Enduring risks to survive viral times

NewsWire Editorial
By Ron Seybold

  We’ve been wrestling with risk at my house this month. The flu made its debut just as November started, and so a period of recovery and a return to health commenced, too. We’re not flu shot people, Abby and I, so we weather the risk of letting a virus have its way with our immune systems. Both beyond 50, we’re in the generation that drank from garden hoses, ate burgers that dropped to the dirt, and played for hours after we skinned our knees outside.

    That’s all risky behavior, but so is rolling the dice on a flu shot, or deciding that it’s time to cut over in a massive migration. The shots and the migrations flow from sound advice, but they are solutions that carry a potential downside, too. A flu shot can give you a dose of the flu, and every virus has powerful evolution properties that let it evade a vaccine after just a few months, maybe weeks. (I’ve researched viral behavior for my just-finished novel Viral Times, but years of study that doesn’t make me an expert, just an informed storyteller. You can read more at viraltimes.net.)

    We all tell ourselves stories as a way of surviving and thriving. Our story this month has been something like, “Okay, it’s just the flu. Here’s how you outlast the symptoms, and here’s how you protect yourself while your sweetheart gets through her bout.” We’ve developed our natural immunity for reasonable risk in our lives since we started the NewsWire together more than 14 years ago. Thanks to you, we survived the risk and thrived.

    During more than half of that 14 years we have seen many of you managing the risk of 3000 transitions. Transition, as I’ve preached, describes the condition of nearly every member of the 3000 community: the homesteading customers who need new support providers and new DIY skills; the migrators, making a shift to a new environment and new apps; the solutions providers, shifting to new markets or shoring up their resolve to serve 3000 sites for another seven years.

    If you think of transition as a virus, then we’ve lived in viral times ever since events in this month changed our lives during 2001. You can reach for a vaccine if you feel the risk of homesteading is too great. Or you can rely on the immunity you’ve developed in your career and your company’s resolve to weather unproductive changes. Flu shot, or no shot, you manage risk and try to avoid a deadly illness.

    Everyone has a flu story by this time in the season, either something they’ve heard or read, something a healthcare pro has told them, or the firsthand experience of staving it off and dodging infection. There will be no completely effective, permanent vaccine for viruses. We’ve lived alongside them for tens of thousands of years. The risk hasn’t eliminated our species yet, even while these viral times have culled out people with underlying conditions.

    You can eliminate your underlying risks. Many people are taking risks now, during the months remaining until HP shuts off its 3000 interests, because they have no other choice. They pursue migrations that could fail and cost millions. They remain in lockstep with 3000s when they have nobody left on staff who knows the in-house accounting application. In both cases, the companies could get mortally ill. Perhaps they survive, like nearly everyone who gets the flu. In 1918 fewer than 2 percent died out of those who got the worst virus in human history.

    You don’t want to be among the 2 percent of your community, or even someone who’s survived the flu and lost fitness, your savings, or contact with your friends and loved ones. We risk becoming distant when exposure means danger, cutting ourselves off to stay out of the risk pool. You want to stay connected during a risky time, relying on the herd of your fellow 3000 owners and partners to share practices to help maintain your IT health.

    I could find no better example of this connection than this fall’s e3000 Community Meet outside San Francisco. The first day of Fall this year brought 40-plus IT pros, nearly all over age 50, into one room where they could exchange what was working and where they observed risky practices. Sharing our stories and contacts in that room was a booster shot of information and hope. We’re all old enough to recall booster shots, while many of us have parented enough to experience the gauntlet of immunizations our kids have endured. Precaution has always been good medicine.

    Vaccines have enabled extraordinary lifespans in our generation, even in the US. But there are some bouts of disease that we’ve got to bull through, letting our bodies spin the magic antibodies while we rest, hydrate and pray for recovery. Setting a transition in play looks like a bout of flu season to me, here in a house where we’ve sanitized, slept late and downed chicken soup and juice. You might not understand everything in the steps of a migration, or building a sustainability plan for homesteading. But you can avoid being in the two percent by staying connected and learning what’s working, gathering the latest advice on how to pass through the fever pitch of  “Change now.”

    There’s no avoiding change, either. There hasn’t been a year in human history without a flu virus, and somehow we’ve survived up to now. You wash your hands, cough into your elbow, amass your gurus and sanitize yourself from undocumented critical apps. Take one of two paths, migration or sustaining homesteading. Call us in the morning, or your darkest night. Meet these risks during viral times head-on, with connections.

OpenMPE's march to source halfway home

The treasurer for the OpenMPE advocacy group has announced that the drive to raise licensing fees for MPE/iX source is halfway home. Contributions have been trickling in since Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies kicked in the first $1,000 in September. The money can help connect customers to patches, as shown in the chart, so MPE can continue to serve companies, both those homesteading and those on a long-term migration schedule.

Although the group doesn't have an official deadline from HP to submit its fees for read-only source, the vendor's "Jennie Hou says the sooner the better," reported treasurer Matt Perdue. At September's e3000 Community Meet where the fundraising kicked off, Perdue estimated that about $20,000 would be needed to pay HP as well as manage the licensing process.

OpenMPE has applied for the license, and must be prepared to pay the license fee, upon approval by Hewlett-Packard. "We are now more than half way to the fundraising goal," Perdue said in a note to the HP 3000 newsgroup, "so please consider what you can contribute."

Specifics of the source code license terms are under wraps, thanks to a Confidential Disclosure Agreement that all applicants must sign. HP hasn't announced which companies have been approved and granted licenses. The program was first announced by HP in February.

Donors to the fundraising drive have been technical consultants such a Kevin Miller of 3KRanger who has contributed $500. Perdue said some donors wish to remain anonymous.

Once OpenMPE gains its source license, the group would assemble and administer the resources of engineers who have internal MPE/iX experience. Secretary Donna Hofmeister said at the Community Meet these patch providers "are more like [HP's] lab." The group will nurture and enable business relationships between customers of third party support providers and the patch providers.

The need for MPE/iX patches is both real and funded by HP customers, according to OpenMPE's president Birket Foster. Referring to "a very large aircraft manufacturer who will be on MPE until 2012," he said the customer anticipates changes in 3000 connectivity.

"They want to hedge their bets," he said, "so part of this [patching] is to make sure that if the standards for disk drive writes change over the next five years, or if IPV6 became mandatory, we could engineer to accept those changes." Any company or individual who wants to invest in the OpenMPE license can use the following deposit point to send checks (made out to OpenMPE):

OpenMPE, Inc.
c/o Matt Perdue, Treasurer
PO Box 460091
San Antonio, TX 78246-0091

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living a Long Afterlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Command the 3000's Service General

It's a powerful part of your HP 3000 that runs whenever the server is plugged in. The General Service Processor (GSP) is the maintenance control console that commands the server to "reboot, do memory dumps and even fully power down the HP 3000," reports consultant and outsource support expert Craig Lalley of EchoTech.

Lalley has been on the hunt for a method to make the 3000's GSP as useful as the unit in an HP-UX server. "On HP-UX it is possible to reset from the host OS," he said. "I have not found a way from MPE."

Lalley explains that on HP-UX it is possible to issue the command

stty +resetGSP < /dev/GSPdiag1

to reset the GSP. From time to time a reset may be required for diagnostics services. If your 3000 gets loving care from outside your computer room, you may need a paper clip to keep service at HP-UX levels.

The gap between 3000 and HP 9000/Integrity GSPs is a common shortfall of HP designs. Even though the 3000's MPE/iX includes a Posix interface, HP didn't engineer enough Unix into the 3000 to enable some administration that HP-UX users enjoy. (That can be a good thing when a security breach opens up in the Unix world, however.)

But when a 3000 needs a GSP reset, pressing a magic recessed button on the 3000's back will do the trick if a Telnet command doesn't work. Matt Perdue of Hill Country Technologies and the OpenMPE board explains.

"I telnet to the IP address of the GSP, log in and do the reset that way," he says. "But you can get someone, to press the physical reset button at the back of the machine. If memory serves, it's recessed into the cabinet so you may need a 'magic paper clip' bent just so."

Lalley calls the GSP, which HP introduced with its final generation of 3000s, one of the most useful things in the A-Class and N-Class boxes.

The GSP is a small computer that is always powered on when the plug has power. With it, it is possible to telnet to and BE the console. While multiple admins can telnet in and watch, only one has the keyboard.

It is possible to reboot, memory dumps and even fully power down the HP 3000 from the GSP.  Use the command PC OFF.

It is probably the best feature of the N-Class and A-class boxes.  The problem is sometimes it needs to be reset, usually with a paper clip.  Since the GSP is a different CPU, it can be done during business hours.

All of which begs the question of to secure these resets. He says the MPE/iX user/account structure provides the security.

As for security, users and passwords are defined, and there are two or three classes of users.

1) Administrator
2) Operator
3) Perhaps even User

I only use Operator, i.e. I usually am the only one who accesses it.  I do have one customer that allows operators. They can reply and watch messages, but not reboot and so on.

Battery up that 9x7? A project or a hunt

Vintage HP 3000s present some risks of hardware failures, but not many. Any computer's hard drive can fail, and will at some time in the future. Power supplies have been reported going AWOL. Memory can forget its purpose. Most of these failures can be planned for, so a site will experience little downtime.

Perhaps not so much with the 9x7 internal batteries. A few weeks ago we reported that a 3000 which forgets what time it is may have a failed internal system clock battery. Sad to say, this isn't an easy hardware failure to recover from, and a good reason to invest in spare parts server. Or arrange for complete hardware support.

Bob J. of Ideal Computer Services filled out the details on getting a working battery to replace what he calls "the Dallas Semiconductor DS1287 real time clock module. The replacement is a DS12887 and is available from components suppliers. The only concern is getting a replacement part that has been on the shelf too long."

"The battery is part of the IC’s package," Bob says, "so it looks like a tall IC. You need to remove the 3000's backplane to replace this soldered module. I don’t expect a battery shop or Radio Shack to be helpful.These modules were used in many early PCs, but haven’t been used in any new equipment for over a decade, so the replacements may be near the end of their lives too."

Bob said that a hobbyist has managed to mount an external battery on the module, to give the chip a replaceable power source. It looks like a workbench project at the hobbyist's Web site. Better to engage a hardware support provider. Better still, perhaps, to consider a newer 3000 if you really want to sustain your applications. Even homesteading has real costs.

Investing in 9x7s could be part-ly wise

A Series 947 HP 3000 surfaced on Craigslist yesterday priced at $400. Offered by Alan Cartwright of Gilroy, Calif., the computer was purchased at auction. Gilroy said the system is new to him and he'd like to resell it. He's not really certain how he should price this computer first released in the 1990s.

"I really have no idea what this is worth," he said on the day after he posted the item, "so any info you could give me based on the facts already at hand would be great." He did note that as configured, the server sold new for more than $150,000. So that would make his asking price a 99.8 percent discount.

Since he's not sure if his paperwork will pass HP's muster to transfer the MPE/iX license, Cartwright will have to wait on that assessment. But Bob Sigworth of Bay Pointe Technology took a quick look at the listing. The 3000 hardware reseller said it's been a long time since he's seen a Series 9x7 with decent license paperwork. The phrase "parts box" came up to describe Cartwright's offer.

Not that there's anything wrong with selling a 9x7 for parts, or buying one. There's a internal systems clock in a 9x7 that's a combination battery-chip. It's not easily replaced if it goes bad, which will happen to a 15-year-old computer. The 9x7's $400 might be worthwhile just to get the Dallas Semiconductor DS1287. (Tip of the hat to Bob J. at 3000 hardware support company Ideal Computer for the part number on the clock.)

The software could be worth a lot less. Sigworth said the MPE/iX license could be tough to qualify for a License To Use certificate from HP. "I have not seen a legit LTU on a 9x7 in years,  I am sure it could be very well a parts box. $400 is a bit steep for a 9x7."

If you'd like to reel in the system from Cartwright, you can check out his Craigslist posting, or call him at 408-210-8185. At the $400 price, he says you'll need to pick it up yourself or pay to have it packaged and shipped.

A New 3000, to Mitigate Risks

At this fall's e3000 Community Meet, ScreenJet's Alan Yeo shared an unexpected story. His company helped to establish a new HP 3000 customer site within the past year. While there's a lot of talk about the risk of remaining on the HP 3000 due to the vendor's exit in 2010, this company saw a 3000 app as a way to avoid the trouble of falling behind.

In our 3-minute video (click on the embed above, or view it on our YouTube channel), Yeo related the case study. A 3000 solution beat out IBM iSeries apps and outlasted the promises of a migration too often postponed.

They were in a position where they hadn't been allowed to do anything for years — because the answer to everything they wanted to do was, “wait until the new ERP system comes in.” They said they needed to do something, so they looked in their group to see who was doing what. The best systems they had in the group happened to be HP 3000 systems. Even though they had IBM i5 apps running.

There's risk in any choice, because IT management never provides a foolproof solution. Tales at the Meet's Roundtable outlined the merits of migrating bugs (to keep auditors happy) and training a third party to manage an application that's understood by only one IT pro at a corporation.

Nobody can mistake a single 3000 startup as a trend, not as 2010 waits at the end of next month. But risk is in the eye of the customer. This one has good reasons for taking up with MPE/iX apps for the foreseeable future.

"The group's strategy was to implement a new ERP system," Yeo said, "but they hadn't gotten around to doing it for five years. Then the economic climate changes, and suddenly you haven't got $10 million in cash to do it."

It's the kind of story more easily shared when you can look your audience in the eye. That kind of contact makes a good case for more Meets in the years to come.

3000 shareware lives at 3k.com

Some programs from the former HP shareware server Jazz are online at Speedware and Client Systems hosts. But some are not -- especially the 3000 tools written by the user community. One of the best repositories of such 3000 programs is still online and serving software. 3k.com is, as its founder and curator Chris Bartram says, "a site with arguably the largest collection of public domain/shared software, or links to the such software on the Internet."

We agree, and want to note that 3k.com was always a Web resource with more scope than the now-defunct Jazz. The 3k Associates site hosts a 3000 technical Wiki, did a 3000 FAQ before that, hosts a raft of technical papers, has a link to the freeware from 3000/9000 support vendor Beechglen, points to another set of tools from Allegro Consultants, and has been home to the biggest directory of HP 3000 software products. How long has this resource been around? Well, 3k.com is a two-character Web address. You simply can't buy those anymore, having been snapped up long before the 3000 business was closed off at HP.

HP closed down Jazz one year ago this month, but the vendor did more than pull the plug on the freeware server. As we've reported before, the Jazz programs are now walled off by a 40-page End User License Agreement. At least the ones that HP engineers developed for free use by the community. The third-party tools that were hosted on Jazz aren't covered by the HP EULA. That's where 3k.com comes in, during a time when OpenMPE is still working to try to get its hosting site open to the public.

The OpenMPE initiative will add a new dimension to a 3000 Web resource, whenever it finally goes online. The servers will host the Jazz contents from HP, as well as the invent3k public development server facility. It's taking longer than expected to bring OpenMPE's Jazz and invent3k.openmpe.org online. The holdup is the state that HP left its Jazz pages in: full of HP logos and references that the vendor demands be excised by third parties.

It's been suggested that this kind of Web housecleaning is a straightforward process using perl or awk, but until recently the volunteer OpenMPE team didn't have this kind of experience. HP certainly knew perl and awk, but it just turned over Jazz in its unauthorized rehosting state. OpenMPE gained a new volunteer this week to help in its Jazz hosting. But HP could have spared the advocacy group, Speedware and Client Systems all the legally required exorcism work.

Shareware, by a popular definition, is software without restrictions for use or sharing, donated to a community. It's good that Speedware, Client Systems and even more so, 3k, have maintained the concept. OpenMPE will have to abide by that nettlesome HP EULA to keep the vendor's donated programs online. This release could have been done with more elegance and attention to the spirit of the free tools. While it's fair to appreciate the work that someone in HP did to free up Jazz's shareware, the delays in presentation by the new hosts illustrate another spot where HP "didn't think of that." OpenMPE directors say that answer was uttered frequently by HP while it responded to OpenMPE's requests.

We'd say "Free Jazz now," but that would involve OpenMPE ignoring the HP EULA. With the likes of 3k.com's wide array, as well as Speedware and Client Systems sites (both were delayed by the HP logo purge), the software is free now. Just not as free of the memory of HP's need for controls while it exits your community.

Links to 3000 via Unix, Linux stay free

Companies which continue to rely on the HP 3000 connect to the system using other servers. In this case, other means non-3000 computers, especially running Linux and various flavors of Unix. A free program was once available to install on the Unix or Linux host, but freevt3k has been found recently and rehosted for public use. It works with block mode well enough to drive the NMMGR tool shown above.

Mark West of Car Hop, an auto sales and finance firm, needed to perform this kind of link, but discovered that the known links to freevt3k through telemon.com have gone dead. West dug up the source code for the utility, rehosted it in a forge on SourceForge.net, then told the community about its lost-then-found resource.

I've been trying to find a suitable terminal to access the HP3000 servers we use at work. I made a couple of small corrections and set up a sourceforge project to store the freevt3k code on. While I’m sure this isn’t the most recent copy, at least it’s been saved from the lost and found. I’ll be happy to accept any patches sent to me.

Freevt3k made its debut in the late 1990s. HP discontinued its NS VT3K product, which allowed HP 9000s to log into the HP 3000. HP-UX 11.0 and later versions no longer support a pathway from outside systems into HP 3000s. But freevt3k a means to let users onto the systems if you don't want to use telnet. (Some companies have restrictions on telnet services into HP 3000s, but no limits on proprietary, internal access.) A freeware project created this shareware version of VT3K.

The version of the software that West has provided has Linux binaries and a Unix source tarball for download. Notes in the README file deliver instructions on how to use it.

Sites turn 3000 clocks back, and back on

This is the week in the world when the loss of an hour must be weathered in IT, as Daylight Savings time ends. (The UK lost its hour last weekend; the US does so Saturday night.) The HP 3000 does time shifting of its system clock automatically, thanks to patches HP built during 2007. But what about the internal clock of a computer that might be 15 years old? Components fail after awhile.

The 3000's internal time is preserved using a small battery, according to the experts out on the 3000 newsgroup. This came to light in a discussion about fixing a clock gone slow. A few MPE/iX commands and a trip to Radio Shack maintains a 3000's sense of time.

"I thought the internal clock could not be altered," said Paul English. "Our server was powered off for many months, and maybe the CMOS battery went flat." The result was that English's 3000 showed Greenwich Mean Time as being four years off reality. CTIME reported for his server:

*  Greenwich Mean Time : THU, JUN 17, 2004, 11:30 AM   *

* GMT/MPE offset      : +-19670:30:00                 *

* MPE System Time     : THU, SEP 10, 2009,  2:00 PM   *

Yup, that's a bad battery, said Pro 3k consultant Mark Ranft. "It is cheap at a specialty battery store," he said, "and can be replaced easily, if you have some hardware skills and a grounding strap." Radio Shack offers the battery.

But you can also alter the 3000's clock which tracks GMT, he added.

"The internal clock can be set or reset at bootup (the method varies depending on the hardware), or by using the MPE SETCLOCK date=xx/xx/xx;time;NOW command, in conjuction with SETCLOCK ;CANCEL.  Follow these by the SHOWCLKS command. It usually takes me a couple of attempts to get it, but you should be able to straighten this out without even having to reboot."

A few customers warned that utility software will sometimes fail to start up if a bad battery has pulled the internal clock too far off the system clock. Tracy Johnson of OpenMPE explained:

Collateral damage may include some third party software going non-operational. I have at least one software package whose license goes bad when the offset gets too large (think years).  When I fix the offset to a reasonable number (within a day or two), then the software works again.

Fortune 500 beds down for 3000 use

Large scale IT operations are already migrated away from the HP 3000, right? Well, maybe not as many as you'd think. Imagine a company that makes "a broad variety of engineered components and products that can be found in virtually every home, office, retail store, and automobile." Better than $4 billion in annual sales. Got to be off the 3000 by 2009, you might think.

In this case you would be wrong. Leggett & Platt is managing its health plan using an HP 3000 and the EnCore claims system. Migration is probably not going to happen before sometime in 2012.

"We do plan on migrating to another platform, but not for another 3-5 years," said Douglas Grimes in IT. Our longtime subscriber added, "I am not sure which one we will go to. We will probably wait to see what EnCore does and follow them."

Leggett & Platt, New York Stock Exchange-listed and 125 years old, makes bedding and furniture assemblies. For example, its Mira-Coil continuous coil innerspring unit "grew in popularity in the 1980s and was patented in 23 countries."

Leggett & Platt doesn't show up on the extensive HP 3000 customer list at the OpenMPE Web site. When a company uses a solution that's not in the Top 20 MPE applications, tracking its business becomes tougher. A Fortune 500 site shouldn't be tough to locate, so we'll just assume someone in the 3000 migration community has Leggett & Platt on a tickle file.

How can a company this size maintain its 3000 use? Independent outsourced support along with experienced in-house application expertise. (Customers of some size do get special HP support deals that could well go beyond 2010, but HP isn't advertising that for Leggett & Platt or any other customer.) That app expertise  might not be any harder to locate than the best selection of Windows IT pros. While Windows has a vast user base among IT staffers, there's so many Windows tools and solutions that matching experience to a specific solution can make for a non-trivial hire.

ScreenJet's Alan Yeo, founder of the company that has helped 3000 sites move and enhance VPlus screens for more than a dozen years, said he figures there's 50 to 100 development solutions for Windows programmers. Entire IDEs, no less. Choosing a tool in the Top 10 of popularity might make Windows experts easy to recruit and retain. But then that kind of selection winnows so much possibility out of the rich world of Windows solutions.

EnCore is supported on other platforms, including an implementation that uses the Eloquence database to mirror its IMAGE capabilities. When the time is right for a Fortune 500 site to migrate, it will. The end of the 3000s life is being determined by customers, not by HP's support calendar.

HP 3000 Becomes a Copy Cat

Sometimes, the HP 3000 can surprise you with its capabilities. Not long ago, the system revealed another life, this one as a minicomputer which controls a copier.

Both of those technologies, mini and copier, are considered old-school. Everybody understands what a copier does, but few people under 50 know what the term mini represents. For anybody reading who's only just arrived in IT during this decade, computers were known as mainframes, microcomputers, and minicomputers. People who know what mini means helped connect a Ricoh copier to a 3000. Over a network, no less.

Of course this Ricoh CP M4000 is not a copier of the '80s, not any more than the HP 3000 is a minicomputer of that era. The Ricoh prints for PCs (microcomputers) at Victor S. Barnes Company. It also stacks and staples, a feature set that IT manager Tom Hula wanted to extend to its 3000. The system became a copy cat by telling the copier to stop looking for some of its configuration information. A third party tool helped provide another way to claim this new life for the 3000.

Routing application output to print and copy devices often becomes the task of a print server. The 3000 has a good heritage of working with such a PC print clearinghouse. There's also the NBSPOOL software from Quest Software. The latter is still for sale, still supported. Quest is one of those suppliers who's going to be supporting 3000 sites a long time after HP leaves the field.

Another fine 3000 product, NetPrint from Minisoft, specializes in connecting HP 3000s with output devices HP doesn't support under MPE/iX. Hula found a workaround on his own, once he talked to the Ricoh support. The answer he discovered within 24 hours was to disable the NPCONFIG information on the output job

The problem had to do with restrictions that were set on printing color. On each workstation, I had had to specify black and white printing as the preference so that people could print to the copier. Using color then required an authorization code if the user had one assigned.

As far as I know, the HP 3000 has no way of communicating printing preferences to this copier. As soon as I removed the restriction from the copier, printing using the NPCONFIG entry I originally used worked. 

One of the community's networking gurus added some more information to suggest another workaround. Jeff Kell, who manages the 3000 newsgroup where this catty advice appeared, said the 3000's tool set might include enough connection to talk to Ricoh's software drivers.

We have an “outsourced” copy center that uses Ricoh printers. Their printers normally require an authorization code to print anything. The only way to print to them from the 3000 was to have them disable the authorization check on the particular printer.  Once that is done, it does accept a normal PCL-stream on tcp/9100 (with SNMP disabled).

Ricoh has drivers for Windows, and there are Unix “cups” configurations for them including authorization codes. But of course there is no MPE variant, unless you can front-end one with some esoteric “lpr” type options, using one of the 3000's external network printing packages (ESPUL?).

ESPUL was created by RAC Software's Rich Corn. The product is resold by Minisoft as NetPrint. The advice gives 3000 customers more than one way to skin this cat. Nothing that gruesome is needed to extend a 3000's reach today. You need only ask those who remember that the word mini can represent a large array of solutions.

E-forms integration worth discounted price

Minisoft announced this morning that its eFORMz document management software is being discounted by 35 percent through the end of January, 2010. The software creates PDF documents for e-mailing and secure exchange. It runs with multiple platforms, including the HP 3000. Customers using products such as Optio, CreatForm and Jetform qualify, as well as others.

In addition to smart forms, deeper barcode features and a secure numeric font for check printing, eFORMz brings something even more significant to a paperless drive toward PDF forms and e-document management: ongoing support and continued updates. Those are benefits that are worth paying a vendor for, rather than working with open source solutions.

Enterprise IT in the 3000 world can have pretty low budgets these days, but free solutions cost something. The price is the integration expertise, usually measured in hours or days spent plugging in an open source tool. You rely on the open source community to keep your free solution updated, too, unless you've studied the source code enough to create "diffs" for MPE/iX versions. That's what QSS developer Mark Bixby is doing this month. He has also advised the 3000 community to learn such porting skills.

Minisoft reports that it will include updates to the new eFORMz for one year as part of its discount. While you cannot be certain that open source software will need more work in its first year, there's no guarantee of such updates being created.

Bixby gave sage advice to the community in the years after HP announced its exit from the 3000. While still working at HP, but after he moved away from 3000 duties, he said anyone staying on the system in a homestead mode would be well served to learn how to port open source solutions like Samba or perl. A vendor with a paid solution lets a homestead site leave the driving to vendor developers, like Neal Kazmi at Minisoft.

Open source port project in play for print

QSS, the K-12 app software company with clients in both HP 3000 and Unix/Linux markets, has kicked off a porting project for MPE/iX software. Founding partner Duane Percox reports that his company is rewriting open source software to aid in printing documents for 3000 systems.

Mark Bixby of QSS is at work on the porting project. Bixby ported the Apache Web server as well as Internet connectivity software to the 3000's OS late in the last decade, then joined the HP 3000 lab technical staff in the Internet & Interoperability unit. He left HP to join QSS in 2008.

Percox said the project will bring Ghostpdl and Ghostscript to the 3000. The former software can be used as a file format converter, such as printer language-to-PDF converter, the latter can be combined with a printer driver in "virtual printer" PDF creators. The QSS work will focus on including the 3000's common printer language, PCL, in the conversion options.

Ghostscript has been ported to Windows, HP-UX, Linux, OpenVMS and Mac operating systems. The QSS project will be shared with the 3000 community as open source when the work is complete, Percox said.

Many HP 3000 applications use the PCL printer language to send output to print devices. PDF is not supported widely in the 3000 application world, but the standard is omnipresent in the computer industry at large. Ghostscript will give 3000 sites a means to create PDF documents from 3000 reports. The open source solution would have to be integrated with an MPE/iX app, but at least the port project will make it available.

Percox said the work might put pressure on some suppliers of output and print products for the 3000. It gives the sites with a tight budget another option for printing, however.

“This might negatively impact vendors with expensive PDF generation products for the HP 3000,” Percox said. “But Ghostscript is a great feature for the financially-challenged customer who wants full PCL-to-PDF capability.”

Unwrapping the Myths of Security

What the Computer Security Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

Review by Steve Hardwick, CISSP

I have worked in the information security business for more than 10 years, and I’ve learned there is one constant throughout – change. Keeping up with the ever-present cat and mouse battle between the hackers and security industry is a full time job. The Myths of Security by John Viega (O'Reilly Media, $29.95) provides a good view of what the security industry faces and why they sometimes fall short in the eyes of many people. So the next time you are hitting your computer with your keyboard in utter frustration, put it down, pick up this book and take a look at why computer security is so hard. You can also learn what doesn’t work to secure computers – and by extension, good security practices. Some of the biggest security weaknesses will surprise you.
 
This book begins by outlining how easy it is to have a security problem. Early chapters cover the methods of attacking computer systems and how they have evolved. These include simple viruses focused on specific operating systems up to more sophisticated Web-based attacks and social engineering exploits. New attacks are independent on the operating system; rather, they exploit the lack of knowledge of the user. (Despite their sanguine outlook, even Apple users are wide open to these types of attacks.) Chapter 15 has an excellent example of a phishing attack that demonstrates how the bad guy can get key information without ever touching the operating system. According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, June of 2009 was the second-highest month for number of new phishing sites detected.

The author makes two very crucial points: First, it is no longer just a battle of viruses anymore – any computer user is vulnerable. Second, users will want an antivirus application that can deal with all manner of information security threats — viruses, malware, adware, phishing, cross site scripting and more.

This book provides an excellent view of many basic security elements, then steps into an overview of the good, the bad and the ugly of the tools that are out there. The author is critical of products that look great on the vendor’s Web site, but would bring a network to its knees if used, for example, intrusion prevention systems.

Viega dedicates several chapters to explain in plain language why some of these tools are not suited for personal use or for small companies. Many solid recommendations throughout inform individual users how to better protect themselves from a wide range of security threats. There is deeper detail on some of the more important security tools, but you'll need a good technical understanding for these sections. Chapter 29 “Application Security on a Budget” highlights the type of issues that are important – emphasizing training and simple free solutions vs. multiple expensive high tech solutions such as those intrusion prevention systems and virtualization.
 
As a former solutions developer, Viega is in an ideal position to give an informative peek over the fence at the challenges the security vendors face. In Chapters 8, 9 and 10, he breaks down the difficulty of vetting the thousands of pieces of data that daily go into our computers. He also explains why product vendors have some difficult choices in meeting end-users’ security as well satisfying the needs of vendor shareholders. This results in some odd methodologies that do not always have the end user’s interest as the highest priority – Chapter 7, “Google is Evil.” Or at worst, as outlined in Chapter 18, even plain old snake oil in a digital wrapper.

Many users do not realize the high cost of development and sheer manpower it takes to combat the threats that are out there. There are many detailed examples throughout the book showing how the business world shapes security products as much as the hackers.
 
The author does lend his industry experience to give suggestions on how the industry can better attack the problems. However, they may be somewhat controversial – Chapter 39, “What Antivirus Companies should be doing” is a good example. The chapter proposes that the antivirus vendors act as a “safe application” clearinghouse and restrict programs that have not been classified. But this goes against the open culture of the user community, even though Apple is trying this approach with its iPhone applications, with mixed reviews.
 
On the flip side, some attention is paid to understanding why there are hackers. Hacking has moved from the era of bravado and bragging rights into organized crime, as well as offering people in disadvantaged countries a way to make easy money. (In one recent example, a Russian consortium offered a malware affiliate bounty: infect a Mac, earn 43 cents.) However, the issue of outdated legal infrastructure in many developing countries which enables this, was not highlighted in the book. Those policies are a major hole in the global response to computer crime.

Similarly, it would have been a good balance to include a discussion on what the various governments are trying to do with new laws and regulations to help combat the problem. Conversely, the book did cover some newer threats such as data hostaging – which is becoming more of a threat to industries at large. For example, consider the salesman who will not return his laptop with all the customer information on it until his last commission check is in the bank.
 
If you are looking for a quick-fix to stop your computer from grinding to a halt every couple of days after your kids have unwittingly loaded the latest and greatest malware, then this is not the book for you. If you want a more in-depth understanding of today's threats, what you can do -- and what, if anything, anyone is trying to do to fix them -- then I would recommend this book.

Steve Hardwick has over 10 years of information security experience. He has worked with different environments from military customers, financial institutions, healthcare organizations and Fortune 1000 companies, as well as conducting security assessments for large and small corporations. He is currently Partner Manager at Mobile Armor Inc. providing cost effective solutions for securing and protecting mobile data.

Developers work to preserve power to port

Several developers in the 3000 community are working to preserve a key tool for porting software to the computer's MPE/iX operating system. The magic wand is the GNU C++ compiler suite, bootstrap software needed to move open source utilities onto the 3000, or keep them updated for security and functionality.

Mark Klein of DIS International did the port of C++ back in the middle '90s, a crucial step to porting Java, Internet networking tools, Samba file sharing, perl, Web services and more onto the 3000. Klein hosted the suite on an account at Invent3k, the public access development 3000 HP closed down in November of last year. Invent went dark and the programs, accounts and tools went offline. For a short while, even Klein couldn't be sure he had the bootstrap software on a server in his own lab.

HP's 2009 policies on Invent3k and Jazz content aimed to share such resources with the community. But a 40-page HP End User License Agreement (EULA) inserted restrictions, terms and fees to control where such freeware and open source software can be hosted. The vendor did not simply pass along code and utilities written by third parties. New hosting outlets must arrange their own agreements to host the independent tools, now that HP has closed up these resources.

Much of it was built on the back of Klein's work, volunteer nights and weekends for the equivalent of a year of full-time coding. The new language opened the door for the HP 3000’s interoperability. He reported today, "I may just host the GNU stuff here in my lab, and at OpenMPE." A third outlet for open source is getting ready to open, too.

Brian Edminster is polishing up his open source repository for the community, a project born of his company Applied Technologies' use of open source in consulting, 3000 migration and management assignments.

In the meantime, OpenMPE promised in September to have its invent.openmpe.org server up by now, a mirror of the software HP hosted until late last year. Meanwhile, the HP re-hosting agreements for its Jazz shareware have erected a licensing requirement around what was once a genuine shareware resource. Some of the HP-modified utilities were built upon code that carried open source GNU licenses. The new EULA through the HP Jazz agreement might run roughshod over GNU shareware terms, said Edminster.

Klein doesn't approve of the new restrictions, either. "I'm not happy about the HP licensing decison," he said. In the meantime, one well-known porting expert in the 3000 community needed the CCC tool recently. Klein sent him the code he created and holds the rights to, e-mailed direct.

For now, that's the only outlet for CCC. Speedware and Client Systems opened re-hosted Jazz content servers this year, but the independent tools like Klein's aren't a part of those servers yet. OpenMPE remains the only organization committed to bringing Invent3k back online.

Managing Applications Instead of Migrations

Commerce in the 3000 community has been dominated by migration tools and services. While many utility and some app vendors are selling support contracts, new business has been hard to acquire. It's been close to eight years since HP announced its exit from the community. And after two postponements, the closing of HP's support doors is less than 15 months away.

But that timeline hasn't dislodged applications from many 3000 customer workflows. So some of the same companies who offer migration engagements will also manage your 3000 apps. Speedware is discounting those services for customers who sign on until the end of 2009. Its marketing manager Chris Koppe said that HP's "end of life" label for 2010 doesn't match up to everything he sees.

2010 = End of Life is valid at some larger sites, but smaller ones will rely on 3000 apps for awhile. End of life "has a different meaning for different people," he said. "While the smaller shops have applications on the side, like mail servers, their core businesses are running on the HP 3000."

And so, Speedware (like a few other providers) sees 3000 app management as an important service to the customer. For a limited time it's waiving fees for "application support set-up and knowledge transfer" services to attract this homesteading business, designed to match the lifespan that a customer sees for its 3000s.

Koppe said that Speedware has started to push application support for 3000s, extra effort to win customers with a service Speedware has offered for more than a year. Customers who asked the vendor got app support up to this summer, but Speedware wants to connect with more of these sites.

He believes his company has the largest number of 3000 software programmers employed or on contract "that know 3000s inside and out and can handle any kind of environment."  Koppe mentioned MB Foster as another source; the Support Group inc specializes in ERP application support, especially MANMAN.

Koppe reasons that because his company's programmers have been busy with migration details, moving applications had made them experts in the 3000's languages. "For those customers that are not going to be migrating right away, a lot of them may need to deal with issues like lack of programming staff -- human resource backup options."

These kinds of potential customers for app support have no 3000 programmers anymore, or can't answer questions about how much 3000 code they have. "How are they maintaining this code," he wonders. "It just runs in the background." MB Foster's Birket Foster agreed about the focus on apps for the community. "It's all about the applications," he said at the recent e3000 Community Meet. Both men invoked the "what about winning the lottery" question, where a 3000 customer's only expert hits the jackpot and curtails an IT career, suddenly.

Speedware will let you pay their experts to maintain application code, batch processing, enhancements, help desk, vendor management, online processing. "It's not hardware support, and it's not operating system support," he explained. Speedware can refer this administration support for hardware and OS to another supplier, and then offer a full package for a company that wants to keep its 3000 apps without any 3000 staff.

Co-location, or offsite system hosting, gets referred by Speedware to the Support Group if a customer needs that level of support. The talent and resources are out there in the community, Koppe said. The app support offers the same benefits as you'd seek from any homestead support provider -- safeguarding IT systems and possibly reducing costs.

HMS host makes do with 3000 hosts for now

Last week we reported on a pair of 3000s running the duty free shop at two US airports. They're not alone. Brian Edminster, who manages the duty-free application and the 3000s, called to report on two more airports running the server as well as a HQ system. HMS Host, the customer, once consolidated retail services for 20 airports' duty free shops on the HQ's 3000.

HMS Host was listed as a 3000 customer on the OpenMPE online roster, compiled several years ago. The company is exiting the 3000 user community as quickly as it can, but customized applications like the duty-free app keep HMS in the fold for now, probably into 2010.

"There's still value in the business logic," said Edminster, who's studied the application with its creator since the middle '90s. He thinks the retail app is so sound that it could be used in a small chain of department stores.

Whatever the future value of the duty-free app at the HMS-run airport shops, the program is getting the job done there. HP continues to service this customer with support, but Edminster is the key link to keeping the shops online. This relationship defines one share of the 3000 community: stable apps maintained by third parties with no products or support to track for anybody who's counting the 3000 populace.

Do these stable-to-static apps, whose days are numbered, count as 3000 customers? Perhaps, if your business is selling application support for static systems. Certainly, if you're ready to provide front-line support for the OS and apps, like Edminster's Applied Technologies does. Not so much, if you want to sell a migration tool or a professional engagement.

A customer in this category -- which I would call an interim homesteader -- often has a project in play to make its exit, even if the timeline is fuzzy. At HMS the company has moved much of its operations onto SAP, Edminster reports. In-house resources do this migration work. What's more, at HMS the company has a fall-back plan if the 3000 apps cannot be folded in the massive SAP solution suite.

These four HP 3000s -- three 9x8s and one A-Class server -- could be taken offline and out of HMS if 1. The company gets out of the duty-free shop business altogether, or 2. HMS hands off its duty-free to the Portugal-based sister company that manages other duty-free with a PC-based server configuration.

Remote apps that serve US airports starts to creep into cloud computing, with a resource attached via networks and tapped by users via PCs in the shops. The sticking point is the networking into and out of major US airports, those built before the 1990s. "It's flaky at best," Edminster says of the airport network service. 

HP 3000 work still surfaces, on contract

Even in a marketplace for a computer the vendor stopped building six years ago, jobs emerge to manage HP 3000s. I put out a Google Watch on the HP 3000 (and HP3000) years ago, and the daily results have delivered some surprising gems. Today's catch includes an opening in the Orlando area for six months of administering HP 3000 systems.

Don't all of you go applying at once now. Even though we're told the pool of 3000 IT pros is shrinking, we hear of many 3000 veterans who are at liberty, too.

What's in Orlando? The job listing is pretty detailed. It reports that ARGI, a subscription management and fulfillment application/outsourced service, leads the list:

This position will administer all aspects of HP 3000 minicomputers including the hardware and operating system. Applications include: ARGI subscription fulfillment, Maestro, 3000 Security, and Omnidex. Must be experienced in COBOL programming. Additional skills in Microsoft server, IIS and PC setup / support. Duties include developing and maintaining COBOL programs, develop and maintain visual basic programs, installing software patches & upgrades, maintaining nightly backups, and supporting PCs.

That's right, you read correctly: This job includes development in COBOL on a 3000, in the year 2009.

We'll have more to share about this kind of 3000 next week, but the label for this installation is often "Longtime Success Needs New Steward." Without getting too speculative, Time-Warner once operated its subscription and premium fulfillment services for its publications in the Central Florida area. That's precisely the level of company that's got intentions to leave the platform, but cannot find a replacement solution that fits as well as its 20-year-tested business logic in COBOL.

These kinds of sites and customers represent opportunity for the marketplace in general. If you cannot find a qualified person who can take a 6-month contract to administer, you might move the app to an outsourced hosting provider. If the app looks creaky but runs fast, you could modernize without leaving MPE/iX. As we heard today from a consultant and app support expert, "there many miles to go before all these 3000s go to sleep." In the meantime, some need a watchful eye.

In Orlando they need "excellent COBOL programming skills and above average Visual Basic programming skills." If you've acquired both those skills and have a yen to live near Disney World, get in touch.

Itanium: Failing HP-UX futures, or more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3000s continue to fly free: but how many?

At last month's e3000 Community Meet, Speedware's Chris Koppe shared an estimate. The company surveyed its customer base, then called or contacted other sites from lists of known 3000 locations. At most, Koppe said, Speedware believes there are 1,000 HP 3000 customers still running systems.

The size of the known 3000 universe is as tough to track as any other kind of expanding entity. By expanding, I mean accelerating away from HP. Everyone who's remaining on the system is moving away from the vendor in relationship to their 3000 use. These customers have been in free flight, out of formation and out of contact for many years now. HP never knew for sure how many 3000s were running, by its own admission. The vendor's estimates drifter further afield with every year that it relied on resellers, then didn't close the loop on support contract renewals. About the only thing HP can report on these days is the relative silence compared to years ago.

So when we heard today from Dave Wiseman, who helped bring ScreenJet into the 3000 world late in the 1990s, about a few 3000s he encountered in-flight, we wondered: Are a pair of US airports, both using 3000 systems in duty-free shops, on anyone's radar who's tracking the size of the universe?

Wiseman, who's working these days for computer fraud prevention company iovation.com, checked in after he checked out of the duty-free shops in the airports.

I was in Minneapolis Airport on Sunday and went to the duty free. When I checked out they were using an HP 3000 green screen system! Apparently it’s still in use in Minneapolis and [Seattle's] Sea-Tac.

In this era of transition, the size of the known universe becomes important for both owners and vendors in the community. The former, they want to know how many people are left manning the oars. Too few (by whatever measure) could mean a loss of knowledge and hardware resources that could jeopardize the system's reliability.

For the vendors, the numbers are more crucial. They help determine how much resource to supply to the market. If the amount of water in the pond can't float the development and support boats, a vendor has to launch a smaller vessel, or put their 3000 business into dry dock. So people ask about this number, just as they have ever since the NewsWire first went into print 14 years ago.

The 1,000 Customers number is the lowest we've heard shared with the 3000 community, but every universe needs to have boundaries both low and high. We'd love to hear from a vendor or supplier who knew about the 3000s in those airports' Duty Free shops. The fact that these systems are tallying sales sparks two thoughts. First, how many more might be out of the main flight path? Second, we wonder who might compile a continuing list of customers -- other than ours. Let us hear from you about any free flying systems you encounter.

OpenMPE searches for source money

The OpenMPE advocacy group is looking for investors. This all-volunteer, not-for-profit organization has passed HP's examination for a source code license. Now it needs money to pay for this license, along with some administration funding to make the knowledge available to its members and its virtual lab.

Above, the group's director Matt Perdue explains the situation in a video of two minutes, recorded at last month's e3000 Community Meet. He's assisted at one point by OpenMPE chair Birket Foster (pan to the right), who explains some circumstances under which HP could terminate these licenses.

A terminated MPE/iX license hasn't ever happened to customers, because they weren't using source code. But the read-only MPE/iX source is for development of patches to the 3000. This is new territory here. No third party has ever asked a constituency in public for funding to open a lab. This is the new turf of volunteer, advocate-based development. OpenMPE at least wants to assemble an independent organization more extensive than a Web-based code forge, the vehicle most open source communities use.

But because HP's license prevents anyone from discussing the terms in public, the source license doesn't have the ironclad, tangible rules and policies you'd expect for an investment in a product.

Neither Perdue or Foster was permitted to state all the reasons that HP could terminate the source license. (It's part of the license terms that none of this gets broadcasted.) Why would a license termination matter? It appears to be part of a guarantee of future support -- something not many software companies will ever offer. The group intends to establish a development lab for patches, then support its work, for a membership fee. If HP revokes the source code license, then using that source for patch support violates the contract terms. We think. Nobody could say for sure.

HP did put an extra requirement into the OpenMPE source license, Foster said. "Certain board members are key to allowing this [licensing] to flow," he said. "They want us to do our own succession planning, so [HP] is good with whoever's there." He added that HP didn't restrict OpenMPE as a licensee in the event the group's board all retired from service. "The next group would be able to take [the license] over." We didn't hear details about HP's permissions to review OpenMPE board changes. Since the licenses are a confidential matter, there's no way to compare terms of any other licensees. So far, no one else has announced they hold an MPE/iX source license.

Perdue said that "there would have to be a specific reason for HP to change its mind" about revoking OpenMPE's license. One reason Perdue did say out loud: A departure of "key people" from the volunteer board.

There's already $1,000 in the license fund as a result of the community meeting. Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies, which is preparing an open source MPE/iX Web site, chipped in the startup money right after the Community Meet of Sept. 23. If your company (or you as an individual) want to invest in the OpenMPE license, the group offers the following deposit point to send your checks (made out to OpenMPE):

OpenMPE, Inc.
c/o Matt Perdue, Treasurer
PO Box 460091
San Antonio, TX 78246-0091

Community Meet slides go online

Speedware's Chris Koppe, president-elect of the HP Connect user group, announced this morning that the presentations from last week's e3000 Community Meet are available online.

The six sets of PowerPoint slides can be downloaded from www.hpmigrations.com/sfevent

The slide sets include Koppe's own, which detail the efforts the user group is making for the 3000 community, as well as a Speedware update on migration and homesteading issues. Speedware offers a service to manage 3000 applications for customers who are homesteading, as well as its migration tools and services.

Other slide sets online today are from Transoft, presenting migration and application upgrade information; an update from ScreenJet's Alan Yeo about its modernization tools; David Floyd of the Support Group, explaining sustainability options and services; and OpenMPE secretary Donna Hofmeister, presenting details on the group's campaign to fund an MPE/iX source license (as well as services coming online soon.)

We have video and audio from these talks we're working to edit and post here in the days to come.

Our 3000 reports move into a 15th year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Potential in the 3000 Sector

NewsWire Q&A

Craig Lalley opens up prospects for HP 3000s to do more. The founder and owner of the EchoTech consulting and IT service, Lalley is a frequent contributor to the 3000 community through helpful postings to the 3000 newsgroup. He's made a detailed study of storage expansion for the system, a specialty that serves up the last technology to enhance the 3000 into configurations, some of which were first purchased long ago.

    Lalley has been active in the HP 3000 community for over 25 years, and he's worked on every model of the HP 3000 from the Series III to the largest N-Class servers. For more than a decade he was the senior technical support manager at Stone Container in Chicago, managing 60 HP 3000s around the country. When not busy reading memory dumps, he is busy chauffeuring his five children, who are not socially-deprived homeschoolers.

    Lalley also consults on performance enhancement for business systems that go beyond 3000 installations. He's managed migrations as an outsourced resource and even maintains a replacement system for a company that hired him to help move off its HP 3000.

    In his work as a veteran who both expands and replaces 3000s, Lalley sees the full scope of the transition choices your community faces today. We asked him to talk about the technology to extend homesteading as well as the realities of moving away from the 3000. We traded email for our interview in August, just after his return from a cross-country family vacation, during the week of the Twitter and Facebook outages.

What technology offers the biggest opportunity to improve the performance and value of an HP 3000 today?

    For those considering homesteading on an HP 3000, the single best way to increase performance and reliability is to add a high-speed RAID array. The VA7410 will allow 2*2Gb per second fibre connections. The VA is rated at 45,000 IOs per second, which is well above the limits of an N-Class 750 4-way system.

    Another option, given that a discontinued HP 3000 is relatively inexpensive, is to buy a second HP 3000 for reporting reasons. A second HP 3000 would make it possible to offload the reporting aspects of the system, thus reducing the load on the primary computer. Of course, the costs of licensing the software may make this option unavailable. A second 3000 could also be used for parts.

Are the 3000s built with PCI peripheral architecture capable of using more modern disk and backup storage? How do they compare?

    Yes, the A-Class and N-Class products using the PCI bus are capable of 2Gb per second fiber connections. Compared the 2Gb/sec to the sustained throughput of 20Mb/sec on the NIO bus (9x9, 9x8 and 9x7 systems), the performance improvement is drastic.

How does the mix of 3000 and non-3000 consulting work shake out for you this year? Are there clients who engage you for both?

    Clearly the HP 3000 user base is disintegrating. At the same time, there are quite a few companies that have not even started a migration.

    I believe the main reason for the lack of those migrations is that there is no business requirement to migrate off the HP 3000. The second reason would be the economy. Most companies don't feel comfortable with the capital requirements for a migration at this time.

What is keeping the remaining companies from migrating off the system? Is it a roadblock that can be lifted with know-how?

    I think which the faith in the economy is at an all time low, the costs for a migration are quite high. The tools to migrate off the HP 3000 are quite good, and there are several options available. I believe cost is probably the deciding factor.

Do you see a useful future for the 3000s out there more than three years from now?

    I am old enough to remember the pending “Death of Mainframes.” I believe the death of the HP 3000 has been greatly exaggerated.

    The HP 3000 is a powerful machine for its time, and its maintenance cost is an order of magnitude less the other products. A well-configured Linux box could probably give the HP 3000 a good run for the money.

What's the oldest HP 3000 you know of that's still in production use? What's the risk that a customer runs by identifying themselves as users of older hardware?

    I know of a couple 918s and a 937 that are in production. I think the biggest risk is the availability of parts. FW-SCSI hard drives are going to be hard to find.

What are the top skills you've learned outside of 3000 techniques that pay off best for you? What have you added that's enhanced the value of your career investments?

    I can think of two skills that have really helped me. First, my understanding of requirements for storage, which are growing at exponential rates. My experience with HP VAs (Virtual Arrays), along with HP's XP enterprise storage solution, can be reused in all data processing shops, regardless of OS.

    I think the second skill set is to be able to communicate with the customers in their language  Most customers don't really care about memory, MHz and IO throughput. Customers care about orders processed, credit card throughput and management barometers.

Partners assemble at Community Meet

In another era we might have called them vendors, but the attendees at this month's e3000 Community Meet came together as partners. The 40 people who assembled at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt have been working together, or have that potential in the years to come when the terms users and vendors don't fit like they once did. Only three of the group could be called "users" in the old term. But those terms are "being deprecated," as old software like Java/iX has done. When HP steps out of the 3000 room in about 15 months, the phrase third-party won't even be accurate to describe the companies and experts who talked and listened all day on Sept. 23.

In a unique beginning, the master of ceremonies Alan Yeo invited everyone present at the start of the day to introduce themselves. We got almost everybody on our hand-held video camera to record the players who were taking the stage. We're introducing this video resource via a fresh 3000 NewsWire channel on YouTube, the world's steaming pile of entertainment, advertising, comedy, and frothing dissent. Of those four, only good humor was on tap in the e3000 meeting room. (There was dissent, but of the kind that doesn't end discussions or ruin chances to partner.)

Brian Duncombe started off the introductions, traveling out of his retirement to attend after he created performance and clustering software in the 1980s and '90s. Consultant Bruce Hobbs in his trademark beard was also on the front row, along with consultant Jim Snider. Then we caught up again with Michael Watson's introduction. Watson reported he's still developing in COBOL, as were several others on that front row.

HP was present in the back of the room, as support engineer Cathlene McRae attests at the end of the intros. After lunch, HP's Alvina Nishimoto sat in the back and offered some insights during a roundtable session of more than an hour. James Hofmeister, working in support of Linux customers for HP, was also on hand.

Some people in the community hope this Meet might gather as many users than vendors. At this stage of the 3000's legend, those are the same attendees. Putting people together in a room all day sparks plans and renews trust. As the evening winked out, a sketch was emerging for 2010 Meet that focuses on training.

Social nets can narrow-cast to wide group

A healthy slug of video, audio and photos rode back in my laptop from this week's e3000 Community Meet. I also took away the warmth of connecting with friends I had not seen in years, people who made important contributions to the life and growth of the 3000. But one part of that rich day, unrecorded, was my own attempt at humor and inspiration, urging everyone to connect through social networks.

This talk began its life as writing on a screen, however, something you'd expect from a fellow who writes his way through life. I share it here and hope that it makes you smile and consider staying in touch until the next Meet via a social net of your choice. We track many major nets here at the NewsWire, using tools like the free TweetDeck console shown above. I hope to hear from you on the nets, or up here in our blog's comments.

Social Network Harm and Help: Advice & Wisecracks

Do you tweet? (All feathered creatures need not try to answer in English). Or share your life on Facebook? Or Digg your Web discoveries, or pile them up in a Delicious box? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

If not, you're in a big group. Maybe not the 70 million people rumored to be using one of these social networks. There's so many more, like the unique one that user group Connect operates, or the public Linked In site. Or Plaxo. Or something new, Cummerbund. (Sorry, just making that last one up.)

That fact about Cummerbund shows a little of the harm in this powerful new tool. You can make something up, and if it's not easily checked in a Google probe, it can get traction. The shorter the report, the easier it becomes to disguise or mistake. Take this tweet from Twitter, posted by @AngelaAtHP:

I witnessed a woman squeal and clap when she test-drove this new HP web-enabled printer at D23

This “tweet” on Twitter then included a link to a Web site. If you noticed Angela's Twitter name, you wouldn't be surprised where her link took you:

So Angela got eyeballs for her message that led to the HP printer Web page. Nearly 2,000 people follow her tweets, and so many of us tweet to others about her stuff. Warning: If follow her, she averages 5-10 tweets a day. Connect has a good tweeter who re-tweets, and so the HP user group helps spread the message of marketing from Angela LoSasso, employed by HP's printer marketing team to spread the marketing gospel about great printer solutions.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they said on Seinfeld. But when a message that short gets re-tweeted, it's lost all of its context unless you dig for it. You gotta admit, a woman squealing over a computer is pretty compelling. You either want to know something more about the computer product, or about the woman. Angela would rather you poke into what's cool about that Web-enabled printer.

Get used to it: There are many people in the generation behind us in this room who are paid to spread this stuff. You might even enjoy it, so long as there's nothing at stake. Information seems to have less and less at stake as we hurtle out of the Ought years and into the next decade.

Angela -- I know I'm picking on her, but all in sport, I love tweeters -- tells us “I'm in the storytelling business. How can I help you tell yours?” I felt so with-it when I heard this. (Does anybody even say "with it" anymore?) I've been in the storytelling business for a few years myself. But longevity doesn't matter so much in storytelling, not even in journalism. Nobody cared much that I was 27 when I edited my first HP newspaper. (Good thing, considering how little I knew.)

And we didn't have social networking to check up on the likes of me, thank goodness. Just like they used to say, “On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog,” I could say back in 1984, “On the telephone, I hoped nobody knew I was a callow “yut,” as those fellas called themselves in the film My Cousin Vinnie.

So I learned enough about the 3000 to stop being called an imbecile, “and no one was the wiser,” I thought. That wouldn't happen today, because we have social networking to check up on each other. And even though I started HP reporting in 1984, that Big Brother-esque checking up is a Good Thing. If you know how to use it to filter and add context.

Information is all about sources, to begin with. “Consider the source,” your mom might have told you when you said something about wearing this, or jumping off that. There's no better time than now to consider your source. The Internet disguised all the dogs. Social networks go further. They've hidden the sources behind personality. "How could that be a dog? He has such a rich baritone on the phone, and funny wisecracks." (Here I'm hoping that's what people said about me.) I fetch on command, though. I even point.

Back to the point. Social networks can help you fetch lots of information you didn't know you needed. Or even understand. They broaden your world. Just like a bigger map of where you need to go. But big maps, with lots of detail, need lots more charting skills.

You can do this. You crawled through the muck of ENQ/ACK sequences and pin-connection maps and even what the heck were the differences between Q-MIT and T-MIT. (Here's a hint; only one of them was a MPE release tape that an HP manager offered to eat.)

Detail is you, or we wouldn't have a world of computers tight and high flying enough to spread stories of women squealing at Web printers. (I know, you might be thinking, “and we really need this?”) You can do the detail of social networking, so long as you don't let it suck up all your real life.

There's the sin of over-sharing to avoid if you start to post to the social networks, too. People will tell you their lunch was a double swirl cone. (She didn't say where she got hers, dangit!) They will also report on more weighty topics. What you're looking for is facts, supported by real experience. It's not just enough to hear somebody say, “We gotta have this kind of health care or that.” Better to hear, “My mom is in the hospital and she can't get released soon enough, because her health plan doesn't pay for enough physical therapy.” You can say all that in less than 140 characters, so you could tweet it. I might ask, “What plan is that?” Or even offer some facts to help.

I bring up all of this nonsense because you are a group of IT pros who are renowned for community. A social network is a glue to keep you informed. I wish we'd all get a Twitter account and start following each other. Hey, you don't even have to tweet. Just being in the forest to hear the bird calls can help.

But only if you look for context, like who's sharing in the society. What their mission is in real life. (Google helps a lot in this kind of spelunking, but it's even better to ask around. Web pages can deceive. Remember those disguised dogs, now.)

I have become a real hound about social networks over the past year or so. I have accounts on all of these playgrounds. Some are more useful than others. You can look up my Delicious page of bookmarks, tweet or follow me personally or at 3000newswire, Friend me on Facebook, look me up on the new Connect myCommunity network for e3000 users. I started a Linked In group for the HP 3000 Community. There are also groups up there for the HP Way, 3000 Appreciation Society. I love it all. I find Twitter to be the biggest and woolliest universe, with Facebook a close second but richer in content. The more hurdles you need to clear to get into one of these, the better the caliber of the source.

Information is my job, though. I can float and find it rewarding to soar. If you find yourself flying too high to the sun, oh Icarus, and you feel your wings melting off your wax -- or maybe like Luke Skywalker, diving his X-Wing fighter too close to the Death Star -- pulla away, pull up, take back your time. Some say limit your social networking time, like you'd cut back on Splenda or See's Chocolates. Enjoy it, but make sure you have enough real life to share something new with the network. Contribute real content. Content will help you be heard, and that leads to giving you good stuff to listen to. The only way we learn anything is when we're listening

So the next time you hear the sound of squealing in a computer room, you'll know to look up from that browser, and listen for that drive in that RAID array going out. And ensure the storage device gets excluded and swapped automatically. And when the magic subsides, you can share a tweet if it all worked, or if not-so-much, then get some help. Because society is supposed to grow to help more of us, even though in each message we say less. Thanks for letting me say so much. In Twitter messages, this would have taken me more than 150 postings. And you still wouldn't have gotten in your message. I hope to hear from you out there soon, and often.

Making Jazz a Third-Party Presentation

OpenMPE is working to put its own brand on the 3000 freeware and whitepapers once hosted by HP -- as well as the Invent3k server for public development access. Client Systems has donated a server to give OpenMPE the hardware to complete in its efforts on Invent3k. OpenMPE director Donna Hofmeister believes this donated Client Server system is the same one HP used when Hewlett-Packard hosted Invent3k.

Meanwhile, an N-Class server donated by Matt Perdue will host the Jazz contents from OpenMPE. Hofmeister outlined the work still to be completed.

"Just like Speedware did, we have to de-HP-ize all the HTML pages," she said. Webmaster Paul Raulerson is currently working on that.  So that's why it will take a bit longer before OpenMPE's Jazz is available." Client Systems brought out its version of Jazz this spring, while Speedware's made its debut this month.

 

HP shifts location of manuals

HP support engineer Cathlene McRae, who attended this week's e3000 Community Meet, reports that the HP 3000 and MPE/iX manuals have moved from the docs.hp.com location on HP's Web site. She said the new link is www.hp.com/bizsupport, a new HP Business Support Center Web site.

The HP 3000 manuals are among the first wave of documents to move off the old Web address, according to an HP notice.

The migration is being conducted in stages over the next year and the MPE/iX content has been migrated as part of the first phase. You will see a  redirection link under the MPE/iX section of the docs.hp.com homepage. It will take you to the landing page for the MPE/iX docs on the Business Support Center.

If you're plugging in a revised Web address for docs.hp.com for the 3000, it's www.hp.com/go/e3000-docs

HP has reorganized and standardized the presentation of the manuals for the 6.x and 7.x versions of the 3000's software and subsystems. The documentation is now available only in PDF documents; HTML versions existed on the HP site in the past.

McRae pointed to an HP document that explains, "To achieve a look and feel similar to docs.hp.com, all the manuals will be organized by categories within each group and in alphabetical order." Documentation for HP Linux systems, OpenVMS, and Tru64 Unix has also been moved in the first phase.

The 3000's documentation has been licensed to Client Systems and Speedware for re-hosting, but Speedware's Chris Koppe said during the Community Meet that HP won't permit these partners to host the manuals until HP clears the material from embargo. HP confirmed at the meeting that it will host the documentation through 2015. HP recommends that customers download patches and documents from the HP site for themselves before Dec. 31 of that year.

McRae also posted links to other HP documents which answer some questions posed during the Community Meet:

• An October 2008 communique on post 2010 beta test patch and manual availability, Invent3k plans and Right to Use license policies.
• The final January 2009 communique covering source code license initiatives, emulator availability and guidelines on receiving MPE/iX and subsystem media.
• The one-page FAQ from January 2009 about HP's 3000 "platform emulator" licensing policies.

OpenMPE announces Jazz, Invent3k portals

The OpenMPE user advocacy group yesterday announced the availability of its hosts for documents and programs licensed from the HP Jazz Web server. The Invent3k free public development 3000, closed down by HP last November, is now also available according to OpenMPE, with both Jazz and Invent3k hosted on 3000s operated by board member Matt Perdue.

Perdue said at yesterday's e3000 Community Meet that the two services are available with a free account and now reside behind a firewall. OpenMPE will be the first organization to host the public access development services of Invent3k, a 3000 HP once operated for developers to test and create MPE/iX software. OpenMPE director Donna Hofmeister said that invent3k.openmpe.org will include the GNU development environment used to port open source software to MPE/iX.

Developers can request their free log-on account for Invent3k by e-mailing Hofmeister at donna@allegro.com

The resources the community is migrating from HP's Jazz Web server are still in a growth mode, Hofmeister added, just like those already online at Speedware. HP's licensing agreement restricted its software exchange to only the HP-created freeware off of Jazz, so freeware from third parties is being pursued for inclusion at the Jazz rehosting sites.

The relicensing partners such as Speedware and OpenMPE have made the third party programs available through links to authors' sites such as the one Lars Appel maintains for Samba. Other third party freeware still coming online include ports from Mark Bixby, the C++ tools ported by Mark Klein and other contributions. "We're in the process of getting permission from these people to put their software on the OpenMPE site," Hofmeister said during an update at the meeting.

OpenMPE also made an opening bid for a role as repository for the MPE/iX read-only source code which HP has been licensing this year. The vendor announced a license program for the 3000's source in February, but little else can be discussed by organizations and companies applying for or receiving a license. HP will not announce who the license holders are, but said this spring that it would consider ways that licensees can inform customers about receiving a source code license.

OpenMPE wants to act as a repository for the code, although other companies have also applied for licenses. The source licensing process is a black box, with all terms, lists of applicants and status of applications shielded under HP's Confidential Disclosure Agreement.

According to HP's CDA, OpenMPE can't even reveal the cost of the source code license. Perdue said at the meeting that purchasing the MPE license, "plus some start up cash to manage it" will require $25,000. The group has its license application ready to file for the source, but it needs a check for HP, and so kicked off a fundraising effort. One attendee, Applied Technologies' Brian Edminster, was ready to write a $1,000 check to spark the drive for the OpenMPE license.

Get connected today for Community Meet

In about six hours, at 10 AM PDT, close to three dozen veterans, experts and members of the 3000 community meet in San Francisco. The event has gathered momentum over a very brief three weeks, and the turnout will rival any head count in any HP 3000 conference meeting room over the past four years.

Some community members who can't be in the room at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt wish for a live streaming feed, or some kind of a Webcast hookup. That's not going to happen today, but there's hope for future meetings. For today, Twitter might provide the best real-time blurbs. You can follow what's happening through the NewsWire's Twitter feed. Go to twitter.com, and just "follow" our account, 3000newswire.

Those tweets, as the Twitter messages are known, will be brief. (Despite what my writing might suggest, I know brief, since tweeting requires the same kind of skill I've employed in writing headlines for the last 30 years.) I enjoy the challenge of saying something meaningful in 140 characters or less per Twitter message. For a community that knows how to stay within the bounds of 132-column screens, Twitter will have a familiar feel. You can tweet back, too. If you're versed in Twitter's "hashtags" (think of them as database keys), I'll be using #3kmeet for today.

There will be more, as battery life, memory cards and concentration provide. We'll have recordings (podcasts on this site), video (on YouTube) and photos to share, some more real-time than others. If you don't Twitter, consider signing on today (it's free) and following the feed. It takes an real-life event to spark a stream of tweets. We're glad to have an audience.

There's also time to participate if you're within a short drive of the hotel in Burlingame. In person, as we all know, is the richest experience.

You can register online (with details at the link), or just show up for the dinner in the evening at the hotel. I hope to see you there, snap your picture, and share an update or a story. Stay tuned, as we TV-era folks used to hear.

Speedware opens doors to Jazz rehosting

Speedware has announced the latest phase of its rollout of re-hosted programs from the HP Jazz site, a software resource that HP relicensed to two vendors this spring. Client Systems made the first effort at supplying a Jazz site earlier this year, followed by a set of migration training modules that Speedware put online. Now Speedware has extended its 3000 training resources to include freeware created by HP for the 3000 -- plus access to programs supplied by the community.

One notable addition to the 3000 Web resource family is this Third Party Utilities section at the Speedware site. Speedware's Nicolas Fortin explained these are links or files that were once located on HP's Jazz site but not provided to licensees by HP. This software includes shareware files created by Mark Bixby and Lars Appel, the two most prolific authors of open source, shareware utilities for the 3000. Speedware pursued the programs from these developers, linking to Appel's software and hosting the Bixby programs.

Fortin said that hosting these programs, along with what he calls the largest set of white papers for 3000s, requires more than hosting and creating links. There's an ongoing stewardship required to re-host the resource which HP once maintained as Jazz.

"Sometime in the near future, we’ll add a few more files to the Third Party Utilities section from Mark Bixby," he said. "Although the Jazz content is mostly static, in reality from time to time we might find ourselves improving it based on specific user requests, if it can help the community. For example, already a user e-mailed us to report that one of the tar files in the HP Software section was corrupted (the file was given to us that way). We managed to re-create that tar file by finding the content and re-packaging it, so now it’s available."

Fortin said that both Appel and Bixby "say they were happy to see the site go live." It's important to keep the work of these two engineers in the orbit of Planet 3000, since their contributions linked the platform with modern networking and Internet services. Bixby's Apache port and Appel's Samba port probably qualify among the more important software releases for the 3000 during the late '90s.

The launch that went live last Friday is the second phase of Speedware's HP site material relocation. HP Transition courses went online at Speedware this spring, and the MPE-to-HP-UX cross-reference tools will appear next. "It took more time than we expected," Fortin said, "but we decided to spend some additional effort to provide the community with some extra value-add, in addition to the content provided to us by HP."

'84 computing recalls conventions of 3000s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3000s can track time, even update with Unix

Even while network testing 3000s in HP's Cupertino lab were being powered down last month, customers are working to employ network services on their own servers. NTP, the network time protocol, was ported and patched for MPE/iX years ago. A developer wanted the latest patched NTP version recently, software that consultant Craig Lalley sent him across the net in a 4 MB attachment.

Tony Summers of Smith Williamson, which migrated last year, said implementing NTP on the company's 3000 was disappointing, but suspected the install wasn't done properly. NTP itself is popular among all environment managers. "Our systems team are wanting to implement NTP on our Unix systems," he reported, "but I’m asking them (for technical reasons related to our own internal applications) that they only invoke NTP synchronization on a system reboot, rather than having it run constantly."

There are some reports that NTP can help manage 3000 operations, but not hosted on a 3000. Mark Ranft of Pro 3K says a corporate NTP server is assisting HP 3000s he manages, triggering an MPE/iX client.

"The NTP client executable that I have is called NTPDATE," he said. "I use it in a command file to compare the system date and time to the server. If it is more than 30 seconds off, I automatically use the same program with a different parameter to adjust the time. If it is more than 45 seconds off, I send a message/page, as something is up (like a time test or a reboot and someone forgot to set the hardware clock.) I have my proactive HP 3000 monitor doing this on all my systems every 10-20 minutes.

"Before a patch," he added, "I had seen heavily loaded systems experience time drift. This routine was a life-saver."

These NTP executables are scheduled to be part of HP shareware offerings on the Speedware Web site, as well as on the OpenMPE server. There's also a way to synchonize a 3000's clock with routines written into MPE/iX, as opposed to the open source add-on of NTP. Jeff Kell, whose expertise in networking included a stint as a Networks Special Interest Group chairman, offered this advice:

NTP may have issues as a server/daemon. If you just want to keep your 3000's clock periodically synchronized, try something like this:

> !job timesync,mgr.xntp;pri=cs
> !ntpdate "a.b.c.d w.x.y.z"
> !stream timesync.pub.xntp;in=0,12,0

Substitute your favorite time servers addresses for a.b.c.d and w.x.y.z. This is an "on-demand" synchronization every 12 hours (adjust to taste).

Will we see you one week from today?

The plans and processes are in place for a lively HP e3000 Community Meet one week from today. I hope to talk with many of you at the one-day event being held at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt Hotel Sept. 23. There's still room in the room, including a lunch and networking, as well as updates and a dinner afterward. You can register online.

The program has been firmed up with updates from Transoft and OpenMPE. But aside from these presentations, there's a value in the $30 that 30-50 attendees are paying for a day with breakfast and lunch provided. If you're at the Meet, business and engagements can get green-lit.

"I just made time and registered for the HP e3000 Community Meeting," reported Ralph Berkebile of Data Management Associates today. "I look forward to the research discussions, briefings and socializing with the associates remaining in the HPe3000 community!"

Other 3000 professionals will be on hand to explore ways to work together, either offering their services or talking of engagements where they'll need help.

Long-time 3000 pro Bruce Hobbs is justifying a trip up from the LA area to do "mainly networking. I may take a run at [promoting] my interest in Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, and see if anyone needs any COBOL folks." There's a mix of classic skills and new technologies that's a good blueprint for a valuable future.

Hobbs said that he's learned personal links earn nearly all new jobs. "I came across something recently reporting that only one out of nine positions is obtained through any of the job search Web sites," he said. "Seems like the overwhelming majority of successes occur through personal contacts."

The meeting is also going to include some discussion, at the end of the day, about organizing a "Bang and Not a Whimper" event for next year when HP closes up the remains of its 3000 business. The complete schedule as of this week:

9.30    Registration     (Breakfast provided)
10.30    Welcome        (Alan Yeo)
10.40    Chris Koppe        (Speedware)
11.00    Michael Marxmeier    (Eloquence)
11.15    Donna Hofmeister    (OpenMPE)
11.30    Networking Break
12.15    Birket Foster        (MBFoster)
12.30    Alan Yeo        (ScreenJet)
12.45    Lunch
01.45    Rene Nunnington    (Transoft)
02.00    David Floyd        (The Support Group)
02.15    Ron Seybold        (3000 Newswire)
02.30    Homesteading Roundtable
03.00    Networking Break
03.45    Migration Roundtable
04.15    HP User Group    (Chris Koppe)
04.25    Closing

Even though networking is scheduled, attendees will step out of the room to connect even while presentations are on offer. Starting at 6 PM, says organizer Alan Yeo, is an "Open Invitation HP3000 Social Gathering in the bar at the Hyatt. All are welcome, and we understand that the bar does a reasonable selection of food." Some of the community is likely to show up only for the networking and gathering in the evening.

With every passing year the virtual networking tools improve. But no Twitter feed, live streaming of a panel discussion or Webcast can offer all the depth of an in-person talk with a colleague, partner or supplier. I'll have my own 15 minutes to share more about the online community offerings and how to use them more skillfully. I hope to see you in person at the year's largest 3000 event.

Counting on clouds to save green?

You have to go back to the veterans of timesharing with 3000s to find reality about cloud computing potential. Hewlett-Packard is pitching this concept -- sometimes called Software as a Service (SaaS). But companies of an average size may not see much savings, according to the Support Group inc's Sue Kiesel.

We talked with tSGi after we asked 3000 partners how much cloud they expected to cover the community with in the year to come. A few companies reported they'd spread a few clouds, tSGi among them. You'll want to have an extensive IT operation to count on the bottom-line greenback savings. And if you're not a Fortune 1000 company? The services will get updated on the big boys' schedule.

"They roll out the upgrades and inform you that you will be going to the new release," Kiesel said. "They'll probably schedule the upgrade based on what a customer the size of GE wants." You may be able to push back if you're of a certain size, but that size is big.

Not upgrading is a common choice, especially for the ERP customer like the ones that tSGi serves. Too much customization of an app makes a careful IT manager look hard at the work it will take to catch up to an upgraded version.

This disconnect between traditional app management and the easy promises of the cloud will keep skies pretty clear for HP 3000 sites -- even those that are migrating and can get a better match between their local hosts and the ones up in the cloud. ERP has been more fraught with customization than most other business segments.

The flip side of the cloud question is how much those SaaS clouds will save the big customers that are running the release schedule. "You won't get the cost savings at that level if you're the size of a GE," Kiesel said. "If you go into the cloud what you're usually saving are capital expenditures, which are very small."

HP counts some pretty large wins in cloud computing, organizations like the US Department of Defense. The adopters are few in number at this point. Clouds operate under subscription-based payments, and "the subscription fees are going to be way up there for a General Electric," Kiesel said. That outlay might even offset the savings of reducing local headcount in IT, which is another cloud promise.

tSGi operates another aspect of a cloud offering, managing HP 3000s installed at the firm's datacenter and operated on behalf of remote clients who connect over networks. This removes the 3000 from daily maintenance, and in the case of tSGi even gives the customer extra support for the ERP applications on the hosted systems. It can even give a company more time to complete a migration. That's important for some, now that HP's 2010 support deadline is only about 15 months away.

In a relocation of host model, a customer can benefit from access to the IT talent they can't afford to get, Kiesel said. "I can afford it as a provider because I have 100 customers," she explained. "My little 10-seat customer can't afford that talent because he's a small business."

Consolidating many small IT operations through a cloud-like service gives the planet a boost, to be sure. A massive footprint of a large IT shop is easy to target. But the combined carbon footprints of computer rooms dwarf the footprints of autos, Kiesel said.

"You might say that you have a small footprint, and what can you really save. But if you put 100 companies together, and you have a bottom line that depends on how efficient you can run your [cloud] services for them, you have a chance of minimizing the footprint for a lot of people. That's computing green."

Industry veterans mark 1984 milestones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP retires docs link while experts retire

A computer system like the HP 3000 has been changing for the past eight years, even though the vendor is tugging at its plug through this decade. HP resources are edging out of the community's picture, even while the experts running systems in companies are retiring themselves.

One link customers will need is a Web connection to HP's 3000 documentation. Once printed in countless reams of bound paper, the knowledge is stored online. The location of the links has gotten more elusive. The most comprehensive start point recently edged off the docs.hp.com main page. This connection to HP manuals for supported products and HP engineer white papers is now at docs.hp.com/en/mpeixall.html

One example of the latter retirement is Greg Bell, a developer/analyst who's leaving a 37-year IT career this month at International Paper. Bell works at the Savannah, Ga. plant, where 3000s have been working since the Series III systems of the 1970s. Even as he exits this month, a pair of 3000s continue to work for this major corporation. There's no migration plan for two key applications there; new apps will move in, or the old ones will be mothballed.

Currently we have one Series 957 in Savannah running our last legacy applications, and one at our Prattville, Alabama mill doing the same. No migration to any other platform is planned -- the applications will be retired or replaced. I and another IT person here in Savannah provide support for the one system here and assist with the system in Prattville.

Bell says the 3000s have been static at International Paper over those past eight years, and that one at Savannah needs little more than a shutdown and reboot once in awhile. HP's exits from development and support have represented changes to the community, but not at this company.

With the exception of having to replace various parts -- which we do ourselves with third-party vendors providing those we’ve run out of from scavenging pieces from the other HP 3000s -- and the standard user setups/deletes, we have not done anything as far as the OS is concerned. We shut it down and reboot it every now and then to clean it up, but otherwise it just sits there and does its thing.

Bell has been at International Paper since the year the 3000 was first introduced. In 1972 the company was an IBM shop, but the 3000 made its footprints in the 80s and 90s running International Paper's financials. "We worked our way up from the Series IIIs to the 957/987 models. At our high point we had seven HP 3000s running all of our financial applications, and DEC servers running the production applications."

Working in IT long enough to call Digital "DEC" gives a hint at the scope of Bell's career. He's moving away to more personal projects after more than three decades that included midnight-oil challenges he met on the 3000s. "I wish I could say I will miss those 8-12 hour system upgrades in the middle of the night, but I think I can "migrate" to something more challenging, like my ever-expanding honey-do list."

The departure of experts like Bell opens opportunity for third parties to serve homesteaders. But knowledge drain has been on the community's list of issues for more than six years. That HP documents link includes a white paper from Mark Bixby, a former 3000 engineer who's now part of the development team at K-12 app company QSS. Bixby's April, 2003 paper, Is Your e3000 Environment Secure? still brims with valuable expertise. Even though the homesteading advice was written before HP stopped selling 3000s, the deck of more than 100 PowerPoint slides is full of good practices. Near the end, Bixby said that retiring expertise could pose security questions.

"Employees with MPE OS and local application skills may leave to seek a different career path," he wrote. "Will the employees who are left have sufficient skills to ensure good MPE and application security? Make sure critical knowledge is written down somewhere."

HP is still hosting the MPE knowledge on its servers, and the vendor is licensing the content to third parties. Unless a retirement path like the one Bell describes is the plan for apps at homesteading sites, you should marshal the critical, tribal knowledge of your apps as part of a sustainability practice.

Community Meet assembles members, polls

The HP 3000 Community Meet is now less than two weeks away, but the Sept. 23 event is gathering its content and taking $30 registrations for the free lunch -- along with what's becoming a full day of talks and networking.

Organizer Alan Yeo reports that the code to snag a discounted room at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt is "HP3000 Meeting", which he says will be activated at the registration desk no later than Friday morning. Call hotel reservations direct at 650-347-1234 and mention the code to get your rate. (After 25 years of travel, booking through the hotel is a habit I practice to assure the very best stay.) You can also register online at the Hyatt's site and use code G-SCRJ to get the $109 rate.

A 6:30 dinner will follow a day that looks to be starting before 10 AM and wrapping up late in the afternoon. Speakers now include the Support Group inc, which is assembling cloud computing services for the 3000 community, both homesteading and migrating sites. Connectivity software supplier Minisoft reports that it's sending its chief developer for middleware products to the Meet.

There's also a way to participate in having your voice heard. An online survey, prepared by MB Foster's Birket Foster, asks eight simple yes-no questions. But you can also add your comments along with a quick response, if you're interested. I hope you'll speak up at the Meet's survey page soon.

The Connect HP user group is accepting credit cards to operate the registration process, support from an organization that will be helmed by Speedware's Chris Koppe starting next year. Speedware's got updates to share at the meeting, as does MB Foster and Mike Marxmeier of Marxmeier Software (creators of the Eloquence database and co-hosts). Migration supplier Transoft is also on board as a sponsor and presenter.

These updates will be brief -- 15 minutes or so -- to keep the day open for informal networking, reports Yeo. The organizers were also working to arrange brief talks from Allegro Consultants, providers of support for homesteading 3000 sites as well as HP-UX users.

Roundtable discussions are set for the afternoon to cover both homesteading plans and migration issues. And by request, I'll be making a short update on community trends in the afternoon, too. I'm taking the bullet of talking just after that lunch, so I'm practicing my showmanship by calling on long-ago theatrical moxie. (That all means I'm trying to keep things lively enough to ward off naps in the audience.)

Viewing the IMAGE of Community's Labors

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

By Charles Finley

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

Quarter-century on, 3000 gurus recall

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

User groups plus the press lifted the 3000

By Steve Cooper
Allegro Consultants

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

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

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

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

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

SFO Community Meet firms up its program, sparks new Transition survey

The HP 3000 Community Meet on Sept. 23 is shaping up quickly, considering the event was only a gleam in the eye of organizer Alan Yeo in mid-August. The one-day event at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt is gathering steam because an independent management pace speeds its growth. A larger organization might take months to assemble such an event.

There's less than a month left before the 10AM start. But sponsors and supporters are pitching in. Speedware's Chris Koppe has engaged the Connect HP user group's Web services to register attendees. (Koppe is the president-elect of Connect). By this afternoon, a visit to the Web address from the '07 Meet, hpmigrations.com/sfevent, should include a link to a registration page at the Connect servers. Credit cards are accepted for the nominal $30 fee.

There's also online polling in place today in support of the event. Birket Foster of MB Foster has set up a survey that anyone in the community can take -- reporting on whether they can attend, plus taking answers to fun questions like "Have you been able to establish a sustainable homesteading plan?" The e-mail and communications outsourcer Constant Contact has a method to keep the polls from being gamed, even while the answers and comments can be anonymous.

It all seems in the spirit of good cheer and dedication to realistic Transition that will propel the Meet. Oh, and there's a sports bar/restaurant at the Hyatt for an after-Meet dinner to help raise cheers, too.

A $30 sign-up fee is in keeping with the 2007 meet, just a nominal charge to get a little skin in the game for the event to lock in attendance. The free lunch is hosted by Alan Yeo of ScreenJet and Michael Marxmeier of Marxmeier Software. In addition to Speedware and MB Foster, K-12 app vendor QSS's founder Duane Percox is among the event's supporters. The one-day affair will have brief (10-15 minute) update talks from leading 3000 community resources such as Allegro Consultants and the Support Group, inc. These are resources who are assisting both migration and homesteading customers.

The meeting will give 3000 users a place to network and catch up on the latest details and stories of Transition. There will be that talk about sustaining homestead plans, too.

You can get on board by making your hotel reservations at the Hyatt for a $109 room rate for the meeting, if you need to stay overnight. Call hotel reservations direct at 650-347-1234 and mention the 3000 Meet to get your rate.

We'll have more details on the day's program, but a major attraction is meeting to network with 3000 resources face to face, be they customers or consultants or suppliers.

Emulators will arrive too late for some

Even as several vendors move into testing for an HP 3000 hardware emulator, the product will arrive long after it could have helped some sites. Edward Berner of Yosemite Community College couldn't hold out, even though he said as far back as 2006 he could use such a product.

Fortunately (for the college, but unfortunately for the emulator companies) we've finally managed to retire our HP 3000. It's been powered off for about eight months now (and was inactive for a while before that).  Once it's been off for a full year, I'll start advocating that we sell the hardware to a vendor or something.  After that we can rent a system, or use a service if we need to refer to something from our backup tapes.

The delays in emulation made up the dread that 3000 advocates and advisors felt about the solution. HP had a change of heart, according to one emulator supplier, about creating a license mechanism for emulation. After awhile Hewlett-Packard began to see a large share of the migrating 3000 sites were choosing a replacement system without an HP badge. That's what happened at Yosemite, where the Sun rose out in the west.

Berner said the college made a transition to Sun Microsystems servers from the 3000. (We know, there's a bit of another migration issue in that environment as well -- depending on what Oracle decides to do about the Sun server business it will acquire along with Sun's software.)

Berner said HP's exit announcement in '01 didn't spark the rise of Sun at the college. "Our decision to migrate was pretty much independent of HP's announcement," he said, "though I guess the announcement probably did provide additional support for the decision." A Series 979, running one CPU and two in-house apps, was powered off at the start of 2009.

Our main application, DSK, was a vendor product, but they went out of business in the mid 90's and we maintained it in-house since. Our payroll application was separate and also in-house, being based on a system we got from another institution in ancient times. We migrated to Datatel and Oracle running on Sun hardware.  The selection of Datatel software was the result of a large RFP process. The selection of Sun hardware was the result of a bidding process.

I probably shouldn't get into comparing the different applications.

The migration was largely done in-house, Berner added, and retraining was necessary.

An emulator wouldn't have kept MPE/iX and those applications in production use at Yosemite. "Our main use for an emulator would have been for running the HP 3000 software for a couple years after the migration was mostly done, for historical data and while the last few stray things were migrated," Berner said. "The attraction being that a 1- or 2-processor Intel system is a lot smaller than a 979 -- and the HP 3000 A Series always seemed too expensive to me."

A price point for emulators will be difficult to set at first. Some companies homesteading on the 3000 report they don't migrate for budgetary reasons. Berner said a price point of "less than the 3000 hardware support contract" fee would have worked for him. That might be a lean business incentive to launch emulator products.

Even while a couple of companies have pledged upwards of a $1 million to invest in an emulator for their 3000 operations, the IT managers who understand the value of emulation are sometimes moving on before their 3000s migrate. Paula Brinson, the datacenter operations manager who we quoted in our Monday story as saying "sorrowfully, I might have to use an emulator," won't have to oversee such a step. She's now retired from the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia after 30 years of IT service. As of this spring, a 3000 application very popular with the users remained online at HRSD.

Generating your Legacy to Improve

NewsWire Editorial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emulator history assists in HP licensing

Members of the HP 3000 community have doubted any hardware emulator would ever surface, often pointing to HP's reluctance to make a license possible. More than five years elapsed between HP's initial promise of a virtual MPE/iX license for PC-based servers and the mechanism of right-to-use licensing. Even when HP issued an FAQ on the emulator, users didn't believe the concept could pass HP's legal muster.

"HP has demonstrated an intractable institutional resistance to admitting that the HP 3000 was a viable platform," said James Byrne, IT manager at 3000 shop Harte-Lyne. "This cannot but continue to have a baleful influence on efforts at cooperation with HP by those producing and intending to use said (non-extant) emulators."

Harte-Lyne was using a pair of Series 918 3000s when Byrne cast doubt on an emulator's future. Other long-time advocates of the 3000 described the concept as "an emulator that will never happen," according to Joe Dolliver, owner of consultancy e3k Solutions.

But early this year Dolliver also said he had "two part-time 3000 clients that have no Plan B, and I will be supporting them for several years to come." lf licensing can be arranged to allow third-party tools to run in emulation, such clients could find a Plan B in an emulator.

"If an emulator existed and cost less than the hardware support contract for our 3000," said Edward Berner of Yosemite Community College, "then I could save money and reclaim some floor space at the same time."

What's been key to keeping the dream alive is vendors' history with HP working on emulation. In addition to the HP 1000 experience from Strobe Data's emulator product, there's been others. Robert Boers, the CEO of Stromasys who recently said the company has worked out its licensing plans regarding MPE/iX, reports that doubt and skepticism have followed emulator sales ever since his firm started selling them for the Digital VMS market.

"That's one of the problems that we have struggled with for years," Boers said. "When you talk to people they say, 'It can't be done. It's too good to be true.' We've had to pull out our Intel laptop and show them that VMS is running on it."

Technical hurdles are a serious consideration, but few in the 3000 community doubted that an emulator was an engineering impossibility. "It's basically a mathematical model of the hardware," Boers said of his product. "The Gartner Group now has a name for it, cross-platform virtualization." His company has made its bones with a VAX-Alpha emulator that he says is so accurate "you can run [VAX] hardware diagnostics on it."

That kind of technical exactitude will be needed to ensure elements such as TurboIMAGE continue to operate as applications expect. Boers said of his product, "Since we re-create an abstraction layer of the hardware, I wouldn't expect anything not to run. There is no fundamental difference except that some of the components -- normally the IO -- will run a lot faster."

The performance of the emulator will be determined by the host hardware, which Boers says is typically driven by Intel or AMD 64-bit processors. HP has not mandated that the hosting hardware carry an HP label to be eligible for a license. Several technical experts in the community say there's no way to test for the presence of an HP PC on startup. That kind of test took place in 3000 hardware to ensure MPE/iX wouldn't boot on another HP PA-RISC server.

There's many a potential slip between lip and cup remaining for any 3000 hardware emulator. Performance might be an issue, but the accelerating power curve of Intel and AMD systems could well resolve that issue over the next year. HP's licensing intentions will be tested, too, once Stromasys attempts to sell the product -- since the third party is a player in the MPE/iX licensing process. The HP Right to Use (RTU) license controls the operation of MPE/iX on non-3000 hardware. From the FAQ of early this spring:

An MPE/iX license can be transferred from an existing HP e3000 system to an emulator, using the  current Software License Transfer (SLT) process. A customer needing additional MPE/iX licenses will be able to purchase an MPE/iX RTU license through the AD377A product in conjunction with an emulator product through the end of 2010.

HP's got a mechanism to sell additional licenses for HP 3000 implementations -- virtual 3000s -- to a customer who's already got a 3000 running. That AD377A product has seen its price drop since it was first introduced in 2008. For some customers, the cost of adding 3000 licenses could make for a better Plan B than no plan at all.

"So this emulator would act as a virtual HP 3000, and the OS and apps would actually live on a 21st century piece of hardware?," asked John Stevens of Take Care of IT. "I have to think that this would have a market. If the price (and quality of implementation) is less that than of a true migration, there’s your answer."

Customers who would rather be migrated could even comprise some of the emulator user base. "Sorrowfully, I might have to use an emulator," said Paula Brinson, the Datacenter Operations Manager for Hampton Roads Sanitation District. "The legacy system is getting expensive due to floor space costs. Maintenance is with third parties now, but is still a fairly significant expense, and I have cancelled as many software contracts as I can and still operate. So emulation may be the way to go."

3000 community to meet again in SF(O)

HP 3000 community members, both those migrating and those who are not, are invited to the second bi-annual HP 3000 Community Meet. On Wednesday, Sept. 23 there will be a single day of free lunch, networking, and 10-minute updates about the state of the computer still playing a significant role in companies and careers. Imagine, an in-person meeting of 3000 users and vendors in 2009. In 2007 it seemed unlikely that a 3000 meeting could take place, after all of HP's warnings about 2006 being the 3000's end of life. Save the date and meet at a rare event.

The virtually-free meeting is scheduled to take place at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt, a swell hotel on Bayshore Highway just a few minutes south of the SFO Airport. The hotel operates a free shuttle to the BART station at the airport, according to organizer Alan Yeo of ScreenJet. Along with Marxmeier Software's Mike Marxmeier, Yeo is "standing a lunch" for up to 50 attendees, plus organizing a "cash bar" dinner that evening in the Hyatt's sports bar/restaurant. $109 rooms are being arranged for out of town attendees. We'll be there, and hope to see you too.

The event is wrapped around re-connecting with community members, the kind of networking that can be tough to accomplish at a Very Large User Group Event. The e3000, as HP and partners still like to call it, can hold on until migrations are completed or homesteading sustaining plans are in place. Yeo reminded attendees at the previous Community Meet by the Bay in '07 that the "e" in 3000 represents the essence of the computer's value.

Yeo, Marxmeier, and QSS founder Duane Percox mounted the '07 meet with all due speed, announcing in September and gathering in mid-November. This year's event, with a late-morning start, then lunch followed by updates, followed by an optional dinner, will come together even faster. The community is counting on that essential element to make that Wednesday coalesce.

"I've been thinking about the naming of the e3000," Yeo said when the '07 event wrapped up. "I believe that 'e' stands for enduring, because the 3000 has lasted a darn sight longer than HP expected." Between 40 and 50 community members were on hand back then. Speedware will be hosting a registration site, Yeo said. Attendance at the '07 event cost a grand $20, which earned a commemorative polo shirt in return. Stand by for program details, and book your flights if you're more than a car drive away.

So there is such a thing as a free lunch, perhaps a testament to that enduring value of the HP 3000.

3000 emulator marches onward

After the project lay dormant for years, work on an HP 3000 emulator is preparing for its first-level alpha testing by October, according to the CEO of Stromasys. The Swiss-based company was named SRI when 3000 emulators were a hot topic among 3000 homesteaders and the OpenMPE group. This fall, the company says, an all-software product to enable Intel PCs to become HP 3000s goes into serious testing.

Stromasys CEO Robert Boers reported that the company that's been selling VAX, Alpha and PDP-11 emulators for more 15 years has gained HP's cooperation with 3000 MPE licensing. An earlier version of the emulator was designed to mimic the MFIO board of the PA-RISC 3000s. HP wanted that work suspended, and so the project was shelved. But a new design bypasses the MFIO work and creates the equivalent of an rp2470 server, a PA-RISC system rated at more horsepower than current 3000 hardware.

Of course that rating is subject to the testing of the emulator, since the product uses Intel hardware to drive what Boers calls a low-end, single-CPU HP 3000 clone. The product won't create new HP 3000s because it complies with HP's MPE/iX licensing for emulators: no new systems, only transfers of existing 3000 licenses.

Stromasys, which operates offices in North America, Asia, Europe and elsewhere, restarted its emulator project after a change of strategy by HP. As the vendor's end of lab operations drew closer, the need to resolve the emulation issues rose up on engineering and licensing to-do lists. Late in 2008 the vendor announced a license plan that would go into effect if an emulator was released before HP's end-of-support date in December, 2010.

Boers said his company, which has been successful in working with HP on Digital computer emulators, plans to begin selling the tested product in 2010. Protection for HPSUSAN numbers and recognition of licenses for third-party tools is covered in the emulator's architecture, he said. The hardware license key is coded in (although who's managing that is unclear), and a separate space that third parties can use for license keys is also part of the software.

It's early in the coming-out party for this product, so far back on the curve that Boers said the company hasn't examined possible pricing or approached software suppliers. Strobe Data has also had a emulation project underway over the same time period, roughly from 2002 onward. But the issue of whether the 3000 market is big enough to support two emulator vendors doesn't seem to concern Boers.

"At the moment we don't know that much about the 3000's market," he said. "This is a nice thing to do. I know the market isn't very big." What works in Stromasys favor to set expectations low at first: the 3000 emulator shares 70 percent of the code with the CHARON virtualization products the company sells to VAX and Alpha users of OpenVMS. HP technical manager Ling Chang said of the CHARON product, "our VAX and Alpha customers are now able to successfully move their existing applications to the HP’s latest server technologies."

Perhaps there's been a realization inside HP that emulation for HP 3000s could keep more users from migrating to non-HP solutions. A thicker abstraction layer -- deep enough, Boers said, to run the TurboIMAGE database -- would offer a 64-bit implemention of PA-RISC on Intel's Xeon family of hardware. ProLiants running Xeon chips could drive HP 3000 programs, if third-party licensing participation appears and testing succeeds. HP's subsystems such as COBOL would be licensed. Plus there's cross-platform products such as the Eloquence database, which might run in a Linux or Windows blade partition to supply data.

As for who might use a 3000 emulator, obvious candidates would be homesteading customers who need access to the latest peripherals, as well as companies who want a clear path to performance boosts as Intel releases faster processors. There's also the customers who see the abstraction of PA-RISC and the 3000 as a smoother way to revive and retain key MPE/iX applications.

Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies, who's been consulting on open source tools as well as migrations in the 3000 community, said an emulator which could mimic an HP 3000 might be just the solution for a customer of his who's been working on a lengthy migration to SAP. Several key Point of Sale modules can't be duplicated in SAP, and a lift and shift migration could be costly and make the finished solution complex.

"Business is tight now, and projects are slowing," Edminster said. "Without having an emulator, the closest I could come would be to use Speedware's [AMXW] product to do the job," he said. "But given a choice, I'd prefer a hardware emulator if it will work properly."

TV news streams from the Tech Forum

The Connect conference that drew 2,700 attendees is long over, but some of the user group and HP messages from the HP Technology Forum & Expo live on, streamed from the Web. SDR News, a video interview service, gathered more than a dozen one-to-one interviews at the event. SDR was "invited media," according to Connect president Nina Buik.

The coverage includes a talk about the future of the Connect user group from its incoming president, Chris Koppe of Speedware. In 11 minutes of Q&A, Koppe talks about the efforts to raise the user group's visibility inside HP. There are also fundamentals about what Connect's mission is during a year when all user groups are working to remain relevant and vital resources.

The SDR coverage is interesting because it was recorded and streamed live at the conference -- so it's not as dressed up and controlled as the HP-created videos all over the Web. Koppe was one of only three people interviewed by SDR at the HPTF who were not HP employees. (There's also five minutes with the winner of a $10,000 drawing, but that probably qualifies as "human interest" instead of news.) Koppe takes his office in January for the user group and has been a board member or volunteer since 2005. He has brought the tribal knowledge of the HP 3000 user community to the group from his work on the Interex board of directors.

The 20 SDR videos also include a word from a company that began an HP 3000 emulator project, although that platform and the ongoing project aren't mentioned.

Koppe, who was a member of the Interex board when that user group folded four summers ago, talks a bit about the Connect business model. "We're non-profit and we run on a shoestring budget," he said. "Every dollar of what we collect goes to member services."

He also noted that vendors will get airtime to add to Connect's voice to HP user community. A Special Interest Group for vendors is in Connect's plans. The user group has great motivation for giving vendors a voice like the one Interex offered for two decades via SIG-Softvend. Speaking from a conference floor filled with vendor booths, Koppe said the Connect vendors "also end up being a funding source for our organization."

Other SDR interviews and video from the conference include keynotes from Intel and Brocade, a Microsoft roadmap talk, and a fascinating interview with Robert Boers, CEO of Stromasys. That company was once named SRI and started work on an HP 3000 emulator in 2004. We'll have more tomorrow about that subject, an issue that once dominated the advocacy of OpenMPE.

E-mail PDFs using the HP 3000

Although computer vendors have been promising the paperless office for more than 20 years, modern business is not even close to eliminating paper in offices. Paper is such a rich business that HP's profits include sales of Hewlett-Packard-branded reams of the white stuff. But the shortfall between dream and reality can be closed with some software built for the HP 3000, as well as other enterprise computing systems.

Hillary Software created a paperless solution for reports that moves PDF versions of HP 3000 output. Connie Sellitto of the Cat Fancier's Association asked about Hillary's byRequest, requesting references. "We'd like to have the ability to generate PDF documents from our HP 3000 and e-mail them to various customers," she asked in a message to the 3000 newsgroup. "I'd like to hear from anyone who has used this product, and what your experience was regarding ease of setup."

While other products such as Sanface's txt2pdf have been bent to serve the HP 3000, byRequest is built to extract and distribute reporting from any HP 3000 application. Kim Borgman of National Wine & Spirits said, "We [use it to] e-mail all our reports now. Hardly any printing happens on the line printer anymore."

byRequest has been tuned up to support secure FTP as well, according to another 3000 manager. Chuck Nickerson, president of Hillary, said the company's 3000 plans are set for the future. "If your 3000 is plugged in, we'll support it," he said. "If it's unplugged, we'll help you plug it in." Hillary will also help move byRequest to a migration platform after HP 3000 use.

Wesley Setree reports the software "does work very well. In fact, we just purchased the portion that enables us to SFTP files automatically, rather than have an operator move them."

Nary a complaint flowed across the newsgroup about byRequest. "We have almost all our reports going to the network or being emailed via byRequest as Word or Excel documents," said programmer analyst Barb Zanotelli of Miller Compressing. "It works wonderfully. Tech support is outstanding and our users love it."

txt2pdf requires that perl be installed on an HP 3000 for a $39 version, but it's difficult to beat on price. (You can try txt2pdf free for 30 days, but it's not freeware.) Five years ago a Montana school district integrated txt2pdf into its workflow, and Bob McGregor reported on how the software was implemented. However, McGregor needed a $990 Pro version of txt2pdf, one that doesn't require Perl installation -- but also doesn't have an MPE/iX version sold as an executable (only Windows, Linux, HP-UX, and Sun's and IBM's Unix are offered). Sanface will take a request to build such an executable for some environments, however.

HP 3000 reports have some quirks. Former HP lab engineer Mark Bixby once posted a paper explaining why the original spoolfile linespacing in an MPE/iX report is not preserved in most conversions to PDF. The HP 3000 business doesn't represent a serious share of the operations at Sanface, which distributes txt2pdf to many PCs. A tool built for the HP 3000 and respects linespacing is what users reported about to the newsgroup. The Hillary Softrware product supports Microsoft Sharepoint with one of its latest features, and an enterprise license gives a company the right to move the software to another platform in the event of a migration. Linux, several versions of Unix, Windows and even the AS/400 are among the environments supported in addition to MPE/iX.

Donna Hofmeister, Allegro Consultants support engineer and an OpenMPE member, summed up the differences neatly. "If all that you’re interested in is making PDFs and mailing them out, that can all be done for free," she said. "However, if you’re also needing multi-host, centralized-viewing, viewing-privileges -- then you’re into software like byRequest."

And if your goal is to move toward the paperless office -- and turn off that line printer like Borgman has -- there's nothing like a solution engineered for the special skills of the 3000. Don't worry about HP's profits. There's still plenty of paper to be sold to other businesses.