on a field where HP is way behind, by Whitman's own scoring.

Even though HP stock hit a 52-week low before her comments, today it's having a relatively good day. The investors just got told they won't see direct profit increases because of HP's changes, and its okay with them. Like you, the majority of them have got a long-term relationship with Hewlett-Packard. Of course if that's not true for you, then getting your homesteading choice reinforced makes the quarterly results relevant, too.

The 3.5 percent rebound the stock's enjoying today is about finance, not company futures. "HP beats estimates on earnings," the headlines go, playing the forecasting card about expected profits -- instead of the downward trend since last year.

Whitman knows, like you do, that "Our business is still declining," in part because customers like homesteaders are not with HP anymore. And the migration segment of the 3000 populace has left HP-centric alternatives behind, in the majority. Whitman said HP still needs to "invest to drive R&D and innovation in our core businesses of servers, storage and networking." It's work that's undone, and now the company will be taking what's special about its Unix and delivering it to the Linux market, pretty much without reward.

The Gartner Group looked over the exit-Itanium Odyssey Project and found that it's going to level the sales playing field for Linux at HP. That's what happened to the HP 3000 at Hewlett-Packard back in the early 1990s. Eventually the product that had less in common with HP's innovation (read: MPEand IMAGE) and had to march uphill. The trend from the top managers in HP servers remains the same as it was: follow the sales. Gartner thinks Odyssey is good for HP -- to the extent it can stop the steep decline of the HP Unix business. But it's inevitable.

As these enhancements roll out, Gartner believes HP will be more inclined to market and sell Linux on an even playing field to Unix, which will add more market momentum to Linux and greater decline of Unix. As this decline occurs, HP will be able to delay migrations or reinforce HP-UX user loyalty by diverting its generally loyal base to a strong mission-critical alternative and viable replacement for Itanium. By accelerating the pace of x86 adoption for mission-critical workloads, HP will drive down the margins that it has traditionally enjoyed as a vendor of large-scale, non-x86 Unix servers. Although BCS only represents 10% of HP's server, storage and networking revenue, the margins are at a much higher proportion.

Those italics are ours, not Gartner's. With that language, any companies no longer doing business with HP can hear an echo of their chaos and trauma over the last 10 years. Although the HP 3000 represented a small part of the company's server revenue, its margins were at a much higher proportion. Now this kind of profitable business is ebbing away even more. HP's not going to chase PC business like it once did. (It's got a project in place now to examine the value of the Compaq brand it acquired in 2001.) But it's more than one annual buying cycle away from generating hope of innovation, much less a fresh value for companies who want integration -- or as HP likes to call it now, convergence.

You might have left HP behind years ago, but need to defend that decision as a homesteader. Or your choice going forward is the success of HP's strategy. Either position needs current information, the kind that can be tracked over time and pinned to a point of profits, sales and plans.

HP runs ahead and behind, then and now

The iconic entity called Interex emerged this month 28 years ago. HP had announced it would catch up to 32-bit computing with Spectrum. And the vendor whose sales still didn't exceed $7 billion said in 1984 that touchscreens were the most intuitive interface. Being ahead and behind all at once is a sign that you're still developing, making leadership while you catch up your customers

Hewlett-Packard used the 1980s in your community to push out new ideas. Touch-based personal computing hit the market in the HP 150, one of the Series 100 PCs that transformed the International Association of Hewlett-Packard Computer Users. Before HP cast its seeds of PC innovation, Interex didn't exist. In a May column from executive director Bill Crow in InterACT magazine, the user group renamed itself "to define the association's independence" from HP.

Although that user group has been in the grave more than six years, its members' insights haven't evaporated. An era of ink on paper (click above for detail) has preserved milestones like HP running more than 25 years ahead of the industry with touchscreens. It's easy to forget your community was reaching for a breakthrough office experience even while it was dragging along chips devised a decade earlier.

Ed McCracken, a GM of HP's Business Development Group, announced in early '84 the seven basic principles guiding HP's "office automation strategy:

1. The workstation is the most important component, followed by the distributed data processing system (DDS)
2. All workstations will be personal computers
3. The touchscreen is the most intuitive interface
4. Workstations will not tie directly to mainframes but to an intermediate DDS
5. A pragmatic approach to open architecture is required
6. High quality is essential
7. There must be an intuitive integration linking managers' workstations, secretarial workstations, and the other components of the system.

Number 3 is the most striking of the guides offered by McCracken, the man who drove the genius of bundling the rising DDS of the 3000 with a crack database. But in '84 HP was already considering IMAGE a database that needed a successor. The vendor was following in IBM's wake, right down to a new partnership with a small company built by an IBM ex-pat. Interex also recognized that Alfredo Rego -- "the man behind Adager" -- was on par HP's CEO, John Young. Both gave 1984 user conference speeches, but Rego recognized that IMAGE was to remain the force behind the 3000's success.

It wasn't going to come through a new processor family -- although the Spectrum project's 32 bits were critically overdue. Like today, software mattered more than hardware like Itanium. Oracle's database, built upon the same IBM roots, will determine the fate of the last remaining OS that HP ever built with its own R&D. Databases are lynchpins.

HP saw as much when it partnered with Esvel Inc. The firm founded by Kapali Eswaran, one of the founding members of the IBM System R relational DB product, would develop "scalable database architecture for HP." The next product turned out to be Allbase, but HP already wanted a common database among its real-time, scientific (HP-UX) and office systems.

Like then, the vendor's reaching for some commonality with its Itanium futures. Last year Intel was announcing new underwear for the chip the industry forgot, promising that Xeon architecture would share base elements with Itanium. HP wants to have it both ways -- a market in a the commodity space along with the power of software built on proprietary hardware. You've still got that kind of power in your MPE-IMAGE world. Because Oracle's got HP by the scruff of its enterprise neck, the software still calls the plays. But now HP doesn't control the database -- to the point of seeing customers define themselves as Oracle shops. Oracle's not leaving HP computing. It's departing the computing most profitable to HP.

Esvel was the first step that HP took toward embracing an industry standard for its enterprise business. Back in 1984 the little company had already delivered the seeds of DB2 to IBM. HP was chasing Big Blue in every field but instruments back then. The vendor which created the HP 3000 believed in a pragmatic approach to open architecture: standards were less important than reliable value. In less than seven years HP didn't believe that anymore, driving the Open Enterprise with open systems.

Allbase earned a few footholds in the Open Enterprise, but IMAGE ruled the 3000's roost. Just like Oracle does today, HP's database had become the common coin of computers for HP business. You couldn't switch over billions of records without a lot of magic in 1984. Hewlett-Packard had the right idea about touch interfaces, but the wrong technology and message. This May the message is in the hands of the software providers, not the hardware makers. HP used have R&D enough to be both, which is what still makes the 3000 value durable beyond all accepted wisdom. 

Link-In, to put 3000 over the 500-pro mark

We're now very close, up on LinkedIn. The HP 3000 Community on the business social network counts 497 members as of today, a collective of hundreds of developers, managers, consultants, employers and software suppliers. After four years of connecting, we're just three members short of the magic 500+ mark for this group. You can put this group into the special ranking, by simply joining it. LinkedIn ranks members of 500-plus groups higher when searches are returned. Searches like someone pursuing experience, expertise, or a skill like coding business applications.

The members of the HP 3000 Community have all of that. So many of them come from the ranks of 3000 IT development and management pros. An IT manager leading a group that maintains and develops apps for a hotel chain. A support manager for a vendor who's still got 3000 customers using a document management tool. The inside sales manager at the largest remaining COBOL vendor in the market.

Join us, and become better connected to your colleagues and employers.

LinkedIn is free at its basic level, which is all you need to join the HP 3000 Community. And for a modest upcharge of $20-$30 monthly, LinkedIn will send your mail directly to other members that you'll find in groups like this one. LinkedIn even guarantees a response to its InMail (by providing you with an additional InMail, if your first goes unanswered.)

Another advantage to joining a large group: you have more people to link with elsewhere, because you've got something in common -- group membership. These personal links also boost your profile, according to job recruiter Linda Tuerk.

Tuerk told the members of the CAMUS users group that getting to the 500 level is important to making LinkedIn a successful tool.

Link with as many members as you can. Some experts say that you will only show up in search results for your skillset only 3 percent of the time if you are linked to fewer than 200 people. That incidence is supposed to climb to 90 percent if you are linked to "500+." Look for "Open Networkers" and LIONs that will link with everybody. Drop them later if you like.

Add Groups related to your professional field. You are allowed 50. Concentrate on ones that have thousands of members at first, then add local ones that seem relevant and have at least 100. Check them out, and as you near your 50 Group maximum, drop some that are less relevant and add the most relevant for you. Most have jobs tabs. Link to Group members you like or that have 500+ connections. Find jobs on Discussion tabs also.

There's more details on how to use a group membership and LinkedIn to improve a job search at Tuerk's post here in the NewsWire blog. LinkedIn group membership is a great way to stay in touch with a community that can seem smaller, if you believe some reports. Let us hear from you.

Powerhouse drives users toward transition

Fourth generation languages may well be an artifact of a classic time in development, but 4GL code still powers some 3000 applications in enterprises. Powerhouse is the 4GL with the widest installed base, and some of its users are wondering how much time is left on the clock for this advanced development tool.

After its genesis as the Canadian company Quasar, Cognos released and developed this range of tools during the '70s and '80s for HP 3000 reporting, screen design, data dictionary work and applications. At first the Quiz report writer ran standalone on thousands of HP systems, including a bundle as a part of MANMAN's services. But when QDesign, Quick and QTP made their way into companies along with Powerhouse, the whole lineup wrapped itself around commercial apps such as the Amisys/3000 healthcare software -- plus many an in-house 3000 app.

Powerhouse users aren't holding out much hope for improvements to the tool which was purchased by IBM in 2007 along with Cognos. This Advanced Development Tool software didn't drive the IBM acquisition -- the Cognos Business Intelligence tools motivated the purchase. Established Cognos managers retort that ADT continues to produce profits for this business unit. Support contracts for even the smallest of HP 3000s run more than $500 monthly, revenue paid for service now called Vintage Support.

The good news is that Powerhouse for MPE/iX has outlasted Powerhouse for the IBM AS/400, in any vintage. But the language labors under the same yoke that COBOL carries, a profile of a tool built for another time. "The PowerHouse business has to have seen substantial decline for IBM over the years," said Vaughn Smith, a consultant in Canada. "How many more sites can convert to other development environments, reducing IBM's revenue, before they shut down Cognos?"

Smith wrote on a Powerhouse mailing list that "With the exception of Unix and Windows, Powerhouse runs on antiquated hardware." This consultant working with OpenVMS took the official HP view of the 3000, saying the "3000 MPE is done; HP offers help to move these sites to Unix or Windows platforms." (Those 3000 vintage support customers might want to correct his view.)

But even community members with direct 3000 migration exerience see Powerhouse as a waypoint instead of a destination, even when a system built in the '80s would cost millions to replace. Charles Finley of Transformix reported that a high-dollar replacement cost "does not ensure anything" about application longevity.

One prospect hired their web content developer to "completely replace" a working application in six months, because the developers assured them that the 300-program project could be replaced in that amount of time. This was done against the advice of the existing developer and, initially, without consulting her. Four months into the project the web developer asked the programmer for a printout of the database structures. They were TurboIMAGE schemas, so they needed the HP 3000 developer to explain them. The VP running the project who'd hired the web developers suggested that they print out all of the data in the database and have volunteers do the data entry. When the programmer pointed out that there could be lots of errors, she stopped getting invited to the meetings.  

I last heard that the system was finally going into testing two years late. What did that cost? This was a non-profit and they did it to save money! Also, as an extra incentive they would have nice web screens instead of those dull terminal screens.

Finley didn't mention the prospect by name, but those details match up with the migration situation in 2010 at the US Cat Fanciers Association.

Costs to carry Powerhouse forward are not a show-stopper for some companies leaving the HP 3000 -- an article in our print edition this month examines such a shift toward Powerhouse on Linux. But the world has changed a lot since the Cognos products were re-engineered in the late '90s to include separate versions for the Web and the Axiant Windows toolset. Much of the product line demands runtime licenses.

One developer who's preparing to make a move to Oracle on Windows and Linux outlined his work, as well as the reasons for doing it. "Once we are fully converted, I expect to start replacing QTP extracts with Oracle stored procedures," said Ken Langendock, "then replace screens with an HTML version that simply gets the data."

I believe, at the end of the day:

1. There are only going to be three databases left: Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server.

2.There are only going to be two OS left: Windows and Linux, because they can be implemented rather inexpensively.

3. There will only be one look and feel for all applications: Web

If Cognos wanted to get back into the running, they would have to follow these assumptions and revamp (combine) all the products into one suite and stop charging for Runtime licenses. They would then have a leg up on all the other tools with their Dictionary, but I don’t see this happening.

 

Intrinsic Advice: Finding HP's 3000 Savvy

While I fine-tuned (okay, corrected) yesterday's report about the current lifespan for MPE date intrinsics, my associate technical editor Vladimir Volokh suggested we include HP's documentation page for HPCALENDAR. That's the intrinsic HP wrote for the 6.0 and 7.x releases of the 3000's OS, a new tool to solve an old problem. Alas, HPCALENDAR is fresher, but it's only callable in the 3000's Native Mode.

But poking into the online resources for MPE Intrinsics, I stumbled on HP's re-shelving of its 3000 docs. No longer available at the easy-to-recall docs.hp.com, these manuals are at HP's Business Support Center. And just about nowhere else within a 10-minute search across Google's search engine. (Bing did no better.) So where are the guidelines to intrinsics for MPE/iX? All docs for the 3000's software are at the BSC 3000 docs page.

The Intrinsics Manual for 7.x is a PDF file at 

h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/CoreRedirect.jsp?redirectReason=DocIndexPDF&prodSeriesId=416035&targetPage=
http%3A%2F%2Fbizsupport2.austin.hp.com%2Fbc%2Fdocs%2Fsupport%2FSupportManual%2F c01712464%2Fc01712464.pdf

A lot to remember, but not much is simple while using HP's resources for 3000s these days. It used to be much simpler. In the 1990s the Interex user group ran a collection of well-written white papers by George Stachnik. We're lucky enough to have them with us today, cut loose from ownership and firewalls. One is devoted to the system's intrinsics.

By the time The HP 3000--for Complete Novices, Part 17: Using Intrinsics was posted on the 3K Associates website, Stachnik was working in technical training in HP's Network Server Division. He'd first written these papers for Interact, the technical journal devoted to 3000 savvy for more than two decades. Even though Interact is long out of print, Stachnik's savvy is preserved in multiple web outposts.

Stachnik explains why intrinsics tap the inherent advantage of using an HP 3000.

When an application program calls an MPE/iX intrinsic, the intrinsic places itself in MPE/iX's "privileged mode." The concept of privileged mode is one of the key reasons for the HP 3000's legendary reputation for reliability. Experienced IT managers have learned to be very wary of application programs that access system internal data structures directly. They demand that MPE/iX place restrictions on HP 3000 applications, to prevent them from doing anything that could foul up the system. This is what led to the development of the intrinsics. Application programs running in user mode can interact with the operating system only by invoking intrinsics.

Even if your company has a migration in mind, or doesn't have an unlimited lifespan for the 3000, knowing how intrinsics work is an intrinsic part of learning 3000 fine-tuning that might be inside classic applications. Tools can help to hunt down intrinsics, but it helps to know what they do and what they're called. You can fine-tune your 3000 knowledge using Stachnik's papers and HP's Intrinsic documentation.

Which bits produce the 3000's stall in 2028?

At the risk of beating a dead horse, we will return to the 3000's roadblock in 2028 one last time. We can wrap up our CALENDAR intrinsic discussion with an explanation of the reason for its hold on the 3000's far future. But it might be useful to consider that 2028 is not so far away that engineers aren't already conceiving its technology. When you merge VW and 2028, you can get an image like the one above.

Before the future, though, there's always history. When MPE was created in 1970, it started as a project called Omega. The miracle of this engineering was its use of 32-bit computing, still a novelty at the time. But when HP canceled Omega in favor of a 16-bit 3000 -- a management choice that prompted black armbands among HP staff -- it sealed the server into a 57-year period of service.

That's because, we were reminded by MPEX co-creator Vladimir Volokh, 16-bit 3000s left only enough intrinsic room for 127 years of accurate dates. The intrinsic CALENDAR, written for the eldest MPE Segmented Library (SL), uses only 7 bits to describe which year is in effect. That delivers a maximum number of 127 years which you can express, and MPE was built with 1900 as its base for dates.

From HP's Intrinsics Manual:

CALENDAR

date

16-bit unsigned integer
(assigned functional return)
Returns the calendar date in the following format:

Bits Value/Meaning

7:9
Day of year

0:7
Year since 1900

HP only allotted 7 bits to describe the year for MPE. Who'd expect that the OS would have a lifespan of more than 50 years? Someone who figured newer and better tools would take over by then. It's commonplace to believe in the equivalent of flying cars -- Volkswagen's 2028 model concepts (shown above) are online in the company's German video and Flash site. Maybe cars will fly in some places, maybe not in others. Oh, for one extra bit. But HP ordered 16 extra, just too late to influence the heart of MPE.

Working in the realm of the original 16-bit MPE intrinsics, "You cannot make less than 9 bits for the date of the year," Vladimir said. "That would be less than 365 days. So that leaves us 7 bits to express the year."

The vintage-'90s HPCALENDAR, reaching into the new elbow room of 32 bits, can use as many as 23 bits for the year. That intrinsic will cover 8 million years, even more. HPCALENDAR is available in Native Mode MPE, and it remains the best choice for any new work done on a 3000's applications.

But MPE's existing intrinsics provide the barrier here: the oldest are in Segmented Library (SL) -- and the newer HPCALENDAR is in Native Library (NL). And the only companies with any chance of adjusting the 3000's dates into 2028 and beyond are those which have insight into MPE/iX source. Then there's knowing what to do with it. They must get into the MPE source and recompile it to use HPCALENDAR.

For complete reference, here's the manual page for HPCALENDAR:

NM callable only.

This intrinsic returns the date in the supported
date type code 4 listed in the table, 
“Supported Date Formats.”

Syntax

I32

   date := HPCALENDAR;

Operation Notes

Where date is the 32-bit unsigned integer
(assigned functional return). This returns the
calendar date in the following format:

Bits Value/Meaning

23:9 Day of year

0:23 Year since 1900

Dates don't vex MPEX, Vladimir reminded us. It can do operations with DATE. "If you have MPEX, and who doesn’t," he says, "DATETOCALENDAR is a function in MPEX."

Vladimir also talks, on his return from consulting trips to 3000 sites, about the level of 3000 knowledge he sees in even long-time users. Management relies on the HP guys to tell them what’s up, and the HP guys don’t know.

"There are all kinds of excuses not to know what you’re doing," he says. He tells of his philosophy about learning. You draw a circle to represent what you know. "Inside the circle is what you know, outside is what you don’t know. You go along the circumference. Only by going along there can you see what you don’t know. So you learn, and you draw a bigger circle, a bigger circumference. The more you know, the more you know what you don’t know."

In converse, consider the smallest circle of knowledge, just a point. Vladimir adds, "When you know nothing, you think you know everything."

No one knows who will be working in the years near 2028 on HP 3000s. But in an era where Amiga computer games can be played on iPhones -- and companies now earn money for such a creation -- it's easy to say we don't know who will break this 2028 barrier. And they might be driving a car called a Volkswagen, and using a computer called the 3000, and neither will resemble what we know today, more than 15 years away.

Taking the Console at Your History

In a community that spans decades of IT, history is around every corner of memory and experience. This year the HP 3000 marks its 40th birthday, a milestone that prompts examination and recollection in everyone. (Not to mention an HP 3000 biography I am working on. Your stories are most welcome.) A veteran of the system is offering parts of that history, as well as a small monument to a simpler time for this computer.

Dave Wiseman has a few HP 3000 items he wants to donate to a good home, including a Series III console. The hardware at right (click for detail) drove the CPU cycles that were first establishing the 3000 as a business-critical platform. Being a Series III, it harkens back to the times when third-party software of any sort was a novelty, plus the need to understand the iron underneath at a level which younger IT pros can only imagine -- when they take the time to do so.

Wiseman splashed into my notice at a user group conference in the early '90s in Nashville, where he toted around an inflatable alligator as an icebreaker stunt. Awhile later he helped to found the ScreenJet experience with his partner Alan Yeo. By now he's moved on to other technical and sales work, but he owns a serious collection of these markers of 3000 history. In a storage closet here in my office, hung over a clothes rod, rest a handsome set of HP-branded ties he shipped me five years ago. Some of us wore such things with pride at these conferences. Wiseman would like to ship you his historic console for a tiny fraction of the hardware's original cost.

"Do you know who might be interested in these?" he asks. "I want don't want money for the items – just shipping costs."

The full array of the memorabilia above includes multiple editions of the VEsoft Thoughts and Discourses on HP 3000 Software, which include papers by Robelle's Bob Green -- plus Robelle's own HP 3000 Evolution, collecting other papers and some NewsWire articles. Even more fun is the DVD of Chris Gauthier's Growing Up with the HP 3000 short film, the Seldom Met User Group (SMUG) guidebooks, and some of those HP-branded giveaways we knew from the era when alligators followed software vendors.

Wiseman will ship it all for $40 to the US or France, or 25 Euros. "The console has protective plastic still on it," he says, "so this is new, unused item! I have a second console -- and I intend to wire it up by my bed so I can press 0003006 and then Start/Enable, to boot myself in the mornings!"

You can contact Wiseman to get your history at davebwiseman@gmail.com.

How to Install a VA7410 RAID Array

By Craig Lalley

First, I would only install a VA7410. Over the years, I have learned the VA7410s are much more reliable than the VA7100s.

You want to make sure that you have the latest firmware on the controllers. And yes, max out the controller memory to 2GB per controller. Then make sure you have the latest firmware on the drives. The good news is that the firmware has not changed, so hopefully it will already current. Contact me if you need the latest drivers.

The official HP supported configuration specifies either a PC or HP-UX workstation running CommandView.  Since the VA7410 has a dual-head controller, you can have two connections to the HP 3000 and one connection to the CommandView workstation. The CommandView workstation is required to update the firmware, and do performance logging.

When configuring the VA it is always better to have lots of small LUNs instead of a few big ones. What that means: make your LUN 9-18GB in size. Use Autoraid, not mirrored. The VA7410 is rated at 45,000 IOs per second, there is nothing the HP 3000 can do (especially an A-class) to make that VA sweat.

The HP 3000 supports 2GB/second.

Yes HAFO is supported, and is set up in SYSGEN. What I do is put the even LUNs on one controller and the odd LUNs on the other. Since both controllers "see" all the LUNs, HAFO is a snap.

Make sure you have the correct PDC firmware on the HP 3000. (The N-Class is 43.43, the A-Class is 43.50.) If you don't have the right PDC, don't even bother with the VA.

And remember, FCSCAN is your friend. TDUTIL to verify the path, i.e  TDUTIL "0/12/0/0"

RAIDing LDEV1, finding code for migration

What are the solutions for replacing our 4GB internal LDEV1 with something that supports RAID -- or at least disk mirroring? We currently have our production data in 'Jamaica' units, fully mirrored (Mirror/iX), but I've been worried about that ancient LDEV1. We do everything possible to not shut down power. It has reached the point where I have concern that if the drive ever lost its taste for power, it might never spin up again -- and the thought of a RELOAD is not fun.

Jack Connor says

There are two fairly low cost solutions which could handle RAID for your 3000. These would be the Mod 10/20 (at left) and Autoraid 12H units, both of which connect via FWD SCSI. A Mod 10/20 would require two FWD cards/connections to be available; the 12H, just one.

Gilles Schipper says

If the HP 3000 is not an A-Class or N-Class, then the best solution would be a Mod 10/20 or an Autoraid 12H. If it is an A-Class or N-Class, the best solutions include any number of fiber-capable devices -- such as a VA7xxx, an XP unit, and others. You could use the Mod 10/20 and Autoraid, but why would you, unless cost is the most important factor?

Craig Lalley says

One problem to consider is the model of HP 3000. The older "NIO" backplanes used in the 9x9s and earlier do not support native Fibre Channel. The N-class boxes do. To boot from a VA7xxx array, you would need the A5814A-003 Fibre to SCSI "brick" if you are not using an A-Class or N-Class.

We have recently begun our migration off the HP 3000. How can I determine what programs reference the data items in our TurboIMAGE databases, since the application vendor we currently use did not provide us with a data dictionary?

Michael Berkowitz says

Since you're using COBOL and probably use copy libraries, you could use Robot/3000 from Productive Software Systems. (Screen shot of Robot shown at left)

Larry Simonsen adds

Another option is to use the 3000's grep command in MPE/iX.

3000's use in 2028: bug, or feature?

The CALENDAR intrinsic that blocks HP 3000 use in 2028 has been described as a bug. On the first day of that year, dates will not be represented accurately. Some in your community consider that New Year's Day, less than 16 years from now, as the 3000's final barrier. But it depends on how you look at it -- as a veteran, or a voyager.

A voyager sees CALENDAR as a deadline for departure. This is a part of MPE that was designed in the 1970s, a period when HP had just scrapped a 32-bit release of the 3000's first OS. And just like the Y2K date design, HP engineers never figured their server's OS had any shot of working by the 21st Century -- let alone 2027. But VEsoft's Vladimir Volokh says, "It's difficult to predict anything, especially the future." An IT pro who's planning to depart the 3000 believes CALENDAR is a bug, but that's not how Vladimir sees it.

"This is not a bug, really," he said. "It's a limitation. The end of 2027 date was as far away as infinity when MPE was created." This is a man who defines the term veteran, the kind of professionals who had to work inside 4K memory spaces to build 3000 programs. Limited and expensive resources like memory and disc were supposed to be extended with newer computers. "Every analyst told us a computer would live five years, at most," Vladimir said.

But as a veteran, you've now come to see the day when MPE's lifespan is reaching eight times that prediction. The veteran who chooses to see CALENDAR as a limitation can refer to HP's own lab response. Engineers during the '90s built HPCALENDAR to start extending the 3000's date limits.

The HP 3000's date intrinsics will outlast those in Unix, so long as a program uses HPCALENDAR. HP advised its 3000 customers in 2008 to begin using it on HP 3000s. HPCALENDAR harks back to version 5.5 of MPE/iX. Its power lies in the 3000 for use by programmers who want accurate dates beyond 2038 (the limit in Unix) for application files.

Lifting the limits in application date handling -- that's one level of engineering skill. Extending the operating system limits beyond the 16-bit CALENDAR is a task with a greater challenge. It doesn't mean that it cannot be done. What matters is how healthy the 3000's best experts will be in 10 years or so. Vladimir says he'll be younger than 90 by then. Almost everyone in today's community will be even younger. And isn't 70 the new 60? It will matter when the 3000 needs the last set of bits to move from 16 to 32.

There's a old joke about software shortcomings being called features, rather than a bugs. Veterans learn to call them limitations and look for ways to overcome these aging designs. Everything is aging, even something as omnipresent at Windows XP. (Microsoft wants to end the life of that OS, used on more than 90 million computers, by 2014. Good luck with that.) XP is dying, the 3000 is dying. Well yes, says Vladimir. He tells his hundreds of customers who he visits, "We are all dying. But slowly."

3000 system census surprises in UK

At a recent 3000 webinar among CAMUS user group members, the Talk Soup Q&A brushed across the 2011 HP3000 Reunion. While the talk examined activity of 2012, one attendee on the conference call could be heard saying, "Not another reunion!" It's a tiresome but expected response to the scope of the 3000 population.

On one side stand the users and managers who employ an HP 3000 in everyday production. They're grateful for any relevant information to keep 3000s running well and updated as much as possible. These community members don't often ask how many systems are still running. For some, another Reunion would be a chance to attend an event they couldn't enjoy because of a 2011 conflict.

Other HP 3000 managers want to view the community as a seriously shrunken village. They've made the choice to migrate, or they can't find work any longer that taps their MPE and 3000 skills. Perhaps they do business in the community and haven't had new revenue in a long while. Other opportunities call, so they're eager to reinforce their choice to move away.

However, we sometimes encounter census trail-posts that lead away from the "too small to be relevant" viewpoints. In the UK one prominent community member had a trail blaze that opened their eyes about who might still remain in the homesteading populace.

 Like most of these reports, it came by way of a third party. One vendor said he saw a support provider's list of 3000 sites and spotted suprising totals.

"There were twice the number of customers on that single vendor's list as I suspected were in the entirety of the UK," he said.

One thing that might well stall migrations this year -- and sustain that populace -- is the emergence of the HPA/3000 emulator product. This virtualization engine won't even have to show much success at this point in the 3000's life. With a solution other than migration on the horizon, the lean-budgeted 3000 users will have something to use as a risk-aversion strategy. A company with concerns over hardware availability or costs will believe that hosting MPE on commodity hardware resolves those problems.

Whether that's reasonable or not remains to be proven. In the short term, the hardware suppliers to the community will survive, because the costs of shrink-wrapped replacement components will remain well below the fee to install HPA/3000. Even a cloud-based deployment will cost more than fresher hardware with HP's badge. Given enough time, the $25,000 entry to that commodity solution may seem a better long-term strategy.

It's a common belief that a 3000 emulator arrived too late to make a difference in the market. But learning that twice as many customers remain online as expected changes that formula -- especially for each customer who's remaining a homesteader.

Continuing support key to homesteading

In a webinar last week the makers of the HPA/3000 Charon virtualizing engine (read: emulator) took questions from attendees about licensing. Not the license of MPE/iX (already in place from HP) or licensing their product with customers (something they'd love to do once a customer commits. Soon, we were told.)

The licensing issue in play is how to get a software vendor to embrace use of their product on HPA/3000. For some companies this is an automatic. They generally don't charge for upgrades and haven't created anything that needs special handling inside MPE/iX. Terry Floyd of the Support Group sells software that his company has crafted. His customer, Ed Stein of Magicaire, is on the short list for early adoption of HPA/3000.

"I don’t write any tricky stuff," Floyd said. "We don’t have anything that needs testing. If Ed could get a box with Charon running, our test would be a full month-end close (dozens of jobs) and an MRP run. I think he’ll do a very thorough job – that’s his nature."

Some vendors, especially app suppliers, might have a different approach. The key to getting software from HP iron onto the emulator may well be keeping up support. 3000 software support contracts can be left behind while trimming budgets. This can present a problem that can be fixed by restarting support -- which is a good idea anyway, if the 3000 is mission-critical.

The flow of support money is tricky. For some 3000s this expense will need to be justified. Floyd sketches out the issues, both from the customer's point of view as well as software vendors who still support 3000s.

Nobody who's on support will have any problems with a vendor. So the real crux is: are you on support with each vendor? If not -- in Ed’s case we can use Cognos for an example -- they probably are not going to be very concerned that they intend to charge you to get back on support. Perhaps a considerable amount. As someone who lives on support income, I guess I can feel their pain, But we have never charged anyone extra for back support if they left us, then came back later. 

What is somewhat comparable in our arena is charging higher rates to do any work for MANMAN users not on our support contract. That is our policy and we haven’t broken it yet.  I guess some would think that is hard-nosed, but if Ed has been off support for, let’s say, 10 years on Cognos' Quiz and now wants to go back on support with them, they might begin the negotiation with a charge of the full 10 years back support, Just to get his attention. I can see -- for some HP 3000 users not on support with some vendors -- why this is going to end up being an “every man for himself” negotiation process.

Writing Down a Life with the HP 3000

I'm celebrating my birthday today, marking how many of my 55 years have included the HP 3000. More than half my life has been devoted to telling stories about this server, but it's a period only two thirds the size of the computer's lifespan. I'm lucky to be living in the 3000's era, and I use the present tense of "to live" to indicate a life with a future.

28 years ago today I was polishing up a feature story about saving the red poppies in Georgetown, Texas for the Williamson County Sun. It was a spirited plea to extend the life of something beautiful. I covered the schools, the festivals, the joyous idle time of life in a small town of 4,500 in 1984. It was work from the first half of my life that prepared me for the next half. You might be feeling the same way, like Craig Proctor bringing his programmer-analyst experience to the next phase of his career, beyond the HP 3000.

In April of 1984 your community was awaiting the future eagerly after a reset. The year's Interex conference had just wrapped up a few weeks earlier, a meeting where HP announced that it was scapping the Vision project to modernize the HP 3000 -- a computer just 10 years old at the time. Vision was HP's plan to turn a 16-bit environment into the 32-bit richness already on offer from Digital and IBM. HP was supposed to deliver a new IMAGE database as part of the program, something based on the ascent of SQL. In a few years HP  brought SQL into the 3000 community with Allbase, a product purchased from a third party. Allbase stuck with customers like crushed poppy leaves in the wind.

HP's work during 1984 started the march to RISC computing, the architecture that lives on beyond the iron in the HPA/3000 emulator from Stromasys. Everything we do in life prepares us in some way for what follows, if we connect the dots. I'm about to start a project to help celebrate the dots of the 3000's life. A biography of the HP 3000 is on my menu for this fall, the 40th anniversary of HP's 3000 rollout. I want your stories to spark the 3000's history, so we can see where our lives are leading us.

At the Sun I polished my skills of community reporting, the ones that would serve me while I chronicled the 3000's community lifestyle. I'd already written government news, sports and arts coverage for five communities at another newspaper, plus editorials and obituaries at still another. The Sun's newsroom crackled with the thunder of a half-dozen IBM Selectrics on deadline, reporters sculpting stories by hammering at keyboards to drive the type-balls across rolled paper.

Schools generated some of the most profound passion among 12,000 homes where we were delivered twice a week. The work in education represented the future, hope, and sometimes anger over short-sighted plans and misspent money. It was good practice for the passion of the 3000 community, already full of personalities and problems with meeting the future.

This book that will tell your HP 3000's past includes a future, too. Shaped by the spirit that will fill its early pages, we'll look forward at the Life Beyond the Iron: a virtualized 3000 that will be running after MPE's 55th birthday. At that point at the end of 2027, the CALENDAR bug will arrive like Y2K hit the community. There will be a solution available to keep the 3000 alive. VEsoft's Vladimir Volokh says, "I will only be 90, so I will create one by then." We're all defying age while we expire, adding chapters to our biographies. In the Spring of 1984 your community was eager for Spectrum, the Book Two of the 3000's life. I am eager to hear your stories and gather pictures, too. Together we can polish a vision of the years to come.

Federal program helps 3000 IT pro re-train

HP 3000 IT pros have a challenge to overcome in their careers: how to add modern skills to the classic tooset they learned managing 3000s. Those between jobs must handle the costs to train, too. Craig Proctor has been spending time to learn the likes of C#, Java and Visual Studio. After a year of study, he hasn't been spending his own money.

"I took a dozen different classes," Proctor said. "The Trade Act paid for it all. It's possible to take one class at TLG Learning, or work with them to design a series of classes."

Proctor worked with a 3000 for more than 20 years at Boeing, as a Configuration Management Analyst and Business Systems Programmer Analyst. He left Boeing in 2010 and began a period he calls Updating IT Skills in his resume at LinkedIn. TLG, based in Seattle, gave him training that he will blend with the business analysis that's so common in 3000 careers. He understands that by drawing on his recent education he'd accept at an entry level IT position. "You get the merger of an experienced analyst, using new tools," he said of his proposal to any new employer."

Last year an extension of the Trade Act was signed into US law by President Obama in one of the few bills that escaped the partisan logjam. A federal website describes it as a way for foreign-trade-affected workers to "obtain the skills, resources, and support they need to become re-employed." $975 billion in federal funds have been sent to states like Proctor's in Washington, adminstered by each state. Furloughed workers file a petition for training, job search and relocation allowances. These pros have an average age of 46, which is the younger side of the HP 3000 workforce.

Proctor didn't believe that his 3000 experience helped in gaining more modern IT skills -- except for his years as an analyst.

I wouldn't say that the HP 3000 skills helped, but the analytical/programmer skills did. All 22.5 years at Boeing were on the HP 3000 (Fortran) and I had a couple of years on it before. as well as Burroughs (now Unisys) using COBOL. The hardest class for me was C#; COBOL and Fortran were so similar, but C# was nothing like that. The other classes were interesting and fun for me -- challenging, but still fun.

Like anybody well-versed in system management and coding under MPE, he'd like to land a job in a business using a 3000. "With so much HP 3000 experience under my belt, I'd feel a lot more comfortable and ready to dive in with another HP 3000 shop," he said. "I also have all the soft skills -- investigative, detail oriented -- that I need."

Learning what Proctor called "21st century technology" can help 3000 veterans who've seen their positions eliminated. There's a LinkedIn Group devoted to HP 3000 Jobs with more resources and discussion. It's a subgroup of Bill and Dave's Excellent Machine, devoted to the HP experience. Like the HP 3000 Community Group, (now 475 members strong) you request membership -- but a 3000 pro sees nearly-automatic acceptance in these groups.

A 3000's Efficiency vs. Unix's Soft Bedrock

While the HP 3000 was still a going concern at HP (meaning HP concerned itself with the 3000 going away) customers were replacing it with HP-UX servers. The question came up often: how much Unix you'd need to replace MPE. HP's lab engineer Kevin Cooper even wrote a paper about it, presented at user conferences. The simple answer to the question was, "twice as many, if you're not using Oracle." The Oracle users had to buy even more hardware.

That multiplier emerged out of HP-aided tests at some big customers. Cooper says that "IMAGE was highly optimized for the way 3000 applications used it, and it consumed a lot fewer CPU cycles per transaction compared to relational DBs -- on the order of a 1:2 ratio. And this just happens to be where a lot of applications burn a big percentage of their CPU cycles."

MPE/iX managed memory well, especially in the caching of database writes combined with the IMAGE Transaction Manager. The migrated apps which HP studied tended to need about four times the memory on their new platforms, which meant a lot more memory management overhead.

This 3000 advantage emerged because MPE has a database in IMAGE and a programming model that had to perform acceptably on a 2 MHz system with just 1MB of memory. Although the OS bloated up over 30-plus years of redesigns, MPE runs well under 200 times as much CPU power and 8,000 times as much memory. Oracle, well, it's got a lot softer bedrock for app software. It's going to need more system resource to do the same thing.

But MPE was not cheap compared to the investment in Unix. Not in capital costs, until you added all the Unix software that was built upon an OS not designed initially as a business tool. This will become an issue to consider as the homesteader community looks over their in-house apps. When they prepare to move their own code they must play architect, or hire consultants to do this. Mark Ranft, who runs the Pro3K consultancy, has said this architecting relies on knowing both strengths and weaknesses of an enterprise target.

An operating system provides a platform upon which to write your enterprise applications. The enterprise architect must understand the strengths and the weaknesses of the platform and design the application around them. Sometimes this may mean you have large pools of mid-tier systems/application servers to make up for the lack of resiliency in the operating system. This could be compared to using the RAID concept for disk arrays.

Several years ago the trading of single 3000s for multiple servers was in full throat. The costs for this many-from-one calculation are not obvious at first. "I fear that most enterprises will find the licenses, care and feeding of these needed numerous mid-term systems are far from being inexpensive," Ranft summed up in a message on the LinkedIn 3000 Community group.

Your MPE advantages continue to flow from record-level integration with data. It has a shared, re-entrant code, and a unique data division. That's different than the Unix single-threaded kernel shared data model. So the 3000's architecture has more parallelism baked in.

IMAGE remains the keystone of the 3000's advantages. Some engineers say that it forced developers to think about data relationships ahead of time -- a process which therefore uses less resource than SQL's ad hoc indexing. This is why a school district or a gas pump maker gets along fine with a Series 969 or a Series 989 -- hardware whose horsepower is horse-and-buggy, versus the CPU available to modern products like the Stromasys HPA/3000 virtualization engine.

Emulation advocate could smooth licenses

At yesterday's demonstration of the current HPA/3000 virtualization engine -- you'd know it as The Emulator -- tech success was in abundance. Everything that the product manager Paul Taffel showed off during the spring CAMUS RUG meeting worked as expected. One hour of demo without a single crash. Glance, third party database tools, even something as esoteric as the OCTCOMP object code translator that HP built, the one that ensures that Classic 3000 programs will run on the PA-RISC systems of the modern era.

That last item was no slower than it behaves under HP's 3000 iron. Taffel was showing off the N-Class version of HPA/3000, and he was doing the demo on a $1,300 PC using a paltry 4GB of RAM within 16GB on a Linux PC.

My test Linux system has 16 GB of memory (although we only recommend or need 8 GB for the A400 emulator).  I was running our N4000-100-750 emulator, with 2 GB of memory available to the virtual HP 3000, and I mentioned that I was actually only using about 4 GB of memory at the time (including Linux overhead). I'm not sure that increasing the memory allocated to the virtual HP 3000 would have resulted in any noticeable speed-up, at least during the relatively low load tests that I was performing.

The marvel of the HPA/3000 design is that it has no measurable ceiling for top performance. Intel will keep improving its chip speeds. That puts more horsepower at the command of this engine.

Licensing advocacy might speed up sales. Some vendors are going to want to test for the market's only 3000 emulator and need to recover the lab costs. Others see a need for more real-world tests. HPA/3000 isn't a software-software interaction, however. Taffel says there's no MPE/iX emulation going on in HPA/3000. Every feature of the 3000's OS operates the same, right down to intrinsics. Yes, even the end-of-2027 date bug exists in the emulated solution.

Terry Floyd suggested that an organization like the storied SIGSOFTVEND could assist in getting 3000 apps and essential tools certified. Taffel called the business that vendors could protect via emulator customers "like money for nothing. It's giving these vendors another few years of software support business."

That's true, unless few members of a vendor's supported customer base have mentioned the emulator. These vendors need to be convinced, by some advocate, that it's good business to include HPA/3000 sites on their approved list. Without any evidence they're going to lose money if they don't do HPA/3000 tests, vendors could play the short game and aim tech resources elsewhere. A 3000 software vendor organization is a good idea anyway, but the HPA/3000 gives it a real business focus. SIGSOFTVEND did its work with no overhead to speak of -- and that group was tracing the impact of HP's changes to MPE/iX. VEsoft's founder knows embracing HPA/3000 is simpler.

The nascent public interest from customers about HPA/3000 might be tied to the early days of the release cycle. At the moment there's a pricing issue for the size of some customers homesteading. We await a report of a sale from Stromasys.

Supported customers do leave a vendor, after awhile. But hesitation over emulator certification may be a sign that a vendor is looking at other places to invest right now, at least until the HPA/3000 gains some customer traction. This reticence represents the cost which HP levied by stalling the Stromasys product for five years. A green light when Stromasys was ready in 2002 would have yielded a product by 2005, or even 2008. At either time, software suppliers would've had a lot more customer support contracts to protect with emulator certifications. Taffel called that delay a tragedy, but he's on the job to create happier endings.

"It's a tragedy if you care about extending the HP 3000 lifetime," he said. "But I'm not singling anyone out for blame. That's just the way things worked out." Stromasys CTO Robert Boers was more explicit last fall about the source of the delay. Everyone agrees that selling this product four years ago would have been easier. As it turned out, HP had lost more than half its migrating sites to other vendors by the time it started to work with Stromasys on HPA/3000.

A test suite for software products need not be extensive, in order to keep them from being expensive. This product does nothing more than make Intel processors behave like PA-RISC chips. VEsoft's Vladimir Volokh said using MPEX on this platform -- a product which literally extends MPE -- didn't require software-software level testing, as far as he was concerned.

If an HPA/3000 prospect has got all in-house code -- and only needs the surround tools which are already certified by third parties -- then they're more likely to arrive on the emulator. Licensing, or even certification, can be very important to closing a sale. Some products like MANMAN don't even look for a HPSUSAN number. Floyd said that in the case of that app suite, it comes down to a matter of ethics. We would add, "and what your auditor expects about licensing."

Stromasys has never launched a product into a market where the vendor was totally absent, so long-gone that you may wonder if there's an HP 3000 license transfer mechanism running anymore. (HP says yes, and we've had reports from resellers who use it.) The customers think it exists, mostly. That's why the first-wave companies are going to be so important to the launch of HPA/3000. People want to see how others are handling the business matters of using an emulator -- and those decisions on licensing may be the crossroads of whether anyone will spend $25K to $100K on HPA/3000.

But at least after yesterday's meeting the world knows it works with MPEX and DBGENERAL and SHOWCLKS. It looks great, and there was a magic moment where an HP 3000 boot volume was duplicated, or compressed, using Ubuntu Linux. Taffel says at some point the product will be called a 1.0, instead of the prerelease 0.8.

Advocacy from someone in the community with business leadership could help include crucial tools on par with MB Foster's connectivity software, or even PowerHouse and Speedware. VEsoft's in a vanguard here with several other software companies fanned out with a few thousand sites. Stromasys can't do certification advocacy as well as a software supplier with deep roots in the 3000 community. There's selling of HPA/3000 to be done on more than one level. Without advocacy, it may be every HPA/3000 customer for themselves in arranging to use the solution with their third party software.

Entry N-Class 3000 demoed on $1300 iron

Stromasys is careful to tell its prospects for the HPA/3000 software that the emulator will be installed on higher-class PC hardware. But for this morning's demo of the product for the CAMUS user group, the product manager Paul Taffel used a $1,300 desktop system. The price included a solid state disk (SSD) drive.

The costs of 3000 hardware aren't a big factor in homesteading for some customers. One manager we interviewed last week cited the price of 3000 disk devices, however, as a reason to follow QSS onto Linux in a migration of their app. Would that company plan to remain on a 3000 if they could employ rock-bottom components and peripherals?

Put it this way: That's one less reason to need to plan for a different environment. It's a serious enough move off homesteading that some customers are taking two or more years to migrate. The product that Stomasys calls a virtualization engine will be eliminating the need to find HP's 9GB drives and shrink wrap them as spares. During the demo, Taffel accessed a 9 GB file -- yes, a file -- that stands in for the 3000's drive. This instance of the 3000 had an MPE/iX 7.5 installation.

Using an SSD to host LDEV 1, while running MPE applications and even HP's diagonostics on $1,300 of iron, should provide a hard reset of what a 3000 will be in the years to come. It's even possible to run a 3000 without so much as a power cord for awhile. The HPA/3000 will run on a laptop.

HP's 3000 managers, generally, find futures beyond the designs of HP

I had an afternoon this week that felt like a ride in a time machine. I was turning the pages of a glossy user group magazine, devoted to HP server products. The HP 3000 was even mentioned in its opening pages. And there on an introductory page, right after an HP print ad, was an HP general manager who was bidding his customers farewell, moving out of a division.

But I only had to blink to notice the differences. The magazine was The Connection, 36 pages plus its covers devoted to the world of NonStop servers, the ones you might know as Tandems. The print ad was not devoted to HP iron, but to time software for the NonStop's OS. And that general manager, you may have guessed, was Winston Prather, saying farewell to another of his server customer bases.

Six men have been general managers of HP's 3000 business since the middle 1980s, but Prather is the only one who's remained at HP. Some of the rest have retired to private practices (Rich Sevcik, now an ardent evangelist in the classic sense of that word; Harry Sterling, enjoying a life in real estate) or have simply left HP for the next chapter of their business lives. Dave Wilde, the last fellow to hold the job, even was welcomed at last fall's HP 3000 Reunion. That was a conference which another of the ex-GMs expressed an interest in and best wishes toward: Glenn Osaka left HP before Prather even took his job, and is now working at Juniper Networks.

Networks hold the next opportunity for Prather, an executive best known for the "it was my decision" to end the 3000's futures at HP. This time he's left the NonStop group in the hands of an engineer who's tackling his first GM job at HP. That's the exact position Prather assumed in 1999 -- before he and others at the vendor gave your storied server the paddling it never deserved.

In his farewell Connection column where he passed on leadership of another Business Critical Systems unit, this one to Ric Lewis, Prather bubbled with familiar platform enthusiasm as he headed back to engineering management. With "mixed feelings" he wrote about enjoying his days in the NonStop family.

As NonStop customers and partners, you know that NonStop has been providing unique value for over 35 years. The products have evolved to keep up with the times: modern hardware, open standards and development environments. As I move on to the next stage of my career, let me leave you with a few thoughts. NonStop is truly a special business. You can see it in the products. You can see it in the dedication of the employees. And mostly you can see it in the statements that you, our customers and partners, make about how you depend on NonStop.

The customers' dependence on an HP product was not an element in his 3000 decision -- unless he was counting the number of customers. Prather, unlike the community's most-admired 3000 GM Sterling, is moving out of general manager work into HP's Networking unit, one of the few places where HP's still showing profitability growth. He's now Global VP of Engineering there, a management assignment not entirely unlike the R&D Manager job that he toiled at under Sterling in the 3000 division.

Olivier Helleboid, the GM who helmed the 3000 group as we started the 3000 NewsWire, has gone on to become VP of Product Management at Intuit. His encouragement gave us the green light to launch the publication. Sure, that era of mid-90s -- and even before, in the simplicity of the '80s -- might be adequately summed up in the language Prather chose while leaving yet another HP server group. This latest one, he says, can outlive his tenure because it has modern hardware, open standards and development environments. With the notable exception of living beyond his career aspirations, that all sounds familiar.

When Prather cut off the 3000, its PA-RISC hardware -- when unhobbled by management's OS decisions -- was as fast as any other server HP sold; Itanium didn't even have a worthy system to ship. The 3000 was struggling toward adopting modern backplane tech, projects that languished as Prather led the 3000 lab. Y2K was too much stress for those labs, and the new PCI-based servers were as seriously late as the first PA-RISC 3000s were in the '80s. Very little sold as new systems in the years around Y2K. Sales were stymied by the "its coming soon" drumbeats about the N and A Classes. Back in the '80s on the cusp of new RISC tech, the 3000 had management champions to pull the engineering oxcart out of the ditch. No champions could be found at the very end of the '90s. Marching in place with his proscribed headcount was Prather's path into a declining future.

It was his future vision that killed HP's business. In those days MPE, which had been turned toward its Unix features under Osaka's watch, had the same then-current calibre of open standards that NonStop enjoys today. As a GM Prather's predecessor Sterling made sure the division was devoted to the Internet; it captured its first set of open source tools. Development of partner apps had drawn to a standstill after one year of Prather's decisions, something that was due to marketing responses, product delivery and commodity competition. At that point Prather told us that as a GM it wasn't his job to sell 3000s -- just to deliver the right server to the customer from HP's many choices. Later that year he ended HP's 3000 life.

Now that HP is losing ground in such unique server markets, the GM who tolled HP's death knell for its 3000 unit has moved into a commodity unit, Networking. He's rid of the decisions about what to build next, because a higher level of manager will approve the calls that were his to make for the 3000 business. Being tied to a proprietary environment business is becoming a burden for career growth, where execs are measured by revenue increases and rising partner counts. Prather has gotten himself paroled from HP's proprietary jail.

It took a 3000 manager to sum up the last five years of Prather's career, a summary that invoked HP 3000 work on Prather's watch. Connect President Steve Davidek, who we interviewed in a 2010 Q&A, thanks "Winston for his support while at the NonStop Enterprise Division." Davidek said the move "is great news for Winston."

I first met Winston while I was giving the World Wide Advocacy Survey results to HP. Winston was still managing the HP 3000 division at the time. The survey results showed HP that, again, they loved their 3000s but the HP contracts were still a pain.

There was a lot more HP pain to come for Prather's customers and partners. He drank deep from HP's proposals for Unix, predicting at an Interex meeting in February, 2002 that more than 80 percent of the customers would be migrated within a few years. Instead, HP lost two of every three departing customers to other vendors. But HP had an enterprise unit to streamline after buying up Compaq's DEC business. Prather got his bosses to approve the elimination of a unit that was shipping current technology, bearing standards support and boasting a partner network more than 30 years old.

Those components are not enough to survive in HP when your leadership dedicated to the vendor, rather than the customer. Five other men found a circuit beyond HP's changing ways. It's telling to see that only Prather stays plugged in today.

Licenses crank engines of 3000 virtualization

In a few days Stromasys will update the MANMAN community about its virtualization product that mimics 3000s using Intel hardware. Instead of calling it an emulator, we'll try to stay current and call this software what Stromasys calls it: a virtualization engine. We'll know more about the tech details and the current sales impact next week.

But in the meantime the applications which run on that 3000 iron need licensing. Either they need support fees paid, or in some cases the app itself requires a license fee. Sometimes unexpectly, a fee like this on a homestead 3000 can catapault into an unprecedented tier.

That's what happened to Sako Badalian at Rockwell Collins. The manufacturer of smart communications and aviation electronics in jet fighters uses a 3000 to run MANMAN, software that's now owned by Infor. Badalian reached out to ask if anybody else who uses MANMAN saw a 240 percent increase in the annual fees paid to Infor. That's the bill that Rockwell Collins received from the fifth company to own MANMAN, software whose ownership swaps date back to the 1980s. (CA, Interbiz, SSA Global and Infor have bought the software's customers and the code over that period.)

You would think that after a decade or more of no enhancements to an app, its fees wouldn't rise. But you'd be wrong, apparently, and this practice has become the one of the cranks that turns a 3000 virtualization engine.

There's a much larger field of homesteading 3000 customers for Stromasys to capture. They run custom code and apps, in-house software. Their licenses are limited to the independent tools used by IT pros who've been on the 3000 job for several decades. The vendors such as Adager, VEsoft, Robelle, Minisoft, MB Foster and Hillary Software, having made their initial sales, just want to maintain their service to the customers. These customers buying the Stromasys engines are unlikely to experience what Badalian bemoaned this week to his fellow MANMAN managers.

My main concern is the term license fee that Infor is charging us for use of MANMAN on the HP 3000. Infor has raised the annual term license fee and one-year support for MANMAN by 240 percent over last year's fees. What I am asking is: have your annual term fees increased substantially for this year? If yes, then did Infor notify you of this unexpectedly large annual fee increase?

Infor may not understand that its revenues for MANMAN are not going to go up by 200 percent using this strategy. Faced with this kind of increase, a 3000 owner will find a way not to pay. Some homesteaders don't have that kind of extra budget on hand, especially for a mission-critical app which they enhance themselves, or pay separately to have improved. Not all of the homesteader cost-cutting is going to come through migrations, however.

The higher profile the MANMAN site, the less room it has to economize on this license and remain an Infor customer. If Infor, Escalate (nee Ecometry) Amisys and other packaged app providers don't crank the virtualization engines for their customers, cloud solutions will rise up in their place. As it turns out, one of those solutions has been built using expertise from MANMAN's creators, ASK Software.

Some customers don't want to be tied to platforms anymore, and their genuine risks in using the cloud are offset by unexpected 240 percent price increases. They will also get a shot at virtualization, too, so long as there's some way to move to custom, in-house 3000 apps. (MANMAN has become this very thing over the last two decades, for the lucky customers who have the right to their source code.) Stromasys will be offering a cloud-based HPA/3000 engine later this year.

Changing IP Addresses for HP 3000s

I need to change the IP address of our HP 3000 in the near future, and it's been over 10 years since I've done anything like this. Here's what I think needs to be done:

NMMGR
Open Config
NS
Guided Config
Put in the network interface, (LAN1), then press Config Network
Enter the new IP address
Save Data
Validate

Tracy Johnson replies:

I would go with Unguided Config. Guided may change things (besides the IP address) to defaults that may have modified over the last 10 years.

Craig Lalley adds:

Depending on the old IP address and the new IP address, you may want to also change the subnet, and the gateway. The gateway can be accessed by hitting F4 for Internet. The gateway is found at the path NETXPORT.NI.LAN.INTERNET

If you are making the change because of a new switch/router, make sure the network guys configure the port for the HP 3000 correctly. In other words, if you have a 100MB card, make sure it is set to 100MB/full duplex and do the same on the HP 3000, and turn off auto negotiate.

Lalley noted that this kind of reconfiguration goes smoother when a manager takes the time to check the network timing settings. Those are available at the path NETXPORT.GPROT.TCP.

Independent IT consultant Al Nizzardini adds that creating a new System Load Tape is an important part of the process. Gilles Schipper of indie support company GSA also explained a key step.

After making the change via NMMGR and validating both netexport and DTS, you need to:

netcontrol net=lan1;update=internet

to actually effect the change

Manufacturers pull HP off support lines

CAMUS director Michael Anderson, an IT consultant in the Bay Area and a leader of that MRP/ERP users group, was an IT projects manager and applications manager at manufacturers Tencor and ThermaWave, both using HP 3000s. Hewlett-Packard is off the radar at most of these manufacturing sites.

“As far as HP support for the HP 3000, I dropped mine a couple months after they announced the end-of-life,” Anderson said of the period in 2002 where he became Enterprise Wide Applications Manager at ThermaWave. “What are you spending money for at that point?  Long term there was not going to be any meaningful development for MANMAN, so there would also be no demand from the application for new features in MPE or IMAGE.  My employer was going through tough times and really needed the $58,000 in savings.

“As long as the old hardware continued to work and you had a good boot tape, what could HP provide that third parties didn’t already provide better for less?  The damage is done and most of the HP support customers are gone. Maybe if they had announced there would be some support in the afterlife there would be more users holding on.”

User groups, which have some of the most seasoned managers in the community, offer a better application and system resource. “On the other hand, for the companies that still use MANMAN on HP 3000s, CAMUS is still here to provide a supportive environment and forum for knowledge exchange,” Anderson said. “But it’s getting pretty quiet.”

While HP’s not making much noise on these soft feints into a market that it’s abandoned, there’s no doubting the attempts will continue, however unsuccessful. MB Foster’s Birket Foster predicted back in 2009 that HP would become a non-entity in the support field by now.

“Does the market miss the final level of HP’s 3000 support? No, these customers are already working with independent companies,” Foster said. “I’m sure that the only thing that annoys those [independent providers] is that HP keeps taking money for support. The long support tail of HP has already moved resources away from the 3000.”

Off the books, however, the HP methods and pricing are still being applied in some places. “They’re still doing support for some customers under nondisclosure because they don’t want the unwashed masses to know,” Foster said. “They’re willing to ensure there’s a body providing support to those customers. It’s something they’ve managed, to keep employees on for an extra period of time to cover some of the support needs for some larger, more strategic customers. But HP is also working hard to ensure those customers have a plan to move off.”

“They’re definitely there on the hardware side of 3000 support,” Foster said. “They’re offering support, but for certain devices. The list is growing smaller. When you get an HP renewal, it now says, ‘Except for these devices,’ with another set of devices falling off the list. For operating system support, I’m sure you can get it if you’re paying enough money.”

“Some of the people who used to work on the 3000 are still working inside HP. They’re very experienced and support certain customers. But I would say HP’s definitely reduced the number of personnel skilled in HP 3000 support.”

The departure of HP from the field follows a pattern of receding that started long before the vendor closed up its 3000 labs. At the MANMAN and 3000 support provider The Support Group, “We felt like we were supporting legacy products already in 2001,” says founder Terry Floyd. “Most of our MANMAN customers were off of applications software support anyway, so it didn’t change our plans much.”

CAMUS webinar includes emulator update

The CAMUS ERP/MRP users group is hosting an online meeting in about a week, on April 17 starting at 11:30 EDT. CAMUS board member Michael Anderson is taking registrations for that Tuesday's call-in and web briefing, one which includes an update from the makers of the Charon HPA/3000 emulator.

Stromasys has added an HP 3000 business manager, Paul Taffel, who will brief attendees on this HP 3000 emulator. Taffel's got airtime on the docket through 1 PM. A demonstration is promised. The meeting is open to anyone who registers with Anderson, by sending him an email. He'll reply with login and call-in details.

In the hour following the Stromasys briefing, users who are managing VMS sites will share information in a Talk Soup about the track record of the Charon technology in the DEC world. The first ERP-MRP production work for the emulator took place in the Alpha and VAX community. Some CAMUS members have already shared high praise for the software's ability to mimic HP hardware (on VMS systems) using Intel PC systems. What's changed since those Charon versions is the hosting environment. It's now Linux instead of Windows.

Anderson says this spring's premiere of the HPA/3000 offer may not fit the users of older, smaller 3000s. The first release of HPA/3000 is only matching A-Class 400MhZ horsepower. Stromasys has proven lab resources to boost that. The rollout schedule promises an N-Class-powered, multiple processor version by sometime after July 1, but sold at a price above $50,000.

Anderson has said that based on the first set of prices, he doubts there's enough of an offer yet from Stromasys to spark growth of MPE application use during 2012.

"I don't see the emulator swelling the ranks of MPE or application users," Anderson said. "I think they are mistaking the ardor of the enthusiast as market demand."

"I think there's a lot of interest in the emulator for contractors who can finally put a development system into their home office," he added. "I don't think we're to the point yet when you can't get parts to keep old hardware running — just rob them from an equivalent HP 9000."

There's also a general discussion of CAMUS activities set for the meeting. Setup for the webinar is scheduled to start at 11:15, to ensure smooth connections.

Migrating Data for Extended Homesteading

Update: Added advice from Brian Edminster on using Jeff Vance's free UDC, UDCVOL.

The redoubtable 3000-L mailing list still boasts more than 600 readers, and more than 100 of them answer questions about 3000 operations. The discussion helps homesteaders, or those who are making moves to extend the life of 3000s.

Or replace them with other 3000s. A reseller recently asked for help on data migration of the homestead variety. He got instructions useful for anyone populating a fresh disc with production data.

I'm using MPE/iX 6.5 on a 9x7 3000, and trying to move data from a system volume set to a private volume set. I made a full backup and have created a private volume set, but I'm having problems restoring my data to the private volume set.

Craig Lalley of EchoTech replied:

You need to build the accounts and groups on the private volume before the restore. On the old system, run BULDACCT like this

acct_list%VSACCT=user_set

Purge the old accounts, then STREAM BULDJOB1. This will build the "buckets," the accounts/groups on the private volume. Then do the restore.

Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies took note of a free program to control volume operations.

An even better idea is to use Jeff Vance's Volume Mgmt UDC's, available at the OpenMPE 'JAZZ' page. It's a step up from doing it manually, because you can set up a config file that will automagically put accounts/groups on the proper volumes. I use this on all my systems, and for all my clients that have non-system volumes. (Basically, anybody with a system big enough to have more than one disk)

Purging that old account was part of several replies to the question. Keven Miller of 3K Ranger said, "You can avoid doing the NEWACCT,NEWGROUP,ALT... yourself by using the ;CREATE and ;VOLSET=p-volume  on the restore. But you will likely want to purge the old account first."

Tracy Johnson of Measurement Specialties said that the concept for the migration is "to make duplicate accounts with NEWACCT on the new volume set with the ONVS parameter, as well as any NEWGROUP commands you may need. Once done, you need to ALTGROUP the groups with the HOMEVS parameter. A pair of job streams can be created with the BULDACCT command. And purging the old data is a good idea. Otherwise you end up with phantom disc space usage."

HP's 3000 support clears away for indies

Even though HP this week announced its Insight Online enhancement for enterprise support, the changes won't be of help to 3000 owners. The remote management technology, designed to improve response times, is another example of new support products HP won't deliver to the MPE sites it's retained over the eight years since the server's sales ended.

After a full year of absence from the HP 3000 community, the support arm of Hewlett-Packard has been disappearing from customer choices for 3000 maintenance. Hardware is the only public offer that the company pushes on its old clients, according to reports from the field. But HP hasn’t retracted its reach entirely for the insurance-only support dollars backed by a declining set of resources.

“Most people have aligned themselves with an independent provider at this point,” said Pivital Solutions president Steve Suraci. His shop that’s completely devoted to supporting MPE/iX and HP 3000 systems runs across straggler accounts when customers say they’re in the last 18 months of a migration and therefore stick with HP. But it’s a rare encounter by now, at least in public.

“It’s not as much as it had been,” said Pivital Solutions president Steve Suraci. “In this new year I had two customers come to me that they never received a message from HP on support renewal — for the first time ever. In other cases I’ve continued to see HP.”

The departure of HP support options still comes as news to a few customers. Last month a manager running 3000s at fuel-pump manufacturer Gilbarco queried the 3000 newsgroup for an update. "Our HP 3000 maintenance contract is up for renewal on June 30th, but HP have told us that they will not be renewing the contract," he said. "Is this commonplace across the globe?"

It might be commonplace, but HP's exit isn't yet universal. Suraci adds that when Pivital does run across HP trying to sell 3000 support, “it’s on a sales office-by-sales office basis, because that’s who’s doing support at this point. When you get your supported equipment list from HP today, there’s three things on it. HP’s being very selective about what they’re actually covering.”

Software support for the systems is just about non-existent, at least on a public basis, Suraci said. “It’s really just been limited to hardware aspects of support.”

Newer CPUs and chassis are most likely to make it onto HP’s supported devices list. N-Class or A-Class servers might be offered from a local sales office as supportable items. MOD 20 storage units are another example of cherry-picked items that would match only a small part of an independent support vendor’s coverage lineup.

But that HP coverage can be wildly uneven. “A lot of times they’re supporting the disk arrays, but not the drives in the arrays,” Suraci said. HP offered to support just one of the two internal disk drives in a customer’s Series 928, and not the internal tape drive.

In a case such as that, a service call could devolve into determining which disk drive may have failed, with the case ending with a report of unsupported devices. Lower-end 3000 systems are rarely on an HP support account by now. Higher-end accounts are more likely to fall into the HP folds after years of more extensive attention.

OpenMPE still open for some downloading

April is the time of year when a new OpenMPE board of directors was being seated, at least from 2002 to 2009. The count of volunteers listed as board members stands at three as of today. Birket Foster, Tony Tibbenham and Alan Tibbetts make up the tightest group in the 10 years that OpenMPE has been at work. This month marks the end of the second year of stasis for a volunteer group that's still serving up bits which are relevant to homesteading HP 3000 users.

The chairman Foster told us that there's still work to do on licenses for any software which will operate under the Stromasys HPA/3000 emulator. "We ran that emulator project in conjunction with HP," he said in February. Hewlett-Packard came up with the only paid-license project for an enterprise OS running on an emulator, sparked by board direction from OpenMPE. With that HPA/3000 now being shown off in sales calls this spring, it's easy to forget the whole concept wouldn't have existed without an OS license for an emulator.

There's still an Invent3K public access development server online, thanks to the volunteer efforts of the group, as well as supporters like the Support Group Inc. There are proceedings available on that server which contain papers that could help train a replacement generation of managers at homestead sites.

On more everyday matters, the OpenMPE website still hosts some code and scripts useful to a 3000 manager. Scripts by the ever-helpful ex-CSY guru Jeff Vance, Donna Hoffmeister, and others are online today. It's part of the Jazz project on OpenMPE, but the open source dreams of the group are being realized in another web outpost.

OpenMPE began as a push to get the source code for the operating system deeded to the customers who'd be using the 3000 for an unlimited future. Over a five-year period, OpenMPE began to turn toward sparking an emulator with licensing and policy requests to HP. Hewlett-Packard never got the open source religion for MPE, but over at the MPE-OpenSource.org site, software that can help is available for downloads, too.

Brian Edminster, who stocks and curates that website, sees a connection between the emulator and the needs of a 3000 community which is making a transition. Even 3000 sites which have definite plans to migrate could find an role for the emulator to play.

"For migrations that are really replacements rather than just re-hosting," Edminster said, "it could well be a lot cheaper to keep a emulated instance of the application at time of conversion -- rather than try to mothball a server, and hope it'll come up okay later."

 

Ordering a Hamburger, HP-Style

This Friday might be a day of heavy lifting for your IT department, with it being the final week of March as well as the end of the first quarter. Even though that HP 3000 will be running reports, it's good to have some oversight ready. You might be eating lunch at your desk -- or supper, if anything needs attention. Maybe something as simple as a hamburger.

But a classic style to HP hamburger ordering -- one that might be as old as the eldest 3000 in your shop -- could leave you dizzy. Not long ago, your community shared this gem. One manager said "I remember telling my HP Sales rep that you needed a PhD to read the configuration manual. The sales rep took the manual from my hand to explain to me how wrong I was. After a 30-minute tutorial, the rep decided it was best if he could call me from his office with the answer."

On a day when you might need a smile from satire, the Hamburger Guide follows after the jump. As the late, great Warren Zevon advised, "Enjoy every sandwich."

By Stephen Harrison and Noel Magee

This is the story of a different kind. No melting CPUs, no screaming disc drives, just the kind of psychological torture that scars a man for life.

I had a nine o'clock meeting with my sales rep. I needed to buy an entire Series 70, the works. He said it'd take about an hour. Three hours later, we'd barely got the datacomm hardware down on paper, so he invited me downstairs for lunch.

This was my first experience in an HP cafeteria. Above the service counter was a menu which began

MMU's (Main Menu Units)
0001A	Burger. Includes sesame-seed bun. Must order condiments 00110A separately.
001	Deletes seeds.
002	Expands burger to two patties.
00020A	Double Cheeseburger, preconfigured. Includes cheese, bun condiments.
001	Add-on bacon.
002	Delete second patty.
003	Replaces second patty with extra cheese.
00021A	Burger Upgrade to Double Cheeseburger.
001	From Single Burger.
002	From Double Burger.
003	Return credit for bun.
00220A	Burger Bundle. Includes 00010A, 00210A and 00310A.
001	Substitute root beer 00311A for cola 00310A.

 My eyes glazed over. I asked for a burger and a root beer. The waitress looked at me like I was an alien.

"How would you like to order that, sir?"

"Quickly, if possible. Can't I just order a sandwich and a drink?"

"No, Sir. All our service is menu driven. Now what would you like?" I scanned the menu.

"How big is the 00010 burger?"

"The patty is rated at eight bites."

"Well, how about the rest of it?"

"I don't have the specs on that, Sir, but I think it's a bit more."

"Eight bites is too small. Give me the Double Burger Upgrade."

My sales rep interrupted. "No, you want the Single Burger option 002 'expands burger to two patties.' The Double Burger Upgrade would give you two burgers."

"But you could get return credit on the extra bun," the waitress chimed in, trying to be helpful, "although it isn't documented."

I looked around to see if anybody was staring at me. There was a couple in line behind us. I recognized one of them, a guy who nearly mowed me down in the parking lot with his cherry-red '62 Vette. He was talking to some woman who was waving her arms around and looking very excited.

"What if... we marketed the bacon cheeseburger with the vegetable option and without the burger and cheese? It'd be a BLT!"

The woman charged off in the direction of the telephone, running steeplechases over tables and chairs. My waitress tried to get my attention again. "Have you decided, sir?"

"Yeah, give me the Double Burger--excuse me, I mean the 00020A with the option 001. I want everything on it." She put me down for the Condiment Expansion Kit, which included mayonnaise, mustard and pickles with an option to substitute relish.

"Ketchup?" I hated to ask. "I want ketchup on that, too." "That's not a condiment, Sir, it's a Tomato Product." My sales rep butted in again. "That's not a supported configuration." "What now?" I kept my voice steady. "Too juicy. The bun can't handle it." "Look. Forget the ketchup, just put some lettuce and tomatoes on it."

The waitress backed away from the counter. "I'm sorry, sir, but that's not supported either. The bun can take it but the burger won't fit in the box." The sales rep defended himself. "Just not at first release." "It is being beta-tested, sir," added the waitress.

I checked the overhead screen. Fries, number 000210A, option 110. French followed by option 120, English. "What the hell are English Fries?" I turned to the sales rep. "Chips they call them. We sell a lot of them."

I gave up. "OK, OK just give me a plain vanilla Burger Bundle." This confused the waitress profoundly. "Sir, Vanilla as an option is configured only for series 00450 Milkshakes." My sales rep chuckled. "No, Ma'am, he just wants a standard 00220A off the shelf." I wondered how long it had been on the shelf. I didn't ask.

"Very good, sir." The waitress breathed a sigh of relief. "Your meal is now on order. Now how would you like it supported?" "Supported?" She directed me to the green shaded area at the bottom of the menu, and I began a litany with my sales rep that I'll never forget.

"Implementation assistance?"

"You get a waiter."

"Implementation analysis?"

"You tell him how hungry you are and he tells you what to eat."

"Response Center Support?"

"He brings it to your table."

"Extended materials?"

"You get refills."

I shoved some money at the waitress and told her to take it. She gave me my check on three sheets of green-bar paper. I studied it on my way to the table, and decided it'd pass as an emergency napkin.

Table? My sales rep had been bright enough to order us a table. He hadn't been bright enough to check on a delivery date. The table waiter, slouching in his corner surveyed the crowded room, looked at me and said, "Two weeks. But I can get you a standalone chair by the window right away."

I handed him the tray. A woman rushed up to me with two small cups of chili and sauerkraut for the hot dog somebody else had ordered. The room began to grow dim, my eyesight faded....

I woke up clutching the water-glass at my bedside table. It was 5 a.m., four hours till my meeting with HP. I had had a vision; I did what it told me to do. I dialed my office, and I called in sick.

Making An HP 3000 More Secure

The Internet includes a wealth of advice, but it also harbors guidelines for IT malice. Not long ago the HP 3000 mailing list and newsgroup included a message that pointed to a pair of documents about hacking into the HP 3000. One expert in the system said these were dated, but still effective.

There's always been a lot in MPE that makes your servers more secure, of course, plus independent software to bolt its doors shut. (Security/3000 from VEsoft comes to mind. User Robert Mills says that "it is well worth the cost and time involved in setting up.") Even MPE's included passwords and permissions usage might be in the dim recesses of your memory, however. Consultant Michael Anderson of J3K Solutions supplied some refresher material.

An easy way into a MPE box is when the default passwords are left unchanged, like the TELESUP account and a few more third-party accounts that are well known. Securing your HP 3000 is simple.

1. Set unique passwords on all user/accounts, and maybe even groups.

2. Use PASSEXEMPT to avoid keeping passwords in job streams, enabling you to change passwords frequently.

3. Make sure ACCESS= & CAPABILTIES are set properly to avoid the use of the RELEASE command.

4. Programatically audit, audit, and then audit some more!

When anyone does log on, there are more options as well.

Write a simple script/program to check the remote IP address at logon, and if it is from the outside you can add additional security requirements, keep a table of allowed addresses, log these events, track outside sessions more rigorously, or simply not allow it.

I don't have my HP 3000 plugged directly into the Internet. However, if it wasn't behind a firewall, I believe it would take the beating and keep on ticking.

I've configured my firewall to forward all telnet traffic to the HP 3000 directly, and I do see attempts to hack it everyday. But none are successful. On the other hand, I've had my Unix and Linux machines hacked, using buffer-overflows and brute force attacks, several times.

Protecting HP 3000s Using Linux

While HP 3000 sites deploy Linux servers this year, some of them are using the environment as a buffer for 3000s which need to be in range of the Internet. James Byrne, who's hosting the hp3000links.com website as well as managing IT project for Harte & Lyne, outlined his setup to use Linux for 3000 protection.

Byrne has his HP 3000s and the internet buffered by a dual-homed Linux box in front of the HP 3000, using that to provide firewall, SSH, and proxy services. He describes his setup a fairly primitive (where  GW/FW=gateway/firewall):

Internet-> GW/FW <-> Eth0:Linux:Eth1 <-> HP 3000

The network connection to the gateway/firewall provides our public routable access.  The link between the Linux front-end host and the HP 3000 is a x-over cable using a 192.168.0.0 block address. Direct network connections to the HP 3000 NIC are physically impossible. This ensures physical network security over the non-encrypted portion of the network (for SSH access).

There are a wide assortment of Linux-based firewall appliance distributions which may simplify set up somewhat for novice users. Alternatively, one can simply use a mainstream Linux distribution, or a derivative like RHEL/CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu, and add and configure the packages desired.

We use a CentOS-5 based host running IPTables, Squid, OpenSSH, VSftpd, and Denyhosts as the front-end to the HP 3000. IPTables is configured to log and drop for 7 days all addresses performing obvious port scans. IPTables similarly counts, logs and blocks IP having excessive failed connection attempts on visible ports.

Denyhosts scans the logs for other issues and really does not add much to our setup.  However, Denyhosts can be used to do itself everything I have chosen to do in IPTables. Therefore, one may concentrate on learning the configuration of just Denyhosts and leave IPTables configuration to the minimum necessary to allow access.

The proxy server handles FTP but we do not allow FTP access to the HP 3000 at all -- so I could not tell you if we have that set up correctly or not.  We have it there in case the need ever arises.

The intellectual load of dealing with these things is non trivial.  However, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Once the front-end is setup ,we run logwatch to send daily reports on connections and consider whether further configuration changes are necessary.

HP 3000 Product Futures at Fresche Legacy

Long ago -- in the distant past of a computer so storied that it has a distant past -- 4GLs promised extra hours on the clock and extra days on the calendar. Although HP tried for a foothold in 4th Generation Languages, only two companies made a 3000 business of it. Both Cognos and Speedware products still drive 3000s today, 28 years after the ad above appeared in Interact magazine.

Speedware didn't use its product name to indentify the company back then. Starting this week, it will once again have a name that differs from its established 4GL. It was Infocentre back then, a company with a word in its name spelled differently. Now it's Fresche Legacy, but it's still supporting the same 4GL that it was selling three decades ago.

Fresche Legacy's president and CEO Andy Kulakowski said this week that Speedware, the 4GL, remains in place on the new company's price list. He even promised there will be enhancements, some to the version of the 4GL that runs on 3000s -- if customers demand them. The ISV Softvoyage, for example, still builds its travel-business apps on a bedrock of Speedware.

"As they need new features in the wide variety of operating systems they support," Kulakowski said, "we continue to evolve Speedware to support them. That will continue based on customer demand. We feel very loyal to those customers. We still have resources in house that are continuing to make changes to those products. There are a couple of enhancements that were made over the course of this year for the 4GL."

Several other products at Fresche Legacy have HP 3000 connections, but they relate to the ability to migrate or alternative-host MPE/iX applications and data. Kulakowski said those products have a future in the new company business plan, too.

"We continue to invest in the Speedware software tools," he said in the re-branding interview last week. "Our customers are still on active support contracts.We don’t have any plans to decline our interests anywhere. This is a growth story, this isn’t a replacement story."

New sales of 4GLs on MPE/iX are a long-shot at best, for both Cognos as well as Fresche Legacy. The president acknowledged that customers who want new Speedware features, for example, are much more likely to deploy them on non-MPE versions of what are now called Advanced Development Tools (ADT).

"We see much less demand from the 3000 customer, but we’ll evolve the [ADT] product to meet their needs," the company's president said. "With MPE being in the state that it’s in, if customers have environments where applications are evolving, growing or critical to the business, it’s quite likely that they’re looking to migrate and transform that onto a lower-risk platform."

Kulakowski was speaking of a Speedware platform. The company says it's been migrating 3000 sites for 15 years, farther back than the HP exit announcement -- because a migration before 2002 was likely to be from one platform of Speedware to another.

That experience in 3000 migrations gave Speedware a road into the future. Activant purchased the company to capitalize on the newer application-based customers which Speedware Ltd. acquired in the post-HP-exit years. But Activant only cared about the migration business at Speedware because it was high-profit, Kulakowski explained.

"In that era, having been owned by Activant Solutions, they were not interested in sustaining this business for very long," he said. "They didn’t know the HP 3000 migration community, and they were somewhat indifferent to it. Because we were a very solid business, they were very interested in the operating margins we generated with it."

Migration skills can be transferred between markets, however, if a company can locate and acquire the human resource and tools for a fresh market. In the MPE world the tool AMXW, purchased from Neartek in 2003, powered many of the Speedware migrations. Over the past year its legacy modernization business has been in the IBM marketplace. Speedware has acquired software tools there, as well as skills in the OS 400 and mainframe Series Z technologies. Kulakowski says the IBM success in 2011 reduced the element of risk in buying itself back from Activant in 2010.

"This year we got a lot of validation on how to sustain our business," he said, "and why we were anxious to buy our business from the previous owners. We got validation on the kind of skills we have and how leveragable they are in other markets. With our ability to provide new skills there, we reduced a lot of risk in that original [repurchase] investment."

So while software will remain a part of business at Fresche Legacy, newer opportunities beckon from outside an era where a product which cut code faster than COBOL development was the engine for company growth. Moving customers gave Speedware a way to move itself, even while its software remains in place.

"While we were developing our expertise in HP 3000 migration, we were sitting back and looking at this in self defense," Kulakowski said of the other platform skills. "We have expanded beyond the HP 3000 community to something larger than only the 3000 space. Especially after this year, we can say confidently we got a lot validation in those new markets. But we have abolutely no plans on sunsetting enhancements to the Speedware family of products."

 

Finding Vintage App Support: Protos

Commitments to the HP 3000 for enterprises demand support resources. There's a limit to how much expertise a company can carry for applications and code that might be more than 15-20 years old. At some point, homesteading firms need to reach out for application support that's not on the payroll.

One good example is software written using Protos, a 3+ GL used in the '80s and '90s in HP 3000 environments. Protos gave its sites a way to code using advanced, time-saving functions, but the output from this language was COBOL. The company gave way to changes after Y2K and ended support, but Protos code lives on in a few mission-critical uses.

We've run across an independent support pro who counts Protos among his skills. Clint Ellis, of Ellis Dodge Technical, included Protos among a toolset of 3000 staples such as COBOL, Pascal, Fortran and Basic. He's also consulting on Linux, so there's a range of services available from him. Protos has been found at migration sites, too.

These are the sorts of skills that any application support provider should be able to locate and engage on behalf of a 3000 customer. Application support is a growing segment of business for 3000 vendors who are serving the homesteading customer. As migrations decline in your community, the experts who made them possible are making a transition into such support.

Protos is a favorite of Ellis's experiences, but it's in his past. "I have not done any Protos stuff for quite awhile," he reports. " I was at the Wichita Eagle newspaper in the mid '80s -- we used Protos for all our new development (and since it generated COBOL it allowed us to be compliant with corporate standards)  I attended at least one advanced course with Protos in Austin. Haven't seen it since. While I was a strong COBOL programmer, I liked Protos very much."

Migration Toward Futures, Staying or Going

After 25 years serving 3000 customer needs and expansions, MB Foster became an HP Platinum Migration Partner right out of the box a decade ago. It arrived amid the fresh chaos of that 2002 springtime along with Speedware, MBS and Lund Performance Solutions, and only Speedware remains in the 3000 business among those three cohorts. As his company celebrates 35 years in the 3000 market this spring, we asked founder Birket Foster about the start of the migration era. He notes that hundreds of customers remain as devoted to the 3000 as they ever were.

When did the migrations start in earnest?

    People started getting serious in 2006. But we still have customers that are running on an HP 3000 today, hundreds of them. They're doing what they need to do to stay where they are. I was talking to one yesterday running a very big contracting business. They were just getting their SAP live and now realizing they have to decommission their 3000. People get their replacement application but forget they have regulatory reasons to keep their data around.

    It's really important that people think these things through before they start migrations, because they can do things during the migration that will simplify things during the decommissioning process.

What are the latest prospects, from the perspective of a company working 35 years in this market, for the long-term HP 3000 user?

    We're just in the beginning of setting things up at MB Foster to work with Stromasys, benchmarking the access of our ODBC and JDBC access to data. We're making sure our UDA product line will run in the Stromasys 3000 emulator environment. That environment was cleared by a little side project I did as a volunteer: helping the 3000 world deal with Hewlett-Packard from an advocacy point of view. OpenMPE was something I chaired, after being recruited by John Marrah of Amisys.

   We've had tremendous people there at OpenMPE to carry the ball and make things happen, like Tracy Johnson making the Invent3k server happen. We ran an emulator project in conjunction with HP. The OpenMPE folks did the work to make sure there was a license transfer process in place for that. Making that legal has been a huge element in the potential for the emulator market.

A little while ago, in addition to your ventures in Storm.ca wireless Internet and Canada's Stay at Home assisted living services, you got more involved with a local restaurant to help out a friend. What new tricks has that taught you that can apply, 35 years later, to the HP 3000 market?
    Two years ago I got into an investment for a friend who wanted to run a restaurant.  I put a management team in place in 2011. When I got more involved to try to recoup some of my investment, it taught me some technologies that I'd had no exposure to. When you have a 240-seat license, you need to fill the room. So I learned a lot more about Facebook to put up a page for the Kemptville Pub to drive events. Once Facebook users Like us, they automatically get messages that tell them about us.
    From that Facebook piece I'm applying what I learned back to MB Foster. We've done our first page for MB Foster Associates. Not so much because people buy from that page, but it's a good placeholder - if they're buying our Windows scheduler, they'll find us on Facebook. It's a different twist from the days when you'd go to visit people in person, back in 1977.

Vision from the past predicts 3000 futures

A span of 35 years is pretty much all of the HP 3000's useful lifetime. Birket Foster's company has lived and thrived on the stage of your 3000 community for 35 years this spring, stretching back to the days when his custom-written programs had to reside in a space of less than 8 kilobytes and exchanging information about 3000s was best done in person at a user group meeting.  

   It's not all just looking backward after 35 years with Foster. When we last interviewed him in 2009, he made predictions about the state of the 3000 community in 2012. He gave a forthright review of how those turned out, including those that could be judged either way. 

   We spoke with Birket -- a first-name fellow who we consider one of the best hubs for 3000 data -- just before Superbowl Weekend started. A few community veterans have a saying about him. “He was the Internet before there was an Internet. And he's still the Internet.” We like to stay online, and believe you'll benefit from his connections, too, whether it's links to a 3000 foundation, or connecting the dots for the future.

Let's look over your three-year-old predictions for this year. How'd you do on who remains in the market? You said maybe 10 percent of the original installed base is left.

   There's still hundreds of machines out there. There might even be low thousands.

You believed PCI credit card security would be an issue in getting migrations underway.

    PCI has been an issue with some customers. Some have worked it out by installing a PC between the 3000 and all those PCI requirements, and the PC manages it properly for them.
HIPAA regulations were going to be a factor in migrations, you believed.

    More and more people are moving to packaged software there, because the cost of administering healthcare is now being regulated by the amount of funding people get from the government. The government won't give them the money if the administration cost is too high, and the 3000 packages won't necessarily meet that.

And your prediction of the difficulty of getting 3000 IT professionals?

    It's still harder to get an HP 3000 programmer. Have you tried to find one lately? I know where to find them, but if you were just putting an ad in the local paper, I don't think you'd get as many resumes as you'd get for a Windows, .NET, Java or Linux programmer. For the people who thought they'd cut the expensive programmer positions and leave the operators, even their operators are retiring. They don't even call them operators now; they're sysadmins. But without a programmer you can't make any changes. That means if your business evolves, you're stuck.

You believed there would mostly be small companies using the 3000 by now.

    The big guys haven't all moved. But I was told by one company we're dealing with, “Our SAP team, which is replacing all the apps around the world, has us scheduled for this year.” There are some large customers who know they're a merger and acquisition candidate, so they're not going to mess with migration right now.

You were predicting a real embrace of what we call cloud services, and hardware would be becoming irrelevant.

It's no different than any other invention. It started with service bureaus, moved to Application Service Providers which failed, so then we called it Software as a Service, which kind of set some stages that would allow cloud to happen. It's only different because you have much higher speed Internet. People from 1977, when we started business, would think they had unlimited resources. You can roll your own machine, on Amazon or other places on the fly. You can say you want this much memory, this many CPUs, running this OS and these databases. This machine is built and ready to go in 20 minutes now, all virtual.

Do you care what hardware it's on? Hardware is not relevant. The application is the thing that's relevant.

Set your 3000 clocks all the time

It's not too late this morning, even if it seems like it when you look at your watch on the first Monday after the time change. There's still time to get your HP 3000 clock set accurately. Last Friday the community was trading tips and technique about how to get on time. Donna Hofmeister, whose firm Allegro Consultants hosts the free nettime utility, explains how time checks on a regular basis keep your clocks, well, regular.

This Sunday when using SETCLOCK to set the time ahead one hour, should the timezone be advanced one hour as well?

The cure is to run a clock setting job every Sunday and not go running about twice a year. You'll gain the benefit of regular scheduling and a mostly time-sync'd system.

In step a-1 of the job supplied below you'll find the following line:

    !/NTP/CURRENT/bin/ntpdate "-B timesrv.someplace.com"

Clearly, this needs to be changed.

If for some dreadful reason you're not running NTP, you might want to check out 'nettime'. And while you're there, pick up a copy of 'bigdirs' and run it -- please!

Also, this job depends on the variable TZ being set -- which is easily done in your system logon udc:

    SETVAR TZ "PST8PDT"

Adapt as needed. And don't forget -- if your tztab file is out of date, just grab a copy from another system. It's just a file.

This job below was adapted from logic developed by Paul Christidis:

 !JOB SETTIME,MANAGER.SYS;OUTCLASS=,5
!TELLOP       SETTIME  
!TELLOP       ALL MPE SYSTEMS
!TELLOP ==SETTIME -- SYNCs SYSTEM CLOCK W/ TIME SERVER !
!# from the help text for setclock....
!# Results of the Time Zone Form
!#
!#   If the change in time zone is to a later time (a change to Daylight
!#   Savings Time or an "Eastern" geographic movement), both local time
!#   and the time zone offset are changed immediately.
!#
!#   The effect is that users of local system time will see an immediate
!#   jump forward to the new time zone, while users of Universal Time
!#   will see no change.
!#
!#   If the change in time zone is to an earlier time (a change from
!#   Daylight Savings to Standard Time or a "Western" geographic
!#   movement), the time zone offset is changed immediately.  Then the
!#   local time slows down until the system time corresponds to the
!#   time in the new time zone.
!#
!#   The effect is that users of local system time will see a gradual
!#   slowdown to match the new time zone, while users of Universal Time
!#   will see an immediate forward jump, then a slowdown until the
!#   system time again matches "real" Universal Time.
!#
!#   This method of changing time zones ensures that no out-of-sequence
!#   time stamps will occur either in local time or in Universal Time.
!#
!showclock
!showjob job=@j
!TELLOP =====================================  SETTIME   A-1
!
!errclear
!continue
!/NTP/CURRENT/bin/ntpdate "-B timesrv.someplace.com"
!if hpcierr <> 0
!  echo hpcierr !hpcierr (!hpcierrmsg)
!  showvar
!  tellop NTPDATE problem
!endif
!
!tellop SETTIME -- Pausing for time adjustment to complete....
!pause 60
!
!TELLOP =====================================  SETTIME   B-1
!showclock
!
!setvar FallPoint &
!   (hpyyyy<=2006 AND (hpmonth = 10 AND hpdate > 24)) OR &
!   (hpyyyy>=2007 AND (hpmonth = 11 AND hpdate < 8))
!
!setvar SpringPoint &
!   (hpyyyy<=2006 AND (hpmonth =  4 AND hpdate< 8)) OR &
!   (hpyyyy>=2007 AND (hpmonth =  3 AND (hpdate > 7 AND hpdate < 15)))
!
!# TZ should always be found
! if hpday = 1
!    if SpringPoint
!# switch to daylight savings time
!      setvar _tz_offset   ![rht(lft(TZ,4),1)]-1
!      setclock timezone=w![_tz_offset]:00
!    elseif FallPoint
!# switch to standard time
!      setvar _tz_offset   ![rht(lft(TZ,4),1)]
!      setclock timezone=w![_tz_offset]:00
!    endif
!  endif
!endif
!
!TELLOP =====================================  SETTIME   C-1
!
!showclock
!EOJ

Mark Ranft of 3k Pro added some experience with international clocks on the 3000.

If international time conversion is important to you, there are two additional things to do.

1) Set a system-wide UDC to set the TZ variable. (And perhaps account UDCs if accounts are for different locations)

:showvar tz
TZ = CST6CDT

2) There is also a tztab.lib.sys that needs to be updated when countries change when or if they do DST.

:l tztab.lib.sys
ACCOUNT=  SYS         GROUP=  LIB    

FILENAME  CODE  ------------LOGICAL RECORD-----------  ----SPACE----
                 SIZE  TYP        EOF      LIMIT R/B  SECTORS #X MX

TZTAB            1276B  VA         681        681   1       96  1  8


:print tztab.lib
# @(#) HP C/iX Library A.75.03  2008-02-26

# Mitteleuropaeische Zeit, Mitteleuropaeische Sommerzeit
MEZ-1MESZ
0 3 25-31 3  1983-2038 0   MESZ-2
0 2 24-30 9  1983-1995 0   MEZ-1
0 2 25-31 10 1996-2038 0   MEZ-1

# Middle European Time, Middle European Time Daylight Savings Time
<< snipped >>

Some 3000 time services labor to serve

Editor's Note: Daylight Saving Time takes hold this weekend in most of the world. The 2AM changeover can give a 3000 manager a reason to look at how the server manages timekeeping, including the potential for the open source tool ported to the 3000, XNTP. Our Homesteading Editor Gilles Schipper is working on an article to address some of the laborious steps needed to utilize it. His research took him to a few experts in networking and open source over the Web, Chris Bartram (our first webmaster, and creator of the DeskLink and NetMail apps) and Brian Edminster (operator of the MPE-OpenSource.org website.)

Chris: As I recall, ntp services never worked well on the 3000. It won’t work at all as a server for other clients, I believe. And as a client it seemed a waste; my vague memory says it had issues because you couldn’t set the time with the resolution it wanted. It ended up oscillating.
 
There’s a very simple standalone NTP client, ntpdate, though that you can run from the command line -- that’s what I use on my systems. I simply run it a couple times a day – it pulls the time from whatever NTP server you point it at and sets your local clock. We even shipped a copy with every NetMail tape. Look for ntpdate.sys.threek if you have a NetMail/3000 or DeskLink equipped system available.

Brian: The latest version of XNTP was the 4.1.0 version hosted on Jazz, and ported by Mark Bixby. It includes both ntp client and server functionality. Through the magic of the 'Wayback Machine' there's a link to HP's install instructions and other resources. The bad news is that HP put the actual download link behind a 'freeware agreement' page - and that download link wasn't wasn't saved by the Wayback.  Some community members who 'archived' Jazz that might have that download package.

However, there is an earlier v3.5.90 version from October 2008 hosted on Mark Bixby's site -- and although Mark's took site down after his departure from HP, the 'Wayback Machine' comes to the rescue with a downloadable install file.

This Bixby website archive has Mark's excellent install instructions, and it well documents the 'time update granularity' issue that the XNTP client has on MPE/iX. In short, it can cause the time to drift if left running continuously -- where it's trying desperately to update the time, but cannot do it to its satisfaction due to the precision it expects to be able to use.

The workaround for xntp is to run it periodically, perhaps daily, for a single update. Mark wrote about this on his xntp page, and even put in a SR with HP to get the underlying MPE/iX internal issue fixed.  And no, it didn't get done in time.

Edminster noted two other server time-sync tools (both ntp clients):

nettime -- a program created Brian Abernathy of HP.  Source and binaries are included, and can be found on Speedware's Jazz page. Note: this program has the name of the time server 'hard-coded' as 'time-server'. But since source is included, it can be changed and recompiled with HP's C compiler for MPE/iX.

timesync -- a 'client only' solution from the folks from Telamon, Inc. It's a binary-only distribution, but it works quite well, and apparently was designed to work with their network engines too. I have a copy of this and can email it to users and managers as a Store to Disk file.  It's the simplest way I've found to get time synchronization for your 3000s. It's literally just a 'restore and run', and has a 'preview but not do' mode to ensure you've got it configured correctly.

This weekend, it's all about 3000 timing

Editor's Note: Daylight Saving Time begins at 2AM local time around most of the world this weekend. A lot of HP 3000s run around the clock to serve companies, so a plan to keep the 3000 on time is essential. The founder of the MPE-OpenSource.org, HP 3000 open source repository, Brian Edminster, offers a plan, experience and a sample jobstream to help get you through our semi-annual time change.

By Brian Edminster

Here's an important implementation note for anyone that wants to put up a 'time synchronization' client on their HP 3000: Do not use it to adjust for spring and fall time-changes!  Use a job that runs on the appropriate dates/times to do a 'setclock timezone=' command.  I have an example below that is a derivative work from something originally posted by Sam Knight of Jacksonville University, way back in April, 2004 on the 3000-L mailing list.

I've updated the job to be more readable, to account for a 'looping' effect that I found in the fall from running on a fast CPU, and to run at 2AM -- the 'official' time that time-changes apply. I have this job set to be intiated by 'SYSSTART.PUB.SYS' on server bootup, and then automatically reschedule itself each Sunday at 2AM.

I'd suggest doing whatever sort of time synchronization necessary before this runs each weekend - so the time corrections complete before this job runs.

Here's the spring and fall time change jobstream code. All are welcome to use, and modify for specific needs. Note that it's set up for the Eastern US time zone. (That's the TIMEZONE = W5:00 -- meaning the number of hours different than GMT -- and TIMEZONE = W4:00 lines.)  Modify these lines as necessary for your timezone.

!JOB TIMECHG,MANAGER/user-passwd.SYS/acct-passwd;hipri;PRI=CS;OUTCLASS=,1
!
!setvar Sunday,    1
!
!setvar March,     3
!setvar November, 11
!
!showclock
!if hpday = Sunday and &
!   hpmonth = November and &
!   hpdate < 8 then
!   comment (first Sunday of November)
!  SETCLOCK TIMEZONE = W5:00
!   TELLOP ********************************************
!   TELLOP Changing the system clock to STANDARD TIME.
!   TELLOP The clock will S L O W   D O W N  until
!   TELLOP we have fallen back one hour.
!   TELLOP ********************************************
!elseif hpday = Sunday and &
!       hpmonth = March and &
!       hpdate > 7 and hpdate < 15 then
!   comment (second Sunday of March)
!  SETCLOCK TIMEZONE = W4:00
!   TELLOP *********************************************
!   TELLOP Changing the system clock to DAYLIGHT SAVINGS
!   TELLOP TIME.  The clock jumped ahead one hour.
!   TELLOP *********************************************
!else
!   comment (no changes today!)
!   TELLOP *********************************************
!   TELLOP No Standard/Daylight Savings Time Chgs Req'd
!   TELLOP *********************************************
!endif
!
!comment - to avoid 'looping' on fast CPU's pause long enough for
!comment - local clock time to be > 2:00a, even in fall...
!while hphour = 2 and hpminute = 0
!   TELLOP Pausing 1 minute... waiting to pass 2am
!   TELLOP Current Date/Time: !HPDATEF - !HPTIMEF
!   showtime
!   pause 60
!endwhile
!
!stream timechg.jcl.sys;day=sunday;at=02:00
!showclock
!EOJ

Telnet opens 3000s with a key cut long ago

Engineering from the past permits us to take the future for granted. In your community the connections between past and present run strong, ties which are now lashed tight by the links of the Web. Programming from long ago stands a chance of tying tomorrow’s computers with the 3000s put into service on a distant yesterday. This technology lay under-appreciated for years — which makes it a lot like the 3000’s design.
   
Once the executives and sales wizards and marketing mavens grab their tablets and go into your offices, they’ll want to use their iPads to work with information residing in safety on the HP 3000. This year the conduit for the connection is telnet, a protocol given the pshaw in the '90s when nobody could see a tablet anywhere but Star Trek episodes.
   
I remember telnet gaining traction in feature lists for connectivity software from WRQ and Minisoft. The access method got strongest praise from Wirt Atmar at AICS Research. His engineers were building their own 3000 terminal emulator, QCTerm, and the NS/VT mysteries were not the primary path for data through that free software. (It hasn't been tested on Windows 7, but the software runs on XP -- which is still running 46 percent of the world's Windows PCs.)

The engineering choice of Telnet at AICS rose up in the face of enabling access to the oldest of 3000 programs. A wide majority of MPE applications used block mode in the '90s to exchange data with terminals and desktop clients, largely because telnet was deemed too slow. Atmar, however, took exception to the accepted wisdom about telnet. The protocol was a standard and vendor-neutral, something NS/VT would never be — and network speeds and bandwidth were on the rise. QCTerm even used an Advanced Telnet setting to take full advantage of a faster network whenever and wherever available.
   
Now the world’s networks pulse at a common rate we couldn’t conceive just 15 years ago. No, the block mode interfaces written in the 1980s are not going to transmit data this year to mobile tablets. A more extensive project needs to pass that protocol to the latest of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) computers. But in the meantime the 3000 can prove itself worthy of a spot in the IT future, so long as it can link some of its programs to a tablet. Telnet never got much respect from the developer ranks of your community in the era of the terminal emulator. But now telnet feels like a piece of 3000 engineering which is finally no longer ahead of its time.
   
Once networking standards swept through the industry, the gamble that HP took to break open 3000 connections became essential. This was catch-up engineering that followed the magic of PA-RISC emulation. There’s other fundamental technology that’s been built or ported to make the 3000 a web-capable database host. The miracle that paves the way into tomorrow is that there is any Perl, or telnet, available for an environment first launched 40 years ago. In a fall when America still hadn’t felt the pulse of disco, a computer took its first steps on a path that would lead to tablets.

Timely recovery can be no mean feat

By Birket Foster

MTTRO is not just an acronym. For years people have thrown around the acronym MTBF -- mean time between failures. This is how long before things fail, which is not really what people need to know. Once things have failed the challenge is to get them back online. In your personal life it could be an appliance like a washer or dryer or a furnace or air conditioning unit -- all of these are readily repaired. There are some interconnections that need to be considered, but the people in the business know all about the choices that are available. They can have a new device hooked up in hours.

Do you have a plan for getting things back online if your HP computer system fails? What is the impact on the organization? What does it cost your organization to have the computer system unavailable? What is the plan to get things back on line? You want to know long will it take, and what the costs will be for your organization while you get things back up and running.

MTTRO stands for Mean Time to Recovery of Operation. It deals with how long it would take to have your operations back online. Knowing the best case and worst case recovery times from different kinds of disasters will help put bounds around the how much will it cost your company to be down.

As an example, if your computer system fails on a Friday night before the backup is complete, you must know the steps to diagnose the problem -- and then there's a plan for recovery from different kinds of failure. How will you know what data is impacted? In the worst case maybe it's just this week's, or just today's transactions. What will it take to know what is missing and how will you recover the data -- can it be re-keyed? Was it from a website and it's gone? You'll want to log those website transactions so you can recover.

In a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery Plan, the details of plans from different kinds of failures should be spelled out. This will make things easier than building a recovery plan on the fly.

Once you have the general disaster (or failure) and subsequent recovery scenarios scoped out, you can look at the costs of each scenario, the business processes impacted, and decide if there are steps to take to mitigate the risks. This makes the recovery plan a driver for business decisions, regarding investment to mitigate risk. It becomes a cost vs. benefit item

Take a look at your plans and make sure they have been updated for the latest methods of doing business. A backhoe severing a fiber optic cable can cause service outages that last for days. With everything interconnected this could impact VOIP telephony, web interfaces to applications, IT processes for inter-company transactions and more. Understand how the different stakeholders will be impacted: customers, employees, suppliers, and business partners.

If you know what might happen, you can plan the recovery. That will make it less expensive because your team will have a plan to follow with a known cost -- and you can calculate the cost of MTTRO.

Birket Foster is founder and CEO of MB Foster, an HP 3000 Platinum Migration partner and provider of the UDA line of connectivity software.

A Rare Birthday for Eugene Today

He was once the youngest official member of the 3000 community. And he still has the rare distinction of not being in his 50s or 60s while knowing MPE. Eugene Volokh celebrates his 44th birthday today, and the co-creator of MPEX must wait every four years to celebrate on his real day of birth: He was born on Feb. 29 in the Ukraine.

Although he's not the youngest community member (that rank goes to The Support Group's president David Floyd, a decade younger) Eugene probably ranks as the best-known outside our humble neighborhood. After he built and then improved MPEX, VEAudit/3000 and Security/3000 with his father Vladimir at VEsoft, Eugene earned a law degree as he went on to clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- en route to his current place in the public eye as go-to man for all questions concerning intellectual property on the Web and Internet, as well as First and Second Amendment issues across all media. He's appeared on TV, been quoted in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, plus penned columns for that publication, the New York Times, as well as Harvard, Yale and Georgetown law reviews. You can also hear him on National Public Radio. When I last heard Eugene's voice, he was commenting in the middle of a This American Life broadcast in 2010. He's a professor of Constitutional law at UCLA, and the father of two sons of his own by now. Online, he makes appearances on The Volokh Conspiracy blog he founded with brother Sasha (also a law professor, at Emory University).

In the 3000 world, Eugene's star burned with distinction when he was only a teenager. I first met him in Orlando at the annual Interex conference in 1988, when he held court at a dinner at the tender age of 20. I was a lad of 31 and listened to him wax on subjects surrounding security -- a natural topic for someone who presented the paper Burn Before Reading, which remains a vital text even more 25 years after it was written. The paper's inception matches with mine in the community -- we both entered in 1984. But Eugene, one of those first-name-only 3000 personalities like Alfredo or Birket (Rego and Foster, if you're just coming to this world), was always way ahead of me in 3000 lore and learning.

Burn Before Reading is part of a collection of Eugene's Thoughts and Discourses on HP 3000 Software, published by VEsoft long before indie publishing was so much in vogue. (We've got copies of the 4th Edition of book here at the NewsWire we can share, if you don't have one in your library. Email me.) The book even had the foresight to include advertisements from other members of the 3000 indie software vendor ranks. His father reminded me this month that the Russian tradition of Samizdat was a self-publishing adventure born out of the need to escape USSR censorship. These Russians created an enterprise out of the opportunities America and HP provided in the 1970s, when they emigrated.

Eugene got that early start as a voice for the HP 3000 building software, but his career included a temporary job in Hewlett-Packard's MPE labs at age 14. According to his Wikipedia page

At age 12, he began working as a computer programmer. Three years later, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Math and Computer Science from UCLA. As a junior at UCLA, he earned $480 a week as a programmer for 20th Century Fox. During this period, his achievements were featured in an episode of OMNI: The New Frontier.

His father Vladimir remains an icon of the 3000 community who's still on the go in the US, traveling to visit some of the 1,700 VEsoft customers to consult on securing and exploiting the powers of MPE. The Volokh gift is for languages -- Vladimir speaks five, and Sasha once gave a paper in two languages at a conference, before and then after lunch. I expect that this entry will be eagerly proofed and then corrected by Vladimir, just as he's provided insight and corrections for the next edition of my new novel Viral Times. It's a sure bet that Thoughts and Discourses will remain a useful tool at least as long as Viral Times stays in print. (I've got copies of Viral Times I can ship, too -- but that's an offer unrelated to the 3000's history.)

At 37,000 words, a single Q&A article from Eugene -- not included in the book -- called Winning at MPE is about half as big as your average novel. The papers in Thoughts and Discourses, as well as Winning, are included on each product tape that VEsoft ships. But if you're not a customer, you can read them on the Adager website. They're great training on the nuances of this computer you're probably relying upon, nearly three decades after they were written. Happy Birthday, young man. Long may your exacting and entertaining words wave.

Some 3000 peripherals still connected at HP

Hewlett-Packard continues to operate a webpage to help 3000 customers learn about compatibile HP peripherals. The information at this webpage doesn't change any compatibility which a 3000 already enjoys with the XP line of disks (48, 512 and more). Since there's been no change in the 3000's OS or hardware since 2007, whatever's working will continue to perform.

But the devices listed on the HP page are much more recent in their vintage. HP still sells them. The XP10000 and XP12000 arrays are on display at HP e3000 Storage Products. For a company that's claimed to be out of the 3000 market, HP's after-market products have become persistent. Support contracts might be available for these devices from HP, too. But a support contract from an independent company is even more likely to include HP's XP and VA devices. A link called Fibre Channel Switches on HP's webpage leads to a gateway page crowded with Storage Networking products. Networking, by the way, was the only part of HP's Enterprise group which posted sales gains for Q1.

Also listed on the Storage Products page, along with a raft of StorageWorks devices, is the essential SCSI-Fibre Channel Router A5814A, available in two models. This device in its -003 flavor is used to attach the 3000 -- using a Brocade 2400 or 2800 switch for Fibre -- with the XP storage units and HP's Virtual Arrays, like the VA7410 used at Hostess Brands. (Click on the graphic above for more detail.) Those HP StorageWorks and XP devices sport links that arrive at active HP product pages. The A5814A does not, a signal that the used marketplace is now the only spot to find a replacement unit. There's also the parts depot of your support provider, sp long as that indie firm actually operates its own depot.

Connecting an older 3000 like the Series 969 at Hostess with a more modern array is a proven method to extend the power and utility of an HP 3000. Each of these Fibre routers is attached to its own Host Bus Adapter in the 3000 as shown in HP's diagram. HP 3000s of the Series 900 vintage were not built to connect directly with Fibre Channel.

When a customer needs to connect the HP e3000 to a native Fibre Channel mass storage disk array, the SCSI-FC Fabric Router (A5814A-003) is used. Only one SCSI-FC Router is required between the host server and the mass storage device. The SCSI-FC Router converts from SCSI-2 at the host to Fibre Channel Arbitrated-loop for connection to Fibre Channel mass storage devices.

The magic of the -003 version of the HP router can't be applied after the fact to the more commonplace model of the device, HP says.

5814A SCSI-Fibre Channel extender uses microcode revision 7.60 or later. A5814A-003 SCSI-Fibre Channel Fabric Router configuration uses microcode revision 8.01.0A or later. The A5814A SCSI-Fibre Channel Extender is not field upgradeable to the A5814A-003.

We've stashed away a PDF copy of this HP field guide to Fibre Channel-SCSI routing here at our blog, in case it becomes tough to find it in the HP web empire. But we're surprised to see these references to HP StorageWorks products still allied with the 3000 -- a server HP hasn't sold for more than eight years by now.

3000 support demands spare inventory

Independent service providers have signed up most of the 3000 homesteaders by now, according to Pivital Solutions' Steve Suraci. The CEO still runs across the occassional shop served by HP out of habit. A big share of the available service contracts have already been passed to independent companies, however, according to an article in our in-the-mail February NewsWire print issue.

But using an independent firm for support is a smart deal only if the provider has ample spare parts allocated to your site, Suraci said. A system administrator who manages the Series 969 at Hostess Brands (how's that for a large homesteading company -- Twinkies anyone?) needed an HP A5418A fiber router (at left) to replace a blown device. The indie support company serving Hostess didn't have one, so Joe Barnett went looking on the 3000-L mailing list himself. He needed to maintain connectivity to his VA7410 array, or face rebuilding the array from backup tapes.

Solutions and suggestions trickled in -- including the purchase of one 5814A for sale on eBay "that might not rewritable," because it wasn't the MPE -003 model. What's more, that vanilla unit ships on 4-14 days delivery time, according to the eBay listing. Suraci, whose company specializes in 3000s, pointed at a weak Service Level Agreement (SLA) as a bigger problem than just not being able to get a replacement HP router.

How many HP 3000 shops are relying on support providers that are incompetent and/or inept? The provider was willing to take this company's money, without even being able to provide reasonable assurance that they had replacement parts in a depot somewhere in the event of failure. There are still reputable support providers out there. Your provider should not be afraid to answer tough questions about their ability to deliver on an SLA.

The easy questions to answer for a client are "Can you supply me support 24x7?" or "What references will you give me from your customers?" Harder questions are "Where do you get your answers from for MPE questions?" Or even, "Do you have support experts in the 3000 who can be at my site in less than a day?"

But Suraci was posing one of the harder questions. "Here are my hardware devices: do you have spares in stock you're setting aside for my account?" Hardware doesn't break down much in the 3000 world. But a fiber router is not a 3000-specific HP part. Hewlett-Packard got out of the support business for 3000s for lots of reasons, but one constant reason was that 3000-related spare parts got scarce in the HP supply chain.

The economy has recovered a bit, Suraci said, so he suggested now's the time to ask these hard questions. "It might be time for everyone to review their support provider, and maybe look a little deeper than what they charge for service," he said. "In many cases, you get what you pay for. Response time, parts availability, and legitimate HPSUSAN updates all need to be addressed in advance of signing on the dotted line. It's one thing to be budget conscious, and a whole other to be blinded by it."

Even when a last-minute email could solve a parts problem -- and it looked like Barnett might have gotten lucky on locating a spare router -- that's not a reliable support plan. One suggestion was a Crossroads SA-40 switch, but Craig Lalley notes that you can't boot a 3000 via the Crossroads device. He had to hook up a Mod 20 storage unit for boot-ups only.

Jack Connor, who does 3000 support work for Abtech, seconded Suraci's advice. "I couldn't agree more. Costing out the spares and having them available should be part of the contract."

Respect MPE spooler, even as you replace it

Migration transitions have an unexpected byproduct: They make managers appreciate the goodness that HP bundled into MPE/iX and the 3000. The included spooler is a great example of functionality which has a extra cost to replace in a new environment. No, not even Unix can supply the same abilities -- and that's the word from one of the HP community's leading Unix gurus.

Bill Hassell spread the word about HP-UX treasures for years from his own consultancy. Now he's working for SourceDirect as a Senior Sysadmin expert and posting to the LinkedIn HP-UX group. A migration project just finishing up drew Hassell's notice, when the project's manager noted Unix tools weren't performing at enterprise levels. Hassell said HP-UX doesn't filter many print jobs.

MPE has an enterprise level print spooler, while HP-UX has very primitive printing subsystem. hpnp (HP Network Printing) is nothing but a network card (JetDirect) configuration program. The ability to control print queues is very basic, and there is almost nothing to monitor or log print activities similar to MPE. HP-UX does not have any print job filters except for some basic PCL escape sequences such as changing the ASCII character size.

While a migrating shop might now be appreciating the MPE spooler more, some of them need a solution to replicate the 3000's built-in level of printing control. One answer to the problem might lie in using a separate Linux server to spool, because Linux supports the classic Unix CUPS print software much better than HP-UX.

The above was Glen Kilpatrick's idea. He's a Senior Response Center Engineer at Hewlett-Packard. Like a good support resource, Kilpatrick was a realist in solving the "where's the Unix spooler?" problem.

The "native" HP-UX scheduler / spooler doesn't use (or work like) CUPS, so if you implement such then you'll definitely have an unsupported solution (by HP anyway). Perhaps you'd be better off doing "remote printing" (look for that choice in the HP-UX System Administration Manager) to a Linux box that can run CUPS.

This advice shovels in a whole new environment to address an HP-UX weakness, however. So there's another set of solutions available from independent resources -- third-party spooling software. These extra-cost products accomodate things like default font differences between print devices, control panels, orientation and more. Michael Anderson, the consultant just finishing up a 3000 to Unix migration, pointed out these problems that rose up during the migration.

My client hired a Unix guru (very experienced, someone I have lots of respect for) to set this up a year or more ago. They recreated all the old MPE printer LDEVs and CLASS names in CUPS, and decided on the "raw" print format so the application can send whatever binary commands to the printers. Now they have some complaints about the output not being consistent. My response was, "Absolutely! There were certain functions that the MPE spooler did for you at the device class/LDEV level, and you don't have that with CUPS on HP-UX."

Anderson has faith that learning more about CUPS will uncover a solution. "One plus for CUPS, it does make the applications more portable," he added.

There's one set of tasks can solve the problem without buying a commercial spooler for Unix, but you'll need experience with adding PCL codes and control of page layouts. Hassell explains:

Yes, [on HP-UX] it's the old, "Why doesn't Printer 2 print like Printer 3?" problem. So unlike the Mighty MPE system, where there is an interface to control prepends and postpends, in HP-UX you'll be editing the model.orig directory where each printer's script is located. It just ASMOS (A Simple Matter of Scripting). The good news is that you already have experience adding these PCL codes and you understand what it takes to control logical page layouts. The model.orig directory is located in /etc/lp/interface/model.orig

What Anderson needs to accomplish in his migration is the setup of multiple config environments for each printer, all to make "an HP-UX spooler send printer init/reset instructions to the printer, before and after the print job. In other words: one or more printer names, each configured differently, yet all point to the same device."

You won't get that for HP-UX without scripting, the experts are saying, or an external spooling server under Linux, or a third party indie spooler product. If you'd like to look over the discussion in real time and add questions, it's on the LinkedIn HP-UX group's webpage. The third party software list for Unix is long. ROC Software moved into this field more than six years ago, along with its support of Maestro job scheduling for the HP 3000. ROC's products for Unix are Rhapsody and EasySpooler, for multiple-server and single-server environments, respectively. Another spooler software vendor with 3000 experience is Holland House, which sells its Unispool product for environments including Unix.

3000 managers who want third party expertise to support a vast array of print devices are well served to look at ESPUL and PrintPath spooling software from veteran 3000 developer Rich Corn at RAC Consulting. Corn's the best at controlling spoolfiles for 3000s, and he takes networked printing to a new level with PrintPath. Plenty of 3000 sites never needed to know all that his work could do, however -- because that MPE spooler looks plenty robust compared to what's inside the Unix toolbox.

Virtual futures await for early 3000 readers

NewsWire Editorial

    A dream delayed is better than a dream denied. It's a natural element of being human to look into the future, a skill your community has polished over the last decade. Across the same period I've done polishing of my own on a dream that looked denied, but has escaped its delays.

    It's Viral Times, the novel I began to write in earnest once HP stopped writing its futures for the 3000. This month the book is a reality in printed and ebook versions, available at Amazon.com and signed from my Writer's Workshop website, workshopwriter.com. I think of Viral Times as my 3000 emulator. It's a project devised from a sense of necessity, given up for lost at least once, but revived and delivered after a surprising amount of challenges in its creation.

   I'd also like to believe my novel has fans waiting in their seats to experience its magic. Not a bestseller's number of readers, partly because a wide-scale release is no more likely than the prospects for the Stromasys Charon HPA/3000 to reverse the trends of 3000 ownership. But you don't need to be a bestseller to tell a good story with meaning for the future. On the other hand, if you don't tell a good story, there's only a slim chance to become a bestseller. Of small books and modest software projects come enduring classics, if we're patient and lucky.

    There's been plenty of time to practice patience with the emulator. It was first discussed in the fall of 2002, the same time I started my training as a writer of fiction with classes at the Austin Writer's League. The concepts of both these ventures have changed a great deal, just like the fields where they're appearing. The '02 emulator was heading for a specialized hardware design that could mimic PA-RISC processors. Software would be essential, but at one point the leading vendor was looking for PA-RISC chips to be placed in a PC-slot card.

    Viral Times started off in a very different place, too. This story of a star reporter who's disgraced and must redeem himself and recover love in a pandemic opened in 2044. I thought I needed that much elbow room in the future to show a society locked down into virtualized life, even virtualized love to avoid disease. It now starts in 2020. By the time it went into release this month, my shorthand for the tale was "It's a story in a future closer than you think."

   In the emulator's tale, the marketplace believed it needed a 3000 replacement right away to stem the departure of customers from the platform. Anything that would arrive later than HP's exit would be meaningless. The reality of the 3000's future was a more interesting story.  It turned out to be a tale of preserving MPE, not the hardware and software we've come to call the HP 3000.

   Nothing was ever going to reverse the outflow of 3000 customers from this community. Too much change took place as a result of the dot-com Web boom to give vendor-locked computing much of a growth path. For business computing, an open model fed by many allied independent players is the only way to grow. Within the last four years, this kind of virtualized community, working with open specifications, is spinning the story of the future of computing. And storytelling, too. The changes don't signal the end of other kinds of computing, though — not any more than the rise of ebooks means the demise of paperbacks.

    Even through Viral Times will enjoy a long life as an ebook — it will never go out of print — it's also getting a loving debut as a story printed with ink on paper. I've published it using everything the 3000 community has given me the chance to polish: deadlines and printer double-checks, research and feedback (we call that last one "workshopping" in the fiction business). We used to call such books "self-published," a lot like the 3000 market used to call most of its products "third-party."

    But independence from strategies of the past is driving both books and computers. Looking to the future provides the great spark of "what if." HP once enjoyed the same phrase when it first introduced a touchscreen computer, a 9-inch marvel of the MS-DOS heyday, too far ahead of its time.

    Viral Times needed eight years of planning and work (and another half-dozen of dreaming) to become a book I can sign and send to readers. There's the ebook version to download to an e-reader like an Amazon or Apple tablet, yes — but just try signing that one. The act of a human hand pushing ink across paper is one of those pleasures we continue to enjoy. I enjoyed signing at a little release party here in Austin. People enjoyed seeing a writer at work, jotting down personal messages above a signature.

   Your community's emulator needed futuristic changes in its strategy to become a reality, too. Virtualization grew stronger, like a chapter revised and edited, until it became a keystone to extending computing into any budget or set of human resources. The IT datacenter with a troop of white coats has become virtualized, so ethereal it's called the cloud. We used to work with service bureaus because the computers were so expensive. Now we use the cloud because people are so expensive.

   And yet we can't dream of a time when we don't need people to manage computing, not any more than I could dream of a story where love wasn't the most important part of staying healthy in a future filled with danger. What I didn't see coming, but wished for, was virtualizing the publishing field. People tell stories that can be read without a wall of paper to prove their worth. Self-publishing, the old vanity press, has become indie publishing thanks to e-reader technology people slagged — just like emulation — for many years.

    What both the Stromasys emulator and my Viral Times need now are reviews. People need to try out the future to see how it fits them and report back. Take a ride on the indie express, and see if there's joy for you in its future.

Taking a Glance at 3000s: where to get it

On a visit to the offices of The Support Group today, president David Floyd asked a great question. If a 3000 manager wanted to buy a copy of HP Glance, where would they go?

Readers probably know Glance as the HP-created performance measurement tool built for MPE-based servers. The product went through 20 years of upgrades and revisions before HP stopped enhancements in the late 1990s. At that point, performance measurement techniques of 3000s weren't about to change much. Reading and understanding the data from Glance always was the counterbalance to the copious detailed reports.

The answer to Floyd's question is Client Systems. This is the former HP 3000 North American distributor, once in lock-step with Hewlett-Packard while Client Systems configured and shipped many a 3000 sold through application-based resellers like Ecometry or Amisys. A few years back HP made its subsystem software available for sale in the market, even though nothing else remained on the price list.

You won't find a way to buy those subsystem product licenses in many places. OpenMPE ran a promotion with the aid of Client Systems starting in 2011 to help the advocacy group raise operating funds. (Website registries, servers, accounting -- it adds up). You can get in touch with an OpenMPE board member (Jack Connor was the last director to mention this offer) and ask for a copy of Glance/iX. HP discounted the prices to a more reasonable post-sales tier, via the deal that gets customers the tools and OpenMPE some assistance. "Client Systems has given OpenMPE pricing at cost," Connor said, "which will allow us to charge 50 percent of HP list for a product, with 10 percent going to OpenMPE."

Why buy Glance now, in the post-HP era of 3000 ownership? Homesteaders and owners on a budget are still working to get the most out of server investments. If you use an independent support provider, Glance can give you more data to share with your experts on call -- whether they're the gurus at The Support Group or others in the field.

Glance was once so ubiquitous in the 3000 community that providers of alternative products like Lund's suite were bitter over the single-vendor advantage HP owned. Back in the days of the 1990s, an additional $8,000 charge for Glance on top of a $130,000 system sale didn't raise an eyebrow.

You may have avoided raised eyebrows if you're interested in getting Glance/iX for a 3000. In an arrangement between OpenMPE and Client Systems that been in place since April 2011, there's a means for anyone who wants to buy licensed HP software for their systems.

Connor can be contacted about subsystem software sales at InfoWorks@USA.net, or email to Dan Cossey at Client Systems directly. "Make sure to let Client Systems know this is a purchase via OpenMPE, to receive the discounted price," Connor said.

Vendors mull emulator tool, app licenses

Even while we await the announcement of the first installation of the Stromasys Charon HPA/3000 emulator product, we're even more eager to get updates on related software. Third party software -- we like to call it independent products now, since HP's stepped away from the party -- still needs a model to license the use of tools and applications.

By many estimates, four out of five HP 3000s in the homestead world are running their own in-house packages. Or they're using commercial vendor software that's modified so heavily it may as well be a custom system. There are licenses of MANMAN from Infor to consider, as well as the remaining installations of Ecometry and a few others. But it's a rare thing for a company to be charging a support fee for an application on a 3000.

Surround code, and third party tools, are a very different territory. Products like UDA Link from MB Foster, Speedware and PowerHouse, Robelle's Suprtool and Qedit, VEsoft's MPEX, even a bedrock tool like Adager -- all are vital parts of the 3000 community that must mull over how their licenses on the HPA/3000 should work. The tool providers usually sustain themselves with annual support contracts, but some have used license transfers while products were moved from older to newer HP 3000s. Several of those vendors have tested their products against HPA/3000 for compatibility.

One such vendor is MB Foster. When we checked in recently with founder Birket Foster -- a Q&A with him is coming in our printed February issue -- he mentioned licensing for emulation as an issue that was resolved by HP, but is still in play at independent software vendors.

"What do you do about software licensing for all of the vendors out there?" he asked during our hour-plus interview. Foster was not only involved in getting the terms on HP's MPE/iX emulator license hammered out in work with OpenMPE. His work goes back to the days when indie software vendors, then called ISVs, gathered in a Special Interest Group he chaired for Interex, SIGSOFTVEND. HP worked through that group to ensure tool makers and app vendors had early tech access to fresh MPE/iX releases.

In the face of a new system model where Stromasys will be selling a USB key, equipped with a valid HPSUSAN number for a replaced 3000, "We still have to charge for all of this," Foster said. "We still have hundreds of customers running our UDA series products on the HP 3000." As development continues on the products -- both for new platforms like Unix and Linux as well as 3000s -- "we have to pay people to do that work, and they in turn pay on their mortgages, their kids going to school and more. We still have to charge for this to keep the engineering in place."

"That's a concern for all of the vendors as they walk into an environment where they'll be on an emulated HP 3000," he adds. "It's not going to be free. But I think most vendors realize that it's got to be reasonable."

String some perls on a day for love

The HP 3000 has a healthy range of open source tools in its ecosystem. One of the best ways to begin looking at open source software opportunity is to visit the MPE Open Source website operated by Applied Technologies. If you're keeping a 3000 in vital service during the post-HP era, you might find perl a useful tool for interfacing with data via web access.

The 3000 community has chronicled and documented the use of this programming language, with the advice coming from some of the best pedigreed sources. Allegro Consultants has a tar-ball of the compiler available for download from Allegro's website. (You'll find many other useful papers and tools at that Allegro Papers and Books webpage, too.)

Bob Green of Robelle wrote a great primer on the use of perl in the MPE/iX environment. We were fortunate to be the first to publish Bob's paper, run in the 3000 NewsWire when Robelle Tech made a long-running column on our paper pages.

Although you might be dreaming up something to bring to your sweetie tonight, you could grab a little love for your 3000, too. Cast a string of perls starting with the downloads and advice. One of HP's best and brightest -- well, a former HP wizard -- has a detailed slide set on perl, too.

The official perl.org website has great instructions on Perl for MPE/iX installation and an update on the last revision to the language for the 3000. First ported by Ken Hirsch in 2000, the language was brought to the 5.9.3 release in 2006.

An extensive PowerPoint presentation on perl by the legendary porter Mark Bixby will deliver detailed insights on how to introduce perl to your programming mix. Bixby, who left HP to work for the 3000 software vendor QSS, brings the spirit of open source advocacy to his advice on how to use this foundational web tool.

As an example, Bixby notes that "it's now possible to write MPE applications that look like web browsers, to perform simple HTTP GET requests, or even complicated HTTP POST requests to fill out remote web forms." It's no box of Godiva, or even the classic blue box from Tiffany's, but perl might be something you love to use, to show that 3000 isn't a tired old minicomputer -- just a great sweetheart of a partner in your mission-critical work.

Developers, users manufacture 3000 chat

A lively discussion is in play at the HP 3000 Community of LinkedIn, where users, developers and managers are examining issues around migrating away from an MPE application of serious size and age. Or the need to do so.

Once Randy Thon mentioned he's using MM/3000 to manage maintenance services at Cessna Aircraft -- adding that the company's looking at options to leave the 3000 -- others in the 425-member community supplied advice and counsel.

The options suggested to Thon go beyond using the new Stromasys emulator. He's pleased with the way his app is working on the 3000 for Cessna. The hardware is the burr under the aircraft maker's saddle. The migration of an app like MM/3000 is a project that taxed every aspect of the software's owner, a crew laden with ex-HP engineers.

"The eXegeSys team spent years trying to migrate MM/3000 to Unix and ultimately gave up," said Jeffrey Lyon, "and sold the intellectual property. 11.7 million lines of COBOL, SPL, and Pascal is a big beast to move."

Another community member said that 11 million lines of code isn't that large, really. "The 11.7 million is not that big," said Brian Stephens. "I did a migration at Speedware; think it was about 4 million lines of COBOL and 300,000 Pascal and SPL in about a year. Our team was 14 members and we started not knowing the app. A bigger team, knowing the app, could get the MM3000 migration done in under two years."

There's also the issue of whether you would get what you were really pursuing, once you'd complete a migration. These are different issues for a software vendor than a user of its products. Have a look at the chat and chime in with your own experience about migration strategy.