Emulator: how far it goes, and what's next

Even among the potential allies for the Stromasys emulator, uncertainty is afoot. I had a conversation with a reseller last week about the product, and he was not sure that IMAGE was a part of the solution. People approach the Charon emulator from their best-known persepective, and in most cases that’s MPE/iX and its database. Good news: Charon doesn’t emulate any of that software. It simply uses what Hewlett-Packard created and installed on everyone's 3000.

Instead of fooling with the 3000's software, the Charon product provides a pre-configured MPE/iX disk image. This is an LDEV1 system disk, but it’s not a physical device. It’s an virtualized disk file, running on a Linux server, which the emulator then reads when it boots up MPE/iX. Once you have this LDEV1, you populate it with the software on your 3000 system -- specialized databases, configurations for IO, the works. The wizardry comes in making an Intel server which runs Linux -- the host OS of the emulator package -- behave the same as an HP 3000 server. MPE/iX is changed in no way. This is why there've been no lingering reports of the emulator failing to run an MPE application or a utility.

Emulator technology has a reputation from more than a decade ago of being a horsepower hog. But the first two generations of emulation have blown past us all, and now Stromasys is beyond instruction-by-instruction interpretation. It’s well past dynamic instruction translation, which pre-fetched a platform’s CPU instructions, then translated them into target platform code. That translation might have been called dynamic, but it was only suitable for entry-level to midrange systems.

Stromasys has left all of MPE and IMAGE’s software stack alone, and patched nothing. The product’s task is to use the latest, multi-level translation technology. Stromasys perfected this technology — the third generation of emulation — while it served users of the VAX hardware who wanted to continue to run OpenVMS after HP-Digital stopped selling VAXes.

The mission for Stromasys and its Charon products is behaving like the hardware abandoned by vendors, but not abandoned by customers with mission-critical requirements. In short, if your software is running on an HP 3000 today, it will run on Charon-HPA/3000 unchanged. Databases operate intact and as expected.

Stromasys GM Bill Driest explained that this third generation emulation takes the 3000 source hardware instruction code, then moves it to a specially developed intermediate language code that’s optimized for cross-platform virtualization. Finally, it’s translated to target platform code to let Intel’s broad, standard family of Xeon processors do the HP PA-RISC work that happened inside 3000s.

What this means is that the software doesn’t have to evolve to increase its performance. It’s a good thing, because MPE/iX is not going to evolve beyond its current rock-solid release. HP won’t permit the source code holders to create new versions of MPE. IMAGE isn’t getting new functions. Believe or not, that’s a good thing. Nothing was broken with MPE or IMAGE except for HP’s model to sell the software at the heart of a 3000.

Instead, Driest says that Charon will rely on hardware improvements to get to the next level of performance.

I’ve been in the industry 30-plus years, and the industry has learned there’s one thing to do when there’s new technology that comes out. You chase it. You migrate, you port, you replace.  We’ve turned that paradigm completely upside down. Why should we always modify the software to take advantage of hardware innovations? Why can’t we adapt the hardware to fit our applications? What you’ve done up to now is create the exact same system you had before, but on a new box. We think there are other options here.

Namely, that’s to use the increasing horsepower of Intel’s designs — the ones driven by commodity markets — to employ additional cores in processors and lift up MPE/iX performance. Soon enough there will be Charon models to match performance of the biggest 3000 HP ever sold. Eventually the rise of hardware power will take this OS faster than HP ever could.

But Driest recognizes that Charon itself has evolution in front of it. “Some of this emulator technology should become self-aware, so the emulator decides, ‘I know what I need from this hardware I’m hosted upon. Why don’t I carve out the amount of memory I need from the new host platform, and give it to MPE. No need for having the level of expertise to do that level of maintenance. And where are monitoring and reporting tools? They’re all around the place, but they’re not inside our product.

Stromasys has plans, Driest said, to enhance its virtualization-emulation products with all of that. In the meantime, however, the company could use some introductions to customers. Stromasys and the community can benefit from having the same people entrusted with MPE/iX system support to guide a 3000 site into the world of virtualization.

Those are pros like the reseller who asked about IMAGE being a part of Charon HPA/3000. They know where the prospects are who use use 3000s. They’ve become trusted advisors in this independent era of transition. While Charon still requires expertise for its implementation, these resellers and support companies are the next place the solution needs to go. Technical leaps are important, but virtualization needs to cross a threshold of trust.

How 8 Years of Web Reports Changed Lives

This week the Newswire celebrates the 8-year-mark on our blog reporting. Starting with a eulogy for fallen 3000 savant Bruce Toback -- taken too early, by a heart attack -- we wrote about the nascent and uncertain era of transition in June of 2005. The Interex HP conference was still a possibility, HP was still creating some patches for MPE/iX -- many things that had gone on for years continued to roll along.

IMAGE jumbo datasets were supposed to get eclipsed by LargeFile datasets. HP was fixing a critical bug in LFDS and needed beta testers, something that was harder to come by for HP. LargeFiles remain less robust than jumbos for most customers. LFDS repairs consumed precious resoures in the database lab, all while HP tried to fix a data corruption problem.

HP sold off more than 400 acres in South Texas as layoffs started to mount up. CEO Mark Hurd set aside $236 million in severance pay. Sun offered up a open source program for Solaris, begging the question about when open source practices could be applied to MPE/iX. This week OpenVMS managers examined what stood in the way of VMS becoming open source. 

Even though parts of MPE/iX are well outside of HP's labs, the whole wooly bunch of source, millions of lines, isn't a candidate for open source like the Sun project. But it might be, someday. 

We looked at whether a transition era demanded the same rigorous HP testing of beta enhancements and patches. "We heard HP say they'd be satisfied with one site's beta test report, a comment offered when HP engineers discussed the lack of beta-test sites last summer at HP World." we reported. "When the labs closed in 2008, software that languished in Patch Jail was bailed out. HP was seeking beta testers "who want to try out the new networked printing enhancements for the HP 3000."

June of 2005 began the period when HP said it would decide about making MPE source available outside of HP. "No source means no more patches. Is that a problem? Steve Suraci of Pivital Solutions, a third party supporting 3000s, talked about this in 2004. "Can we find workarounds?," Suraci said. "Almost always. We haven’t run into a situation yet where we haven’t been able to get a customer back up and running."

More than three years later, Suraci's shop licensed MPE/iX source code to produce patches and workarounds. Six other licensees got what the Sun customers seemed to want: source. Gilles Schipper of GSA, one of the longest-tenured support providers, said HP code was not key.

"I don't think [access to HP's source] is a necessary thing for the 3000 to maintain its reliability," Schipper told us. "I'd like to see it happen, because it may allay the concerns of some customers out there." 

That's a lesson that the OpenVMS customer might embrace, with all the direct talk of parts of the OS built by third parties or created in HP Labs.

We've been so grateful for the support of the community, especially our sponsors, in keeping the blog the leading source of HP 3000 community news and experience. Thanks for making us a pick to click in the 3000 world since before the days of a user group bankruptcy.

Newest HP song of server exits same as old

Now that there's another homesteading-migration movement afoot in the HP enterprise community, it's worth studying. What's different about the shutdown of the OpenVMS operations at Hewlett-Packard, versus the tale of the last decade from the 3000? Many moments and passions are similar. Slides not even six months old like the one below foretold of nothing but clear sailing. But with HP's 11 years of extra embrace for VMS, beyond the 3000 sayonara, things may be kinder for the VMS acolytes, those whose faith HP praised in an exit letter.

Within a day of posting the letter, the VMS community was trying to organize an effort to get the operating system source code from HP, re-licensed as open source. Perhaps they didn't take much heed of the 7-year quest by OpenMPE to win the rights to MPE/iX. First there was a set of legal proposals, followed by the logical proposals that the OS couldn't be worth anything to an HP which was casting it aside. I'm talking here about both the 3000 community, as well as those wounded in the world of OpenVMS.

"Is there no one who can free VMS from HP?" asked one member on the comp.os.vms newsgroup. Another member replied with an update from the group devoted to Rdb, the Digital database as vital to VMS as IMAGE is to MPE. He wanted to deal with Digital people in place before a controversial CEO served up the first sale, to Compaq, before HP.

Up on the Rdb list, Keith Parris raised the possibility of HP open-sourcing VMS.  While I would prefer VMS to come from DEC before [former CEO Robert] Palmer, that is no longer an option.  If done correctly, an open-source VMS might be better than no VMS.  Perhaps HP should pay a peanuts-scale salary of, say, $150,000 so that someone can coordinate this full time. 

Unless a revolt has pulled down the walls of HP's IP legal group, such license freedom sought by customers won't be forthcoming. HP got badgered into releasing MPE/iX source to a select group of licensees, who cannot improve upon the 7.5 release but use their code to create workarounds and patches. However, the VMS people do have the advantage of a thriving emulator company for any Digital VMS implementations which run on older, non-Itanium servers. The tech issues have been long-solved for Charon for VMS, but there are licensing issues that the Digital user will need to manage for themselves.

Here's where the HP 3000 community is a decade ahead of the drop-kicked Digital group. Stromasys reports that licensing hasn't been an issue in getting Charon HPA/3000 up and running in the early days of sales. HP's provided the MPE/iX license, and that just leaves the third party software.

Stromasys reported last month that the license arrangements for the emulator have to be left to each customer who will transition to a virtualized 3000 server. You make your own deals.

But product manager Paul Taffel said that "There have been no problems with vendors. We finally figured out who you have to call in IBM to get the Cognos license, for example." That would be Charlie Maloney, at 978-399-7341.

What the Digital faithful do not see in place yet is a license arrangement from HP for OpenVMS on every platform -- including some that may not yet exist, like an Itanium emulator. In these earliest days, they at least can point to the emulator company that's arranged for such a thing in the past. But there are doubts and uncertainty to go along with fears.

"Are these emulators a serious option?" said one customer on the newsgroup. "The emulators could be a serious option, but what of them, if HP clams up and refuses to license VMS on them?" 

The reply from another customer echoed right back to the earliest days of outrage over the 3000 transition. "This is why prying VMS from HP's clammy hands would be the first priority, and nothing else matters if that cannot be done."

Your community marshalled its forces in late 2001 and into 2002 to try to wrest the entire 3000 business from HP, at a price. Hewlett-Packard was not interested, but these are more interesting times. HP just won a lawsuit with Oracle, fighting over the future of Itanium. Oracle didn't want its software to run on Itanium anymore. Neither does HP want OpenVMS to run on Itanium. The wounded customers in the VMS world suggest that Oracle ought to sue to get back its judgement from the prior suit.

To demonstrate there's still value in working with Itanium, HP might be induced or coerced to smooth the OpenVMS path from HP product to community asset. Just like the 3000 odyssey of the previous decade, HP was assuring the VMS user in slide decks dated as recently as December.

Despite Oracle’s  announcement to discontinue all software development on the  Intel Itanium microprocessor, we remain committed to supporting  you and your IT environment. We will continue to support  OpenVMS on Tukwila-based and Poulson-based Integrity systems beyond the next decade.

As if that were not enough, another message came down from the man recently promoted to head HP's Labs. Martin Fink was formerly the head of the Business Critical Systems group where OpenVMS remains for sale until the end of 2015. In 2011, while HP battled Oracle in that suit, Fink found the moxie to make a rallying statement that will sound familiar to the 3000 customer. At least any who recall the mid-summer assurances of 2001 that preceded the November shutdown notice. 

Fink told OpenVMS customers

Let me reassure you. HP plans to continue the development and  innovation of Itanium-based Integrity NonStop and Integrity server platforms with our HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems for more than 10 years.

At the bottom of each and every slide in these decks is the standard HP disclaimer that anything can change at any time. It's just this: until the song of departure is sung for you, it's hard to believe it HP would sing it to anybody as faithful as you've been.

Today's Limits on Emulation Speed

The long-term future of 3000 virtualization looks sunny, in part because there's the remainder of our lifetimes for the Stromasys engine to get faster. Using this month's offerings from the company shows there's plenty of performance to make up, simply to get to HP's 3000 benchmarks from 2003. Migrators won't care like homesteaders will.

When you look at the now-shipping Stromasys Charon product line, it's easy to see the product will run as fast as nearly all of the A-Class and N-Class servers. But HP sold three models of N-Class that are still out of the reach of today's virtualization engine speed. Those models represent the threshold Charon must still break to operate as fast as the fastest, hamstrung HP iron.

Hamstrung is a word from horses and people meaning to cripple. It's an acknowledged practice that the 3000's CPUs were down-clocked by MPE/iX. In some cases, like the lowest-end A-Class, the operating system dialed back the processor by 75 percent. A 440MHz CPU was forced to run at a genuine 110 in the entry-level A-Class. This is one reason why a fully-revamped, 1-processor A-Class HP 3000, with a faster bus, still only ran 70 percent faster than a Series 918.  Even at the dawn of a new generation of 3000s, HP was keeping the servers in check.

If a company is considering an emulation scenario on the way to a migration, these limits might not matter. At one Dallas-area e-commerce company, consultant Doug Smith reports the 3000 was moving to archive-system status. A migration was in the wings. But for other companies, hoping to match those three biggest-sized 3000s, June's Charon product line will leave them short of a match.

Migrators might not make up much of the Charon customer base. If they've concluded that a midrange 3000 will do the interim job, however, even companies leaving the platform will have enough horsepower. One of the reasons for this involves adding extra CPUs for the unreleased Charon versions. Unlike HP, Stromasys will support a 6-way or 8-way N-Class.

The virtualization lineup won't support these today, unless you count the ability to provide model numbers in the lineup Stromasys that showed at its recent Training Day. The N4060 and N4080 offer 50 percent and 100 percent more CPUs than HP ever would for a 3000. At the moment, Charon will need those extra CPUs to run as fast as HP's fastest N-Class configurations.

When it was still a product for sale from the vendor, this kind of top-end N-Class would cost more than $100,000. At that, it was a complex hardware-based server subject to the indignities of iron: CPU boards, specialized disks, proprietary memory -- all might fail in the way physical components do. But you could get very fast, with enough memory in an N-Class 500MHz or 750MHz server.

AICS Research, which sold QueryCalc to hundreds of 3000 sites for more than 25 years, still hosts the comprehensive 3000 Relative Performance Matrix on all MPE servers. The listing of benchmarked systems goes all the way back to the Series 30, as underpowered at the time as the early Series 930 was at the start of the First Generation of PA-RISC CPUs. HP wrapped up its benchmarking with a muddled picture. In 1998 it changed its processor comparison rating to the "HP Performance Unit." Since it was near the time of the e3000 renaming, this became known as the HP EPU.

"In effect," wrote the late, great Wirt Atmar in his notes to his matrix at AICS, "what they did was to begin to use a new set of test suites which they felt were more appropriate to the way that HP 3000s were being used."

The numbers aren't absolute measurements of anything other than the time the various systems take to process one of the several HP test suites, but they do allow you to compare with some accuracy the relative performances that you should expect when upgrading to higher performing system.

You must divide by 10 to get a set of EPUs that make sense in HP's final 3000 product lineup. The Series 918 became a 1.0 when HP recalculated its benchmarks. That means the 4-way 500 and both 750 MHz models at right are coming in at 49.9, 60.6 and 76.8 EPUs, respectively. The Stromasys lineup doesn't go that high today. As Atmar said, those are just numbers from a test suite. Your mileage will certainly vary.

Migration prospects these days are most likely to be smaller customers who didn't see a good business case for leaving the 3000 from 2003 to 2013. They need help from third parties to make their move, and useful advice might be to start the migration while using more reliable iron than HP's 3000 "kit," as the British would say. These people have got what they need from Stromasys today.

However, as the economy rises, some of the larger 3000 homesteaders may be replacing HP hardware that makes their boardroom directors nervous. Emulation can happen even at the same time the big homesteaders make a move -- like Amisys healthcare hosted sites are doing -- to something non-MPE.

The biggest homesteaders don't have a place to go yet to match their top-end performance on today's virtualization engines. However, using extra CPU cores will let Stromasys keep adding CPUs.

Charon-HPA/3000 systems use two cores to emulate each PA-RISC CPU – one core fetches instructions and interprets them on-the-fly into equivalent Intel instruction sequences, while the other core works in parallel, pre- fetching code pages and applying various analysis and optimization algorithms to identify higher-level optimizations. 

This More Cores strategy puts some of emulation's limits in the hands of Intel. That's a company that has not been shy about adding cores to its Xeon-x86 line of CPUs, the line that drives Charon. The level of innovation on that line is moving at many times the evolution speed of Intel's other enterprise chip, Itanium.

It's a gamble to guess at future performance needs, so selecting a hardware-based 3000 always involved predicting the lifespan of use -- the headroom for a site's application growth. Virtualization isn't much different in the forecasting, but moving up is a new experience. What makes virtualization attractive is the ease of upgrading to a faster model. HP might have called this a board swap back in the days that it sold hardware. This kind of swap was still on the order of $20,000 for the leap from HP. And that was after you turned back your old processor to HP, so it could be resold. Nobody's going to have to turn back a model of Charon software in order to turn up their performance.

Legacy hardware evolution looks limitless

At the recent Stromasys Training Day and HP 3000 Social, the company's GM Bill Driest asked a question about the future of the HP 3000. But he may as well have been asking the same thing about HP's Integrity servers, too. What's to become of these vendor-specific systems, once the vendor leaves the system behind?

GM Bill Driest suggests the sky's the limit for futures in hardware that's been curtailed by the vendor. At right, Stromasys CEO Ling Chang talks over the possibilities at the recent HP 3000 Social with Eric Sand of Sandsoft.

“People like Gartner are talking to us, and there’s been a fundamental sea change,” Driest said. “They’re saying this: isn’t it conceivable that the end state of all legacy hardware is some kind of emulation or virtualization?” 

Driest admitted that five years that belief was “so much of an early adopter message. There’s a fundamental pause as we ask, ‘On what platform do you believe we’ll run the last MPE production environment?’ Do you really think that it’s going to be on some refurb HP hardware?”

The company was introducing a strategy of “Rebuild, or Revitalize?” as the driver towards virtualization of the MPE-ready hardware. It exhorted the customers and resellers, along with support providers and consultants in the Computer History Museum's meeting room, to “Join the Revitalization Movement.”

Asking about the future of legacy hardware was once a moot question. Of course it would be decommissioned and drop-kicked to the curb. A few gun enthusiasts even executed a 3000 and captured the gunplay on video. But systems continue to serve despite such schoolyard jeering, and in spite of the age of the hardware. It's the age of the software that matters -- something that can be updated more easily once the box is virtualized.

This might seem to disrupt HP's plans to step away from platforms like the MPE engine of the 3000, or the VMS hosting on Alpha or VAX -- or perhaps the PA-RISC HP-UX servers, and dare we say it, the Itanium-based boxes. HP's own expert has said he figures Itanium production to be good only for another seven years. After that, the Integrity box might become legacy itself. Why, we wonder, has HP added the Charon products to its Worldwide Reseller Agreement?

Stromasys has never claimed to be creating a virtualization engine for Itanium processors. But given the size of the 3000 market versus the efforts to create Charon HPA/3000, I'd speculate that some of that HPA engineering could be re-used for another HP project.

According to Driest, analyst Andrew Butler of Gartner published a report this year that identifies Stromays as a disruptive technology in the server market specifically. “Butler said that ‘Functions commonly thought to be part of the underlying part of the OS are being distributed to the server, to the hypervisor, to storage.’ People are virtualizing everything. We’re almost re-inventing what it means to deploy an application,” Driest said.

The meeting presented a new and more extensive group of Stromasys executives to the 3000 community. CEO Ling Chang said the company “is proud to become a part of the 3000 ecosystem.” More than a decade after HP announced the 3000 would drop off Hewlett-Packard’s price list because of a declining ecosystem, that group has gained a member worthy of citation from Gartner.

When Gartner first started tracking the Stromasys offerings three years ago, they called it processor emulation, Driest said. “We fit in on this little bubble called Processor Emulation. We are fitting in at the peak of their curve called Inflated Expectations. It says there’s a promise for this technology.”

Hard questions came from one reseller who reported that he serves 135 companies using 3000s and had clients in the room from several California school districts. “Think about how you can help us help them,” he said. The reseller has been in the reseller business to service customers who manage K-12 schools using MPE/iX solutions.

The product lineup from Stromasys (click for detail) showed the top-end emulator being an N4040 virtualized system, running four processors at 250MHz — not the 750MHz rated for the 4-CPU HP hardware. The N4060 and N4080 models are forthcoming. The latter runs at an estimated 61 HP EPUs — four times faster than the A520 Charon model.

Stromasys opens HP's way to Charon gates

The maker of the emulator solution for the HP 3000 community demonstrated the natural resting state for MPE applications during its recent training and brewhouse social. Dedicated community veterans, as well as some customers looking for a way to extend those applications, took note of a new alliance. HP's got the 3000 version of Charon on board.

Stromasys also announced it’s just been named a Gartner Group Cool Server Vendor for 2013, the freshest part of the news, plans and futures the company unspooled in its first North American Training and Social event for 3000 customers and allies. The room of the Computer History Museum on May 10 was full for the day-long briefing on company strategy, as well as Paul Taffel's extensive demonstration of the HPA/3000 model of Charon in action.

Stromasys is one of only seven vendors who’ve made the server technology cool list, just published by Gartner. The company showed off a product lineup that includes a pair of implementations that are designed to out-perform some N-Class HP 3000 hardware. General Manager Bill Driest said he’s seen his company's software run on a cutting edge HP DL380 server with a 4.4Ghz processor installed, a pre-release from Intel.

But the power promises may extend beyond hopes of matching high-end N-Class performance. HP's taken on the software as a potential solution for its customers. Stromasys hopes the 3000's will share the view that hardware is only a waystation to a virtualized platform.

Work is underway in the Stromasys labs to utilize extra cores on the DL380's processor for such servers. With each 4-core set available in Intel chips, HPA/3000 could emulate another HP 3000 processor. The 32-core limits of today could yield an 8-CPU MPE/iX machine. This is a configuration HP could never ship or officially support while it built and sold its 3000 servers. The HP top-end was 4 processors for its 750-Mhz.

Driest made his debut in front of a HP 3000 crowd during a morning session that outlined where Stromays is heading from its current position as the only virtualization solution in the PA-RISC space. One new wrinkle was the announcement that Charon HPA/3000 has made the cut onto HP’s Worldwide Reseller Agreement. Stromasys already has its product that emulate VAX and Alpha systems on that list. 

A Worldwide Reseller Agreement gives HP the right to resell a product from a software supplier. Companies as large as security supplier McAfee have entered into such a deal. HP now has the mechanism to sell Charon HPA to customers who might want to remain as MPE/iX application users.

The Gartner announcement was a sneak peek at what Driest was describing as a way to earn its solution onto the Hype Cycle of Virtualization. Processor emulation is in the Expectations part of the curve, but Stromasys hopes to be securing a spot in the Trigger, a rising wave of the lifecycle.

“People like Gartner are talking to us, and there’s been a fundamental sea change,” Driest said. “They’re saying this: isn’t it conceivable that the end state of all legacy hardware is some kind of emulation or virtualization?” 

Driest admitted that five years that was “so much of an early adopter message. There’s a fundamental pause as we ask, ‘On what platform do you believe we’ll run the last MPE production environment?’ Do you really think that it’s going to be on some refurb HP hardware?”

What Else Everyone is Doing These Days

Multi-tasking has been debunked, but a multi-faceted career is common in your 3000 community. We used to think we could work on several things at once. Now it's obvious that what we really need to do is work at something else, even while we all take care of the partner who brought us to the computer dance.

Take Birket Foster, for example. One of the best-known 3000 community members, he has been chairman and director of Storm Internet Services since 2003. The wireless Internet company serves customers in rural and outlying areas of Eastern Ontario. Not a small venture, either, but one built upon HP 3000 success. A recent article in the Eastern Ontario AgriNews took note of Storm's latest "freestanding wireless tower and company support centre, [raised up] on the grounds of his longtime software business on Main Street in Chesterville."

No MB Foster Associates, no Storm. The wireless venture grew up during the transition era for the 3000. This is what I mean by the "else" much of the community does. Take Richard Corn, who created the ESPUL and NP92 printing utilities for MPE, all the way back to the Classic 3000 days. Rich, a charter supporter of the Newswire, is also selling Cloud Print for Windows software today. Again, no RACC, no Software Devices LLC, where that Windows software is developed and sold. He's still supporting ESPUL, by the way.

I could include myself in the What Else Workers. My partner Abby and I established the Newswire when most people knew her as Dottie Lentz, and for years we did nothing else but 3000 information services. From the days of her Bolt Bucks giveaways at HP World conferences, we've evolved into additional ventures. My own What Else is The Writer's Workshop, where writers who range from fledglings to published novelists gather Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and by appointment to learn and practice storytelling. They finish novels like Danuta or Lay Death at Her Door. I finished my novel Viral Times during the transition era. Without missing a day of the 3000 news from our current times, I could re-engage my fundamental skills and desire: storytelling and writing. I strut my stuff on The Write Stuff and Twitter about storytelling at @ronseybold.

Does the 3000 community suffer from the What Else work? It depends on your perspective and role. Did you sell HP 3000s and create them, or launch new customers with your applications? Adding a facet to those jobs might be at the 3000's expense. Ecometry cast away its 3000 aspirations -- although it supports several dozen MPE sites -- to create a Windows multichannel commerce version of what was once known as MACS/3000, built by Alan Gardner and partner Will Smith. Gardner and Smith never get to sell off the company for millions unless they've built up more than 300 customers using their software.

Alas, no new Ecometry sites today, but Robelle is among the companies still supporting the 3000 version of the software. Its website tells the Ecometry user "you are already a Robelle customer, even if you don't realize it, since the Ecometry application uses Robelle's Suprtool to speed up data access." For more than a decade Robelle has sold HP-UX versions of Suprtool, and even more lately, a Linux version. Not exactly a What Else, just another facet. But when we speak of Robelle, we must make a transition in this What Else tale to those who continue to dedicate themselves to the 3000. They've chosen no sort of What Else, often for reasons of strict technical focus.

Adager and VEsoft lead the way in omnipresent vendors with an MPE-only focus. What they're doing works at such a fundamental level of the 3000 that it demands full-time attention. Alan Yeo is also dedicated to the HP 3000 -- in its migrations as well as support of 3000 clients -- at ScreenJet. Pivital Solutions is an all-3000 venture, and using its dedicated focus leads to satisfied support clients. Customers are also happy at Allegro Consultants and Beechglen. Both of those support providers serve as many or more non-3000 sites today. Allegro's What Else is creating iOS applications, some that interact with HP 3000s as well as Linux and Unix servers. And if your name is the MPE Support Group, your focus is pretty clear.

Meanwhile, the Support Group serves MANMAN sites with ERP needs at the same time that it created partner Entsgo, an HP, IBM, IFS, and Openbravo solutions partner. If you haven't heard of Openbravo, you might not be aware that it's "professional open source solutions for business, offering the industry's first real alternative to proprietary enterprise software." And the Support Group is keen on Kenandy Cloud ERP, another solution related to the 3000, but evolved beyond it. Kenandy is built on the ASK Software foundations of Sandy Kurtzing. Before she became Kenandy CEO, she and her partners were working in kitchens with 3000s hooked to acoustical couplers in the 1970s, growing up MANMAN, and therefore the 3000's manufacturing heartland.

And the individuals? Jeff Vance is one of the best-known names in the world with 3000 excellence in his CV. Vance left the HP 3000 lab to join K-12 app provider QSS, a move to drive that ISV into the Linux application marketplace. Not so long ago Vance left QSS to work at Red Hat, pretty much where Linux grew up into a commercial solution.

Again, no MPE lab, no chance to work at the company whose environment will replace HP's Unix. Vance has taken the kind of What Else that becomes All Else, since his days of MPE UDC and utility development are done. Michael Berkowitz was our first paying subscriber to the Newswire, but long after Guess Jeans turned off its 3000 and turned him to other technical work elsewhere, Michael still keeps an eye on 3000 people through the community's 3000-L mail list.

Today he reported on some of the other HP lab experts gone elsewhere. Visiting Vance's LinkedIn page, Berkowitz notes

So I go to the webpage, find that he's working for Red Hat, but also notice the "people also viewed" column on the far right.  Lots of names from the past.

Mike Paivinen
Scott McClellan
Becky McBride
Craig Fairchild
Steve Macsisak
Stephen Watt

Of that group, including Jeff, only two (Becky and Craig) are at HP, the company they might have thought they'd be employed for life.

Fair enough, but HP's been shedding tens of thousands of good people for the entire period of the 3000's transition. Walter Murray went from the HP Langauges Lab to the California Corrections organization. Now he's in an All Else post, managing IBM mainframes there. As a What Else fellow, former HP Support Escalation expert Bob Chase is now at SMS, where his clients include Unix and Linux enterprise managers.

There are others, many others -- maybe the majority of community keystones -- who do a What Else today. Look around to see Fresche Legacy transforming legacy environments in the AS/400 community. Even while it's got its Speedware roots dug in at application support engagements for 3000s, and employing a surprising number of MPE veterans. Applied Technologies, a company building its engagements around open source software to help companies using 3000s, as well as those that do not. 

Of course, there's the biggest debutante of the 3000 ball, Stromasys and its virtualization emulator. This company started up serving the Digital world with Charon and continues to do so. They've added the 3000 to their facets -- and so in a rare turn, Charon PA-RISC servers became a What Else for that vendor.

This is the way of our 2013 working world. We go on to something Else, because of what created our expertise, whether it's What Else or All Else. But the 3000 remains essential to success in multiple facets or in new gems of careers. Charles Finley, once one of the stoutest 3000 resellers from his Southern California Conam base where he grew SCRUG into a user group force, commented on Berkowitz's inventory of who's gone from HP.

I'd like to give Finley, now going after transitions at Transformix, the last word -- but first say this: everybody is doing what it takes to stay busy with what's needed. And the HP 3000 is so solid that it is, as the Skin Horse said in The Velveteen Rabbit, a computer that's Real. "Becoming Real takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept." Much of the 3000's ability to make room for What Else is because it does not break easily.

Finley has it right about what makes everyone who still knows the 3000 well someone who's very Real. It's all about the relationships, the wellsprings of the computer's stories.

Those, admittedly competent, HP people only represent an era in which there was a substantial connection between HP and its loyal installed base. That was not valued by some people in power at the time. Therefore, they dismantled it. What I also believe to be true is that it is unlikely that they at HP can ever get it or anything like it back, even if someone was empowered to try. 

I would venture to guess that those same people are doing a great job at their current employer because that's the kind of people they are. However, I would also guess that it is not likely that their current employer, unless it is some subset of IBM, has a similar relationship with their installed base that HP once had.

Hardware Cherished, Hardware Valued

HP's 3000 hardware has been taking a free fall in market value for several years by now, a slide that's drawn even the biggest of servers into the low five-figures of price. This is the way of the world for every computer ever built. But it happens more slowly to the computers which are cherished, instead of just used.

A few messages out on the 3000 newsgroup highlighted that fact of our life in 2013. Tom Lang was forced to sell his Series 918RX, because he doesn't have room to use it in his new working space. He announced it was on offer at the end of February. Over "many weeks," as he reported, many enquirers asked lots of questions about the server. In mid-May, he reduced the price of the system to $1,100.

There are a lot of extras in Lang's package. These bonus parts don't show up in a lot of Series 918s. And the system has probably the best feature of all: a valid MPE/iX license. HP doesn't make those any longer, and nobody can emulate that element, either.

However, Lang heard from other 3000 owners and managers that four figures were at least one figure too many to sell a server that HP used as the 1.0 rating benchmark -- back when HP used to rate 3000 performance. For the record, the fastest 3000 ever produced, and sold for well over six figures at the time, ran at 49 times the power of a 918.

In ancient times, HP used a Series 37 Mighty Mouse as its 1.0 rating. The Series 37 did not outlast HP's MPE licensing business, however. Lang was told on the group that two Series 918s went directly to the scrap heap at one UK business. At another site, one manager said the price that seemed reasonable for a server that included a license was $200.

Until HP relents and begins to sell MPE/iX licenses to go with its Reseller Agreement for the Stromasys Charon 3000 emulator, $200 seems pretty low.

The operating system is the most durable part of a 3000, when you include its database in the valuation. If a customer has got their eyes on adding an emulated 3000 to their IT datacenter, these old servers are just the right piece for an audit-proof installation.

Some of the advice on the value of a 3000 was of a more gentle nature. "A rock solid machine," said Michael Anderson of J3K Solutions, "but sadly, not much of a market for it anymore."

Anderson knows of a company that paid about $8,000 for a 918 in 2003. It included a disc-array, DLT, DDS-3, 512 MB of RAM, and about 50Gb of disc. "They sent it to auction in 2007, and I got great deal on it, mostly because nobody at the auction knew what it was," Anderson explained. "It's been running for 5-plus years without any problems, during the same time period I've gone through three PCs. Apparently, now-a-days, it's not a good idea to manufacture products that keep working."

The HP 3000 was always sold at a premium compared to more popular systems. HP insisted that it protect the value (that means "pricing") of the servers sold earlier in the business life of HP's 3000. But the vendor didn't do much to protect the brand of MPE or the 3000 or IMAGE.

So the HP hardware's future and value is riding on the nature of being cherished, instead of its still-indelible durability that Anderson has chronicled. Not so long ago, a strategic analyst on the 3000 web-paths said that "people pay about twice as much for Apple systems as for others," and that Apple just put those extra dollars in its pockets. But being a brand which is cherished is one kind of asset, and being a brand that's cherished out loud by the industry's greatest marketing organization is quite another thing.

Never mind that you cannot find the jackalope of a Windows system priced at half of an Apple system, which will do the same work with equivalent components. Unless you can twist a Torx wrench, or know how to wear a static strap, whatever costs half as much will do less. I went to look for a new $575 SSD-based 11-inch laptop, built to Apple's Macbook Air standards and with the same horsepower. I gave up after about a half-hour. You can hunt for a jackalope a long time.

But the equation works in the other direction, if someone like Anderson is doing the shopping. A $500 Series 918 does so much more than any $1,000 PC, if your applications are already in MPEiX and use IMAGE. Stromasys can't sell MPE/iX licenses to make a copy of Charon HPA/3000 legal. Only HP can do that.

It will be worth watching to see if Hewlett-Packard can see its way to selling what will make an emulator truly legal. Before too much longer, HP is going to have to do that for HP-UX customers who'll use an emulator -- one that replaces an Itanium server. The natural state of every computer system is virtualization. Being cherished, that's something you cannot virtualize. Like the Skin Horse in The Velveteen Rabbit, only the love of an owner can make software that Becomes Real. Maybe it's that way for MPE -- like the Skin Horse said about being Real, "it takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept."

Finding our Fix-It Chick. Got yours?

As I write my offices are full of the sounds of saws, nail guns, feet shuffling across old floors and power clicking off and on. Let me explain. We’re making a change or 57 here, something that feels as profound as any transition project — whether to an emulator for homesteading, or the revisions for migrations.

People as old as most 3000 veterans can marvel at what the Web has brought since we began our careers. These days I talk to experts who started computing when modems were 110 baud, instead of the networked 18 gigabits that don’t even require a modem. We've upgraded our Internet speed pipe here at the NewsWire, a company that has always called our house its home. That home, like your server, is in need of changes.

For 18 years, our back two side-by-side bedrooms have bristled with wires strung between the rooms of our offices, added for one new device or scheme. We upgraded our infrastructure, as an IT manager would say; much is wireless. But we’ve been doing much more, changes with a senior future in mind. Perhaps like you. Fortunately, we have help to plan, as well as implement. We're clever and bright, but we need the help. Perhaps like you, or like our ally Birket Foster has long suggested.

Abby and I are doing our latest, largest renovation of our 36-year-old house this spring. It’s a task with details, surprises, planning and delight in the results. This morning while I write, we are watching new Ikea cabinets rise in a kitchen that was gutted, but still working before the demo of tile countertops and a stove and oven with many turkeys and pies in its history.

We have moved walls, painted and removed the antiquated ceiling popcorn, watched the sculpture of drywall floating and mudding, the art of tiling with glass. On and on it goes, from a ‘70’s bathtub to a steam shower, from chipped and unforgiving floor tile to nature-friendly bamboo, to creating a space where my lovely yogini can practice her stretching arts in a guest room with a Murphy bed to make a studio floor appear.

Long ago my friend Birket had his kitchen in his Chesterville home remodeled. This too was a house where a business grew up. The basement of his first location had 3000s networked into racks and employees who arrived at the kitchen door to sell and create software and follow a vision.

After his remodel, Birket began to compare a big project like migration or renovation to a remodel. You succeed, he always said, with a great plan and a good guide. Abby and I have been lucky to have both of these, but the most important is our general contractor, designer and now friend, Kristi Copeland.

Kristi left the world of software at Convio to follow her dream of building the dreams of others. It’s been more than four months since we started to work together. My mantra by now, when a cabinet doesn’t quite meet a ceiling or a steam unit delivers Error Code 5 or the automatic closet light misbehaves — my confidence comes from, “Kristi will know.”

I hope that even in this era of Web brilliance, when the sparkle of IT wisdom is a click away, you can find your own Kristi. She blazes through updates via email and texts and shops the Web with passion, so the Internet is making our transition possible on our modest budget. Having someone who will know saves more than money, however. It saves relationships between partners. Abby and I do not need all the knowledge and experience so essential to transforming our office and home. We rely on our Fix-It-Chick, something you can find for your future, too. 

Six Years of Insight on the Afterlife

Six years ago this month I revisited the site where I first heard of the "death of the HP 3000." HP wanted to call its exit from the 3000 community by that phrase in November, 2001. Instead we're thinking about the afterlife this month, in the wake of the North American sales force opening for the Stromasys Charon HPA emulator. Who needs this? At the Stromasys event, I heard from third party support companies that Hewlett-Packard continues to use MPE/iX applications -- which must be pretty crucial and costly to migrate.

It's a safe to say that the Worldwide Reseller Agreement for the emulator could be a benefit to HP's own operations. Such systems are usually scheduled for migration. But as Stromasys GM Bill Driest said at this month's Training Day, "I'm a quota-carrying salesman, and the phrase we use is "Liars are buyers.' "

In other words, a customer who says they'll migrate has a chance of being on the server longer than they expect. Does that make them liars when they say they'll be off the 3000? Maybe, but more likely it's a matter of timing and degree -- the same things that tamped down my panic when I heard in a phone booth in Lausanne's train station my distraught partner Abby telling me, "HP says the 3000 is going away. They're not going to make it anymore. They need to talk to you, before they announce."

I ponder the afterlife that's emerged because that's where I think my mom is today. We sent her off in a memorial service on Sunday, when three of us eulogized her with imaginations of her dancing in heaven, catching up my dad in the afterlife, or asserting, like I did (at 12:00 in the YouTube video), "They say nothing dies if it lives on in the hearts and minds of those who love it."

The MPE/iX OS, apps and IMAGE are doing more than living in hearts and minds. They live in companies like HP. The ecosystem was supposed to be the death of the 3000, according to the HP speaking in 2001. Instead, it's becoming a place where the customers who need help are getting supported. Even if they need an interim emulator to buy, so applications can remain where they lie.

The afterlife has a way of entrancing us all. I knew that HP's five-year time-frame for getting customers off the 3000 was outlandish, knew it even before I hung up the phone in that train station. But HP was writing the song that could've been presicent lyrics for the Squirrel Nut Zippers' song "Hell."

In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there'll be Hell to pay

On that tomorrow in 2001, I bought a new notebook and rode the train back to Paris. I began to write 50 questions for my briefing with HP. At the top of the first page I wrote the seminal query, the one that fueled 49 more:

Tell me why it's going away.

Some of those 50 questions I wrote in a fever of inquiry, roaring onward to London on the under-the-Channel Eurostar train. Things like open source or sharing of MPE code with third parties, or a delivery channel of HP-driven 3000 services beyond 2008 — those got resolved. An emulator -- pretty much unheard of in HP's business line of computers -- was still four years away from being licensed and more that 11 years away from having a sales kickoff in Mountain View. The third parties didn't get much of HP's direct help for a homesteading customer -- unless you count the limited-use release of MPE source, and the concessions like that emulator license, wrenched from HP by OpenMPE.

Let's review how some of the 49 have shaken out, six years after I passed that phone booth where the afterlife started to emerge for 3000 owners.

Will the customers and development community get access to HP's internal compilers, to make changes to MPE/iX? Absolutely not, and they probably never will. MPE is as polished as it will ever be. However, seven companies do have source code to MPE/iX. They write patches and workarounds for the OS and the database. It's a compromise, but that source code is something to keep MPE/iX from having Hell to pay.

What are HP's plans for its own 600 internal HP 3000 systems? Five extra years into the afterlife, there are still some 3000 systems running HP company functions.

Are the PA-RISC customers in the HP 9000 customer base being given an obsolescence date as well? Not only is PA-RISC obsolete now, but HP's own expert witness in the Oracle lawsuit said the HP-UX processor's successor, Itanium, has about seven more years of life.

In 1998 HP committed to Itanium for the 3000. What has happened in the market to change that commitment? We heard of a decline of "the 3000's ecosystem." What declined was sales from HP and its resellers, working on a 2003 sales cutoff. But replacing hardware is not the name of the game anymore in 2013. Sustaining applications is the essence of the ecosystem. Virtualization is the end state of every hardware system.

Will there be a planned reduction in Response Center staff trained in MPE?  There certainly was, but how planned is a matter of perspective. HP offered two Enhanced Early Retirement programs, plus moved its MPE staff onto concurrent support duties for other operating environments. Then sent most of the remaining support team away. Today, even 16-year vets like Bob Chase of the 3000 Escalation Center are out working for SMS Systems Maintenance Services as a Senior Technical Support Engineer. If you issue the magic transfer code 798 on an HP call, it gets 3000 sites to Response Center folks who know the 3000 is not a printer. You call for free patches. That's about all.

What are the possibilities of having solution providers take over some parts of MPE source, like the spooler or ODBC? Nobody is going to take over development of these parts of source, unless HP gets picked clean for parts in a takeover. Highly unlikely.

Is there any possibility of reviewing this decision? Customers still wish this was possible. Fewer all the time, though. Of those who wished for a reprieve, the ones who need a long-term MPE engine will look at the Stromasys emulator. The others have bitter memories and no hunger for anything HP-centric. Windows or Linux will do. 

Is this decision in the best interest of the 3000 owner, and if so, how? HP said back then that ending its 3000 operations was in the customers' best interest, because HP felt it was risky to remain a 3000 customer. That ongoing ownership of a 3000 was influenced by the vendor's leadership and plans, however -- so HP's decision started the clock on the afterlife. 

The Squirrel Nut Zippers' song does croon some hope for the afterlife, though. The truth and a clear picture emerges there -- like my mom dancing circles around my dad, scolding him for leaving too soon to see the great stuff to come.

Beauty, talent, fame, money, refinement , job skill and brain
And all the things you try to hide
Will be revealed on the other side.

Tomorrow afternoon HP will release its financials for its second quarter of 2013, a year when its CEO said "The patient is showing signs of recovering." People who wrote off HP as a split up company, PCs and enterprise IT, might turn out to have an outlook as hazy as HP's own about the 2013 ecosystem of the 3000. Of Luke Skywalker's friends's future in The Empire Strikes Back, he asked, "Will they die?"

"Difficult to tell," Yoga replied. "Always in motion is the future." As is the afterlife, from the way I see it in my seat this week, beyond that eulogy.

Making Headway with a Static OS

Stromasys has been selling its emulator products for more than a decade, and with significant success since HP's Digital group stopped the sale of Alpha and PDP servers. But VMS -- even while it's made a transition to OpenVMS over the years -- is still updated and supported by Hewlett-Packard. MPE/iX does not enjoy this status. There's a bit of irony by now, as it relates to the Stromasys product. You cannot order an MPE/iX server (with hardware and a fresh OS license) from HP any longer. But the Stromasys Charon HPA software is now part of HP's Worldwide Reseller Agreement.

Yes, this new software product that runs on industry-standard Intel hardware qualifies for HP resale status, unlike the server which it emulates. Go figure; nobody wants to be bothered with building hardware anymore.

But the lack of a supported OS as a keystone to a Stromasys emulator -- well, that seems novel. However, at the recent Training Day for the product, GM Bill Driest said selling a product with a vendor-curtailed OS is not all that unique, in his view.

"We don't see this market as fundamentally different from what we've done for a number of years now, to get 5,000 customers in 50 countries," Driest said on May 10 at the Training. "From a sales and marketing perspective, this is our US launch. I have a handful of customers in the US, so we are just embarking on this new market for us, worldwide. There are existing references and customers in Australia, New Zealand."

But from a tactical perspective, he said, those Digital system successes have taken place with an OS that's not available: the apps use versions of VMS that are locked in and not qualified for any extra engineering HP adds to that OS. This is, he believes, essentially the same situation as an MPE/iX market that can go no further than the 7.5 release.

While the replacement of aging hardware used to be the concern just five years ago, now the prospects for Charon in the 3000 world "are looking for partners, ISVs and consultants to take over more of the application administrator role. There's a revitalization of the important of the app to be done here. They'll be saving the hundreds of thousand to millions of dollars to rewrite that application." 

It's a conscious decision to not let an app retire, Driest added. It's a choice so common up to now that the Digital customers start with a plan to emulate temporarily. Then the reality of replacing an app sets in.

"Customers say they just need their systems a couple more years, and they have a plan to migrate," he said. "But once the monkey's off their back, they realize they have other higher priorities for their IT resources. Rarely do you see them reinvesting in a multimillion dollar project once they realize they can run their application successly in an emulation on industry standard technology.

"They're not coming to us anymore and saying 'Can you fix my HP 3000 hardware?' That's what we thought they were saying five to 10 years ago. We understand that the value is in that application layer. We're just a new hardware refresh. And our average deal size has not been about onesy-twosy sale in testing or development. There's organic growth in legacy systems, new opportunities out there. I wouldn't have predicted that five years ago."

Many Different Ways to Move Your Console

There's been plenty of change in the 3000 manager's life over the last 10 years. Some of it might involve changing the location of HP 3000s from one part of the IT shop to another. Users and support experts have discussed the many ways to adjust a 3000 console's location. The method you choose depends on budget, experience and technical skills depth.

Kent Wallace, a 3000 manager for Idaho-Oregon healthcare delivery system Primary Health, needed to move his 3000 console:

I was asked to move the console another 10 feet (more) from the rack (it's an N-Class HP 3000/N4000-100-22). What are the 3 pin positions on the wire that I need to extend this RS-232 cable?

Reid Baxter of JP Chase offered the most direct answer, for those willing to modify cables. "Pins 2, 3 and 7."

Tracy Johnson of Measurement Specialties added:

In addition to what Reid said, you can also get a 3-pin mini-din extension cord and extend the other end.

Our blog contributing editor Gilles Schipper chipped in with a solution offering even farther movement:

If you want to extend the range of the console to anywhere on the planet (at least where there’s Internet access) you could consider the HP Secure Web Console to replace the physical console.

Depending upon the condition of your physical console, this solution may also save a bit of wear and tear on your eyeballs.

(Schipper wrote us a great article on setting up such a web console.)

Former HP support engineer Lars Appel offered another take on Schipper's strategy:

While Gilles is right about the possibility of using the web console, it would probably be easier to use the already built-in dedicated LAN port of the N-Class systems that gives access to the GSP by telnet.

I prefer the “telnet console” over the “web console” because it gives more freedom in the choice of terminal emulator — whereas the web console typically lacks features like “easy cut and paste” or special key mappings (e.g. German language ;-) or something similar.

This prompted Schipper to clarify his suggestion:

Lars is absolutely right about the built-in “secure-web-console” that comes with all N-Class and all but the earliest A-Class e3000s.

And, yes, the built-in is definitely more functional, allowing cut-and-paste as well as telnet access, whereas the external variety has only Java access to it via a web browser and no cut-and-paste.

So, if one has a choice, the built-in is definitely superior and available with only proper configuration.
However, the external secure web console is available for all HP 3000s, and would still be most useful where is internal secure web console is not an option.

Jeff Kell, curator of the 3000 newsgroup where the advice appeared, added the last word and a little joke:

The internal one isn't really "secure" — it's plaintext telnet. The GSP "documents" some secure access mode (ssh? https?) but I could never get it to work on our A-Class.  Maybe it's an HP-UX thing. 

The external web console was the really insecure "secure" web console.  It used a secret decoder ring :-)

Old and Grand, and Still Worthy of Salute

Newswire Editorial 

One week before my latest birthday I was sharing hope about an aging icon. “She’s a tank,” I said to my sister Tina. We said this often to one another about my mom, who was 87 when she passed away late last month. Death and perhaps the  afterlife comes to everything that is vital, endearing and revered. Ginny Seybold, born in the era before radio was king, died peacefully in her bed. She was vital in heart and mind until nearly the end. All of us – brother Bob, Tina, older brother John, my bride and partner Abby — we all desired more years from mom.

But in a few hours from now I will board a jet to fly to Toledo, the place she gave birth to us, and put on the black suit I reserve for occasions of joy (my kids’ weddings) and of sad times. I will give a eulogy and certainly cry through it, just as I am at this very moment I’m creating these words. My mom taught me to read, gave me the first words of countless ones that I would learn to ride like fresh breeze throughout my life and hers. For more than a decade I would work and tinker at a novel, while she was devouring everything her Irish favorite Maeve Binchy wrote, until I could finally finish mine and send it to her, just like the hardbacks I’d buy because she wasn’t getting out to the library as easily. But when a novel would arrive, she’d scamper through the book like she would dance across floors from the 1930s up to her 80th birthday. My mom outlasted expectations of her vivacity.

Since I am her boy, I can use a comparison with a bold stroke. In that outlasting, the push of the tank of her heart, she resembled the computer I have written about for more than half my life. People expected the 3000’s demise many years ago. Now with an emulated version selling and shipping, for the 3000’s relations and disciples, Charon has become the kind of tank that Tina and I marveled at when we visited mom in the Franciscan Care Center.

Tina found that resting place for our mom, relentless and persistent in locating a spot where Ginny could receive the attention to both her heart and her body. The former was strong in spirit, the latter holding out as well as anything created before FDR became President.

I think we all have someone older in our lives who we wish would last forever. For some, this might not be a person they love as a friend or a member of their birth family. People who die like Roger Ebert of the film world, or Steve Jobs of our own industry, or Dr. Suess of everyone’s childhood, they all leave holes in our hearts too. This is the first way I reply when everyone, so kind even if we don’t know one another well, tells me they’re sorry for my loss. “I have a hole in my heart now,” I say. I tap my chest and I can say no more at that moment. Loss is like that, a fog that seeps in and whiles away time as you remember why you loved whatever or whoever you did, their perfection and the parts that were very human, very imperfect.

Like you and your community, I owe my mom a lot. She believed in beginnings and taught me to question and debate and express my imagination. Not always with the best of examples. But as my counselor and friend Jim Hoadley says, “She was a teacher, you know — she taught you how to show compassion.”

I know it’s not the same thing to love a computer’s ideals and elegance, to revere the struggle of years when our community had to learn compassion about the imperfections of the 3000’s creator. Even still, we had our memories that remain beyond the death of the Bill & Dave HP. The times that Marc Hoff of HP, taken by cancer, would give out his home phone number on the back of business cards, or swear to eat a new MPE release tape if it came out with a bug in it. The times that Bruce Toback or Wirt Atmar would make us chortle or fume, and then become richer and smarter through the miracle of the newsgroup, before they were claimed by heart disease. For me, the quiet confidence and spark of revival from Danny Compton in Texas, who took a discarded Maestro software tool and created ROC Software – so many years after he got a death sentence at age 8, and then outlasted the forecast by more than 30 years to build a family, products, and then a company.

For my own family in this sad week, I try to think of the joy that I saw in mom’s face, especially on the night of her 80th birthday party, one my bride created for a pip of a mother in law. Ginny was vivacious, at her very best. She was lively in her later chapters, like the night I saw her dance on roller skates at age 52 with us grown kids, or that night she banged a tambourine onstage in her new home in Vegas, 80 years old and smiling through way too many choruses of the Beatles’ “They Say It’s Your Birthday.” My mom, turning around to look at the cover band playing in that faux Irish pub inside a casino. Turning as if to ask, “Surely you must be done?” And the band looking back at this marvel of a pip, maybe saying, “Wow, I hope I can do that at 80.”

There is so much more to write about endings and the afterlife, a life where I’m sure mom now dances on the legs that she lost in her final years. I only know that words fall short of feelings about long relationships of love. There is one word I will invoke at her service this Sunday, the first Sunday after everybody’s Mother’s Day. The word is pip, and my mom was one. A word with more than one definition, just like my mom. Pip, an excellent person or thing. Pip, a crack of a baby bird’s shell. Pip, a small, hard seed in a fruit. They say that a person never dies if they live in our hearts and minds forever. So I’ve got her in there, and deep inside my heart, too. Here’s to anything old that has become grand. As the British say in salute, pip-pip.

 

Virtualization, Emulation and the Cloud

At the recent meeting of Charon HPA/3000 experts, prospects, and allies, a question emerged from Steve Cooper of Allegro, who wanted an update on the cloud-based capabilities of Charon for 3000s. “Technologically it’s a slam dunk,” said Stromasys General Manager Bill Driest (above), adding that the implementation on Charon VAX and Alpha versions has been tested and implemented for about eight customers so far. Others have been working with a perpetual license for the product in their private clouds.

"We know some customers who have bought a perpetual license are running it in a private cloud environment," Driest said at the recent HP 3000 Training and Social Event. "How we're going to monetize that market is something I think the people in this room can help us with."

The company was represented at last year's VM World virtualization conference. "Cloud is a growing part of our business," Driest said. "We had a full cloud demonstration, live, and up and running. We're able to provision a machine on the fly. We had two different sized VAXes, two different sized Alphas. We're trying to assess the market for this. How big is that subset?"

 

For manufacturing applications, "You need to be close to the wire, and you're not close to being in the cloud. For certain HIPAA data [in healthcare], it would need to be a private cloud without a public cloud. We've tested, we've sized, we've done some of the cost models.  Today, if we want to sell a perpetual unlimited license we get the money up front. In a cloud model it might be a 3-year, $1,000 a month kind of thing."

Stromasys is looking at how cloud implementations of its product change the dynamics of how the company goes to market. "We are very interested in the conversation, but not from the technology perspective. It works and the customers are starting to ask questions about the cloud for certain sets of apps. They say 'I don't want an emulator, I want you to take the whole thing.' But we're not sure from a business side where we divert some of our resources -- on how we market it, how we price it, and how we sell it."

Is an HP 3000 customer more applicable to this kind of virtualization, where a customer only wants to run an application, without datacenter investment or on-site IT management? "I don't think we have a clear understanding of that yet," Driest said. "From the technology side we're there. But is the world ready for emulation and the cloud on legacy systems all at once?"

Today, Stromasys sales are 40 percent direct to customers, and 60 percent through a reseller channel that includes HP. Some "boutique VARs" know niche products. "Someone's in the MANMAN market with a 3000, and these VARs focus on that," Driest said. "The emulator comes as part of their normal work."

An HP 3000 support provider asked about how that channel could help him help his customers, 135 sites running HP 3000s. "So they don't keep dropping off every July fiscal cycle."

"Well, we could start with my card," Driest said, drawing a gust of laughter from the support company as well as the room full of the 3000 ecosystem players.

HP's 3000 virtualization was MOST-ly done

Nineteen springtimes ago, HP was offering an operating system to run alongside MPE on the same hardware. To say that HP's Multiple Operating System Technology was virtualization might be an overstatement. But the unreleased product gave Unix and MPE equal footing in a single hardware system. MPE was the cradle that Unix would rest in, much like Linux is the cradle where the PA-RISC virtualization rests in the Stromasys Charon product. The only reason it was not released might have been the horsepower demands on the hardware. MOST was not starved off the price list by a lack of HP desire from the 3000 division. But the daring of its engineering was on a battleground between HP's own products.

I worked on external communications for MOST for Hewlett-Packard in the spring of 1995. It was one of the biggest assignments I took on during the months that led up to creating the 3000 NewsWire. The audacity of putting a venerated OS in as a bootstrap system for HP-UX apps led me to believe HP was exploring every prospect to win any customer who was veering toward the market's magnetic pull of Unix.

HP showed off external specifications for MOST to key partners in '95. The product was scheduled to emerge in the fall of that year on Series 9x9 and 99X PA-RISC systems. These were the highest horsepower 3000s in the HP stable. MOST was to begin with two partitions, one for MPE/iX and the other for HP-UX. Or, a customer could run two separate instances of MPE on a single server. MPE was to be the primary partition, controlling the uptime of the hardware.

In one sense, this product wouldn't have been a 3000 -- because half of it would be dedicated to running Unix apps and processes. Independence, a white paper on the product stated, "is especially important, as the co-dependencies between the different OS should be as small as possible."

MOST might have been ahead of its time in hardware requirements, but it reminds me of the virtualization that nearly every operating system enjoys today. The Stromasys Charon lineup, the VMware partitions which run Windows, Linux, and Mac OS all at once -- all of these flow from the concept that drove MOST. Well, there's a major difference. HP didn't release MOST, even after a beta test period and surveys that showed most of the customers saw it as an evolutionary path to heterogenous computing.

"The future path is almost impossible to foresee," HP's briefing stated. "Windows or OS/2? WARP? Unix or NT? Once proprietary, but now open systems?"

The software would have realized the founding principle of PA-RISC engineering: "Eventually, any PA-RISC operating system will be able to operate concurrently and independently on the same hardware platform."

HP delivered on some of these promises many years later, employing its Superdome designs for high-end servers with flexible partitions. This was not strictly emulation, because the native hardware remained the same. It's a sad piece of history that by the time Superdome was rolled into the markets, MPE/iX was not an environment supported on the high-priced server.

The OS came closest to its rightful place as keystone of HP's business computing strategy with MOST, however. HP said that it "is a natural complement to the four strategic directions of the HP 3000:

• Reinforce HP 3000's strengths in mission critical OLTP environments
• Superior integration in a multi-platform environment
• Provide an evolution to client/sever computing
• Deliver innovative applications and services

The Hewlett-Packard of 1995 was looking for a way to "let customers add, test and develop new applications without purchasing a new Unix box." That might have been the downfall for MOST. A successful server, steered by MPE but also able to run Unix apps, would surely have been a roadblock to more HP 9000 server sales. HP bet hard on Unix in that era, a play that now seems to have run out of step with the Windows and Linux choices of today.

The magic code for licenses HP never sold

The meeting room brimmed at the Computer History Museum May 10, where Stromasys spooled out more than six hours of technical briefing as well as the product strategy and futures for Charon HPA/3000. This emulator was anticipated more than eight years ago, but only came to the market in 2012. And that gap, largely introduced by HP's intellectual property lawyers, killed one license needed to run MPE on any Intel server.

But the good news is that an HP licensing mechanism still exists for MPE/iX to operate under the Charon emulator -- pretty much on any good-sized Intel system that can run VMware and Linux. However, you need to know how to ask HP for the required license.

Charon HPA product manager Paul Taffel uncorked the phrase that permits a customer to switch their MPE/iX from HP iron to PC or Mac hardware. It's called "an intra-company license transfer." If you don't ask for it by name, the standard HP transfer forms won't pass muster. Most SLTs happen between two companies. Who'd sell themselves their own hardware, after all?

In short HP's using its existing and proven Software License Transfer (SLT) mechanism to license emulated 3000s. It's doing this because of that delay which ran out the clock on a hard-earned path to the future. HP called it the Emulator License back in 2005. It just happened to need an emulator on sale in order for a customer to buy this license.

The Emulator License isn't quite like the mythical griffin of ancient lore. It made more sense than a jackalope. But the process to earn one of these licenses is not well known yet, which was one of the reasons Stromasys held its training and social event.

Perhaps HP's lawyers -- who certainly had to be convinced by the 3000 division at the time -- insisted on the "existing emulator" clause in the license. The license was supposed to cost $500, but HP could never collect that money without a working emulator for a 3000 on the market. Then HP stopped issuing MPE/iX licenses because its Right To Use program ran out at the end of 2008. No RTU, no emulator license: this was a moment when the 3000s in the world were limited to whatever HP iron was on hand.

However, this was not the first time HP had ever tried to make it legal to run one of its OS products on non-HP gear. By the time OpenMPE wore HP down and got that Emulator License, the Stromasys product line was running hundreds of instances of VAX and PDP emulated systems, all using VMS. Digital, even after it became part of HP, didn't care if you were emulating its "end-of-lifed" PDP and VAX systems. What Digital-HP cared about was the ongoing support revenue, and the good will, of keeping older systems running where they remain the best solution.

This time around, for the 3000, HP intended to cut off all of its business by 2006. Er, 2008. Well, certainly by 2010, even though some 3000 owners still could call on HP for MPE and hardware support during 2011. No matter. Customers are the ones who determine the life of a computer environment, and software never dies. At the Stromasys training event, general manager Bill Driest said that the natural end state for every computer is virtualization -- or what the classic 3000 customer would call emulation.

"We're here to help preserve the software investments that you've all made," Driest said. "We've always believed that the value of the system is in the uniqueness of the application. For 14 years we've had this tagline that keeps coming back: preserving the investments we've all made across these hardware generations."

So to recap, you contact HP's Software License Transfer department. You tell them you want to do an intra-company transfer. And instead of the $500 that HP said this emulator license would cost eight years ago, it's $400 -- the same fee HP wants to collect on any MPE/iX system transfer. You need to have a 3000 license to begin with, of course.

You don't get to create MPE/iX licenses for Charon systems. Stromasys cannot sell you one. But a copy of MPE/iX does exist in the freeware download, model A202. It's just not licensed, because you attest you won't use this freeware for commercial use when you run through configuration. The licensed copy of MPE/iX in freeware -- the holy grail of open source pursued by OpenMPE for more than nine years -- is as much a mythical creature as an emulator license. This isn't the first time Hewlett-Packard built an item for 3000 customers that it never did sell. But at least the previous one got into testing before it was killed off. More on that tomorrow.

Socializing can lead to contained footprints

Our friend and columnist Scott Hirsh just called to confirm he'll be at tonight's Stromasys HP 3000 Social at the Tied House. I took the walk over there today, because it's just down the street from the Caltrain Station as well as the terminal for the San Jose light rail. Buffalo burger is today's special.

But what's more special is the range of 3000 sites who'd be Charon HPA/3000 prospects, if only they knew how to focus on fitting into a new server paradigm. One site that Scott visited out in Union City, Calif. was discussing available IT datacenter floor space. "How are you fixed for that?" says Scott.

"Well, we've got this big system in the back of the datacenter we have to keep running," the IT manager says, explaining the server keeps significant parts of the company running. Even though Scott is out there in Union City to help the manager with Dell solutions, he's curious about what this box is.

"We're pretty sure it's an old HP 3000," the manager says. Scott's invited him tonight for some beverages and heavy appetizers, but there's been no RSVP yet from Union City. If you're in the area, come by tonight, or tomorrow at the Computer History Museum. You might find a way to free up floor space while you don't have to throw your critical MPE applications overboard.

Hope to see you tonight over a pint. You never know what opportunity might bloom, like those curbside flowers growing out of a beer cask on Villa Street at the Tied House.

Who'll Be Social and Train, and Why

We've been hearing from 3000 community members who are on the way to the Stromasys HP 3000 Social and Training. The official RSVP list is at Stromasys, but we've gotten some notice from people who want to ensure they meet up at the Tied House brewpub -- Thursday evening (tomorrow!) or at the Computer History Museum Friday 10-4.

On the same day I got notice from Doug Smith -- a 3000 consultant and developer and support provider -- that he'll be at the Stromasys event, HP tried again to wrap up the lifespan of Windows XP. The company that gave up on MPE and the HP 3000 might be just as misguided about XP's future as MPE's. It seems so simple to HP.

Let’s face it—reminiscing about old software programs 20 or so years from now won’t bring about nearly half as many warm memories as that 1967 Pontiac Firebird of your youth. 

You could say that updating business software is akin to changing your toothbrush after it’s seen better days. Can you imagine running Windows 98 on your home PC? Then why would you fight tooth and nail, stubbornly looking into a variety of contingency plans and options to hold onto Windows XP?

The why of holding on is obvious. Smaller companies -- and some surprising large ones -- cannot make a good business case for putting their Firebird of a business server up on blocks. The math on an emulator solution, supplied in good stead with support for MPE and indie software tools -- holds up against projects that start in six figures and take at least a year to deploy.

The Tied House and the Computer History Museum will be places to learn why that toothbrush (the HP hardware) might be old, but the fresh toothpaste (MPE) is still worthy of plenty of extra years. Doug Smith thinks so. So does Walter Murray, who developed HP's COBOL products for the 3000 before exiting Hewlett-Packard to manage 3000s for the state of California. Then there's the contract programmers, and more, simply off our heads-up emails.

There's Scott Hirsh, for example. He's the former chairman of SIGSYSMAN and said "Hey, why not stop at the pub and meet some people." Scott, a former Newswire columnist (Worst Practices) is now a storage expert at Dell. He started out managing 3000s for Rosenberg Capital Management in San Francisco, about 15 years before HP started bundling Windows XP.

Bruce Hobbs and Mike Watson are making the trip to the Training on Friday, flying up from Southern California and Colorado, respectively. Just for the day, to see the software in action. There's an opportunity to help out a customer or two, one who's got their own software, no license hurdles and little desire or budget to buy that disruptive toothbrush.

Tom McNeal will be at the Tied House tomorrow evening. He's a veteran of the kernel project when the first 3000 multiprocessor platform was released, in 1991. Tom's adding the brew pub visit to a busy night. You might be similarly inclined. "I thought I'd send this, which is signed by all the folks that worked in that lab."

We also had a dinner party commemorating our kernel product, and that was a lot of fun. Frank Ho was the project manager, and I worked on the memory manager, which was primarily developed by Marcia McConnell. The other, going clockwise from Marcia, were Simon Cutting, Peggy Chen, Craig Hada, Hung Nguyen, Kim Rogers, Vijay Bajaj, Dave Rubin, and Satya Mylavarabhatla.  As far as I know, Marcia is the only one still working at HP.

Martin Gorfinkel, creator of 3000 software Fantasia for printing and an advocate for the community, says "I still get support calls for Fantasia. "Mostly I would like to have my editor and Fantasia for my own use. All that should work nicely within the limitations they place on the freeware emulation." He added that he needed to get a new PC to load it. The newest PC he had was about five years old. Gorfinkel will be at Friday's training session.

It's not tough to imagine that between a free pub evening and free lunch at the History Museum -- places where you can meet with 3000 legend Stan Sieler, who says "I'm hoping to be at the Thursday social, and present for most of some or most of Friday -- a 3000 user could network with people who've had firsthand experience with emulation, or are ready to share stories about how they hope Charon HPA/3000 will help them in an interim for migration, or as a hot archival system for MPE data.

I hope to see you there. I'm brining a fresh toothbrush, just to commemorate another run of years with something built as well as the toothpaste that's MPE.

 

Emulator's days are not so early after all

"It's early days," say more than a few community vendors about the lifespan of the Charon HPA/3000 emulator. They point to a lack of reference accounts. Some note that no third parties are engaged to teach and train and support the virtualization solution. Even the vendor acknowledges the performance of this 3000-on-Intel magic needs to surpass the power of a 4-way N-Class system.

But it's not early according to Adager's CEO Rene Woc. We tried out the accepted wisdom and found him pushing back on the popular view. It's misguided, by the reports he's getting from customers small, medium and very large. He reached out for a Yogi Berra quote to guide his outlook. "The future ain't what it used to be," Yogi said. That's especially apt when customers are gathering license data for your software, to be used on Charon. Or when they share their intentions, which is to keep MPE software running well into that future. How different it is than it used to be.

These are customers getting information about Adager's license transfer plan. "It's just another MPE machine," Woc reported. "We are treating the emulator just like HP3000 hardware."

As has been well-chronicled by now, there's no technical issues in this complete emulation. "Our customers didn't come across any issues," Woc said. Given the reputation of the Adager labs -- a tight-knit group that uncovered the last, corruptive bug in IMAGE and alerted HP to spark a repair -- "no problems" means Charon runs as expected.

Adager charges a $975 license transfer fee to move software from one HPSUSAN number to another. The software does not cross check with an HPCPUNAME, so moving the HPSUSAN to the emulated server, plus that transfer fee, covers the extent of Adager's operations. This is one vendor that 3000 users don't have to work out a license with. One of many (like Minisoft) who see continuing business coming out of emulated 3000s.

"It's to Stromasys credit they've been able to distribute this news about it," Woc said. "Our customers have made the decision to go ahead with it. It's beyond testing. It's between decision and testing, and then putting it to work. We've gotten very encouraging signals, and not necessarily from hobbyists. From actual companies that are at different stages. People have moved on from testing to ordering their license transfers [from us].

"People have called to order a trial Adager license" as a result of Charon HPA/3000 testing, he added. "At this stage it's taking off. As far as tangible results right now, I think it has a good psychological effect. People feel comfortable knowing that they're not facing a closed future."

Yogi's comment about the future that "ain't what it used to be" was a darkening one in the old days of software and systems. A computer fell out of product lineup, then the vendor ended support. The customers fled and the independent software community curtailed support. Now the future includes many years of 3000 production for these license transferring customers.

And Woc said that customers include some very large corporations, because Adager has always been in shops very large and very small. Robelle is on the Stromasys bandwagon too. These kinds of software products don't make up applications off the shelf. But to be honest, software off the shelf has not been the 3000's specialty for a long time. Ecometry and MANMAN aside, and a few dozen Amisys sites -- the 3000 keeps working on customer-written apps. Only these tool providers, like VEsoft and its MPEX -- need to agree to licenses for Charon. The rest of the solution is code a customer owns because they're built it themselves.

The emulator product "takes the pressure off in the sense that MPE cannot be continued," Woc said. "It will run on the latest and greatest Intel hardware." He added that VMware, part of the solution, "is a fully supported product. From that point of view, I think people feel confident  they have an option -- knowing also that the [off the shelf]  3000 applications have very little development. The shops that depended on Ecometry and the like know they will still have an engine to keep running their business."

If the economy fully recovers, some of these emulator sites will move ahead with migrations. "We will see. If they can still handle their business, even after that, they may just stay. If a new business model comes up, like mail order became ecommerce so many years ago. It's so hard to predict." These days are early for some application users. For others, it's a matter of scheduling an emulator product that's a small fraction of the cost of a migration -- both in capital cost as well as the price of disruption of what's not the future, but today.

The Kind of License that Still Matters

Licensing doesn't matter to most of the homesteading community anymore, according to a long-time consultant, former HP SE and board member of the Interex and OpenMPE user and advocate groups. There's an important distinction to be made about what Paul Edwards believes about the 3000 manager. The licenses that matter are the ones that permit the use of supported products.

That puts HP's MPE/iX licenses on the heap of casual concerns while running a 3000 operation in 2013. Hewlett-Packard arranged for a $500 emulator license transfer. The deal was set up six years before an emulator would ever go live on a customer's product site. But the HP license is missing permissions for the Hewlett-Packard subsystem software, some of it still essential. The COBOL II compiler and TurboStore/iX are the most common products among those subsystems.

"Theoretically, the cast of lawyers at HP thinks MPE has got lots of value," Edwards said. "But Joe Computer User, running a 3000 in a little company somewhere, really doesn't care. He'll never see an HP rep who's going to come out and find he doesn't have an MPE license. He'll run whatever applications he's got -- Amisys, something written in Cognos or Speedware, whatever it is -- he'll run that the way it is."

The value of an HP 3000 MPE license seems to be dropping. Edwards, who saw more than a few companies using multiple 3000s on a single license back in the 1980s -- and said he "looked the other way" for the benefit of the customer -- said he bought his latest HP 3000 for less than $500. And with that purchase, a valid license for a 3000 that could be transferred to an emulator. Or sold at a price. Last week the 3000 community saw one of the first open requests to validate an MPE license. By itself, sans hardware, apparently.

It probably happens all the time, but Cypress Technology was putting together a resale that needed a valid HP 3000 license. The wording on the message on the 3000 newsgroup might have been hurried. But the point seemed to be about documentation of the license transfer, not the 3000 system.

I am looking for an original purchase order or invoice showing a sale of one HP 3000 or 9000 box that is dated before August 16, 1994. I'm just looking for the paper showing the sale from HP to whoever, it does not matter the buying entity. I don't need the hardware, license, or rights to anything. The PO or invoice must have one of the below boxes on it and be dated before August 16, 1994. $350 offered.

What followed was a list of six HP PA-RISC workstations and servers, headed up by a Series 918. "I would think some old timers on this list that don't throw anything would have to have something like this. Email me if you have it. I only need one proof of sale."

Proof of sale is one of the chief requirements for an HP Software License Transfer. Although when you think about that date, it's 19 years ago. Maybe it's remarkable that a proof of selling a 3000 -- just an invoice, PO, or a letter -- would be worth that much nearly two decades later. It's likely that this kind of request just shows there are a few Joe Computer Users who care about licenses.

Licenses for independent software, especially the key utilities like data exchange tools or database managers, fall into a different class of respect. These are products still maintained through support by the creator, unlike the 3000 or MPE. Edwards added that if an audit of a homesteading site raised questions about the nature of the MPE/iX license, a manager could rightly say, "Listen, they don't even make this computer anymore." Active development and support are the watchwords for licenses that matter, for much of the community.

Goodie box delivers 3000 skills, tools

Howard Schelin started his HP 3000 career in Miami migrating. It was 20 years ago, and The Miami Herald had to make a move -- away from IBM and onto the 3000. There was much for Schelin to teach the IT department then, and the Interex user group catalogued all of what was needed. This week a generous box of that reference material and software arrived at our office, because the offices of the Herald are moving along, just like the 3000.

In a few weeks the Miami Herald will be relocated to a new building about 15 miles southwest of 1 Herald Plaza. As in any move, there is a lot of material that gets pushed to the curb. I am sending you items that will not be making the trip to the new location.

The box as big as a Ram Truck battery had a reel of tape on top, a release of the Interex Contributed Software Library from the days of the early '90s, when DAT cassettes were still a novelty to the user group. But then there were a hearty stack of the familiar boxes that contained software treasures created by fellow managers of 3000s, then given away for the community to use.

Now the HP 3000 is making its migration away from the Herald, Schelin says. "The HP 3000 stay at the Herald is drawing to a close, as its last application is on schedule to be migrated to the cloud by April, 2014. I have been an avid reader of the 3000 NewsWire for many, many years, and I hope you find a home for the enclosed material."

Considering that some of these programs and proceedings continue to be useful tools for the homesteader -- and are difficult to locate -- he's probably right. Maybe not so much that 1993 lab handbook on Managing a POSIX HP3000 System, although the lab was taught by MPE legend Jeff Vance. But the Catalog of the CSL for that year, printed and bound, is a working collector's item. 

The goodie box includes eight years' worth of technical papers on CDs, some discs so classic that the boxes advise the user to be sure to have Windows 3.1 to look at the material. But the DDS tapes -- the lingua franca of 3000 data -- start in 1997 and run through 2004. By 1998 there was a Freeware account of software, added to the Contributed Software Library. As Michael Hensley explains in the 1999 Supplement to the CSL Catalog, indexed by name and by keyword

When HP added Posix to MPE, creating MPE/iX 5.0, it became possible to port many popular "Unix" utilities to MPE. Since it was possible, many people started to do so, and then made these utilities available via the Internet. When HP was asked about providing C++ on MPE, HP suggested downloading the GNU G++ product via the Internet. I sarcastically asked if they had actually tried it, over a typical-at-the-time 9600 baud modem.

As a penance, I decided to make these utilities available via tape. Although most people now have access to fater Internet connections, the size of the downloads has grown ever larger. I think the tape will continue to be useful for some time to come.

By the time Schelin and the Herald IT staff were gathering these resources, the HP 3000 was moving into its open source era. The specifics of CSL programs that worked for MPE V (the Classic 3000 OS) as well as XL were being supplemented by the Posix/Unix offerings. (Click on the image at the left to see who was writing the software in the era, and what's available on the tapes.) It was one of the richest times for software on the platform. Y2K was sparking interest and renewed investment in the 3000. We were growing the 3000 NewsWire on the wings of that interest.

These resources have outlasted the user group that marshaled them. In time, the hardcopy delivery seemed unneeded. The Proceedings of the final HP World Conference in 2004 remain shrink-wrapped. But Interex went out of business the following summer. And all of that Internet resource went dark. OpenMPE has gathered some of this online, but good fellows like Schelin keep adding to the community's assets.

I'd be glad to make Howard's desire come true, and let this material work its magic in other shops where 3000s will be working for, as Hensley said, "for some time to come." We can also hope that this classic resource goes to live in the cloud in the future, just like that final HP 3000 application at the Herald. Email me if you'd like more detail of the contents, and I can pass them along. Via US Mail, just like they were delivered in the 3000's classic era. 

Congrats, Pivital on 10 years an HP VAR

Ten years ago this month the HP 3000 community gained its final official reseller. Pivital Solutions stepped in to sell HP 3000s, even though Hewlett-Packard only intended to manufacture the computers until the end of October, 2003.

In fact the final HP sales of the 3000 crept into 2004, including deliveries and back inventory. Pivital took on the spot because the company had confidence the 3000 user base would be needing official and trained support for many more years to come. An official place in the HP authorized reseller lineup would enhance what the company had been doing for years already.

That extra service has translated into new resources, even recently. Pivital is one of the few holders of a license for the source code for MPE/iX. Support companies use that resource to create workarounds and even custom patches.

In 2003, we wrote:

Pivital Solutions CEO Steve Suraci hears the tick of a different clock than the one which HP has been counting down for 3000 sales. Less than six months before new HP 3000 sales will end at HP, Pivital is ramping up its efforts as the newest authorized reseller of the servers in North America.

Pivital has taken over the system integrator spot in HP’s 3000 hardware channel that’s being abandoned by Dimension Data. Suraci said that Dimension released much of its 3000-capable integration staff which Pivital was working with, and Pivital saw an opportunity emerging from the situation. It may seem to be late, but Pivital sees its entry as early in the lifespan of the 3000 customer 

“Strategically, we know there’s going to be long-term homesteading customers on the HP 3000 out there,” the CEO said. “Even HP is attesting to a quadrant of the market where people will homestead forever. That is a big portion of the customer base which we deal in today.”

The company had built up a practice of offering the application and then extending MPE support to customers using the GrowthPower ERP application, moving on in the late 1990s to expand its customer base beyond ERP sites. “We found we were becoming more involved in the other business aspects of these companies,” Suraci said, leading to partnerships with Minisoft and Cognos, for example.

But as of late last year, “we felt we no longer had Dimension Data as an outlet to move 3000 hardware to customers. We needed an outlet to sell hardware and get the deals done.”

 National hardware partners couldn’t interest Pivital in becoming part of their folds, and HP was willing to let the 18-person firm with operations across several US states take over the reseller spot from Dimension Data. Suraci said selling 3000 systems to customers is only the start of what Pivital plans to do with its new prospect. Selling the last round of new hardware to sites which need to upgrade from older models lets Pivital position itself for support business in the future, as well as other hardware sales. 

HP has announced it will continue to make N-Class and A-Class CPUs, IO and network cards, peripherals and memory available for new sales during 2004, though Suraci said the vendor hasn’t released specifics of how that aftermarket will work with the authorized channel. The support business that flows from hardware sales looks to be a more reliable prospect for revenues for Pivital. Suraci wants HP to see the company as a contender for any third-party 3000/MPE support partnerships HP may launch in the years to come.

Value Hidden, and Uncovered

This morning I came in to find our backup job stalled. Abortjob was ineffective, as was abortio. I ended up rebooting the system. While coming up, I got the “defective sector” message with “FILE.GROUP.ACCOUNT has an extent with unreadable data.” The file is now locked and I need to use FSCHECK to unlock it. How can I determine which drive this extent is on? I have a good idea which one it is, but I’d like to be 100 percent sure before I replace and reload.

Stan Sieler replies:

FSCHECK’s DISPLAYEXTENTS command may help. Note that, if I recall correctly, it displays logical unit numbers, not exactly LDEVs.

I ran checkslt on the MPE/iX 7.5 SLT and it failed. It failed on a DDS-2 drive on two different systems but passed when a DDS-3 drive was used. The MPE/iX 7.5 SLT is on a 120-meter DDS-2 tape. Is this usual?

Michael Berkowitz replies:

What makes you think you don’t have two bad DDS-2 drives? When we had them, we went through them like water, replacing them every couple of months. They are bad news from the word go.

But how can I have two bad DDS-2 drives?

Gilles Schipper notes:

Not surprising at all. I once experienced the following situation. Our customer had a disk crash. Fortunately, it happened just after a full backup. HP replaced the faulty disk drive and we proceeded to perform a system reload from the just-completed backup that had been to a DDS-2 tape drive.

As soon as we mounted the tape (on exactly the same tape drive that created it), we received a console message indicating AVR error on LDEV 7. I knew right away we had a problem. HP returned to replace the tape drive with another DDS-2 drive. Still no joy. We recommended replacing the drive with a DDS-3 tape drive. As soon as this was done, the reload proceeded without further problems.

The bottom line is stay away from DDS-2 drives, as far away as possible. From this experience and others, I have concluded that the DDS-2 drive is, to put it mildly, flaky.

Who Will Come to the Emulator's Party

Next week the Charon HPA/3000 emulator will have what one vendor calls its coming out party in North America. The software performs the miracle of making low-cost PCs act like HP's PA-RISC 3000 hardware. Just describing that technical ability widens the eyes of 3000 homesteaders, veterans and some vendors.

On the evening of May 9, we'll get to see some of the eyes of people who want to drop by and gaze on each other over a beverage at the Tied House. The next day will reveal who's doing the closer looking at this software solution. Training will commence at 10. Lunch is included. Cooperation and imagination will be optional entrees on the day's menu.

One HP support company called the other day and said they're promoting Charon as a viable path for a homesteader's future. "I feel like I've been hawking the Stromasys product myself awhile," said Chad Lester of the MPE Support Group. Another company in Austin, the Support Group Inc. that serves the MANMAN and ERP customer, has a strong belief in the future of Charon HPA/3000.

But so far, we've only heard of one company that's engaged a third party software vendor in an instance of emulator production use. Cognos is working at the Australian insurance firm where Warren Dawson has testified to us, as well as to the European HP users who attended an event similar to next week's. IBM's Charlie Maloney, a veteran of many Cognos days, has started looking for an IBM PR rep to talk with us about licensing Powerhouse for emulator use.

Technical ability will need to be married to software property rights for this software to make an impact. We're hearing ample talk from MPE/iX software vendors about license support. Robelle's going on record as a Charon supporter. VEsoft wants to work with customers who'd like to run MPEX, Security/3000 and Audit/3000 on the emulator. HP has an emulator license for the product, legally operable so long as a currently licensed 3000 is being turned off to transfer its license to Charon.

More than one vendor with plenty of 3000 software ISV connections believes it's early days for the emulator's commercial merits. It's up to the homesteading customer to arrange all license arrangements to move their software utilities and applications to a PC-Linux host for virtualized MPE/iX hosting. It will be a good sign if some customers arrive at next week's event who have third party apps, such as MANMAN, Ecometry or even Amisys, and they need to arrange the arrival of their software. Some software vendors are waiting to hear about their emulator needs on this unlimited platform.

Of course, nothing is really unlimited in the world of computing. Right now Stromasys says it's hard at work to ensure its highest tier of virtualization software can match and exceed the power of an HP-built N-Class. Even Itanium endured these kinds of early days, many months of them, while it weathered its debut. It was a couple of years before any Itanium powered computer could keep up with the sleekest of PA-RISC processors.

It won't take that long for Charon HPA/3000. A virtualization simply mimics the hardware's architecture, instead of the task of retaining emulation while offering a new instruction set.

Expect the crowd at the Tied House to revel in the return of a 3000 community that hasn't met in North America since 2011. There will be the top executives from Stromasys to make the taps flow at the brewpub, then pour on the technical details and new horsepower developments the day after in training. Hundreds of HP 3000 customers have been contacted about the event. It will only take a handful of commercial applications -- maybe as few as two -- to come to the emulator's party and make it a hit.

How to Shift a 3000 from FTP to SFTP

I have a script that uses FTP to send files to a site which we open by IP address. We've been asked to change to SFTP (port 22) and use the DNS name instead of an IP address, and I don't believe the 3000 supports that. Does it? If so, how?

Allego's Donna Hofmeister replies:

I'm not sure you want to do SFTP on port 22.  That's the SSH port. SFTP is meant to use port 115. Have a look at one of Allegro's white papers on how to do SFTP on MPE

If you are going to use DNS, you must have your 3000 configured for that.  It's easily done. 

However, if you've never done anything on your 3000 make it act like a real computer (oh -- that's right, it is a real computer and fully capable of using DNS), this can turn into a can o'worms.

For 'DNS lite', it's probably simplest to:

1. copy hostsamp. net to hosts.net

2. edit hosts.net to make sure it has

127.0.0.1 loopback
1.2.3.4   name    <--- where 1.2.3.4 and name are corrected to the system you want to connect to

3. copy the NSSWSAMP.net to nsswitch.net

4. edit nsswitch.net to have this line:

hosts : files[SUCCESS=return NOTFOUND=continue]

With this done, the 3000 sorta kinda acts like it's using DNS (because it's looking the the hosts file for how to translate 'name' into '1.2.3.4')

Tony Summers provides a caveat:

One warning. The upgrade from FTP to sFTP (or SSH FTP etc) can involve more change to your scripts that you expect.  

What we do for FTP (originally on the HP 3000, and now on the HP-UX server) is build a text file with the commands (the sample below, edited)

cat FTPT0070
open ftpserver.site.co.uk
user USERNAME PASSWORD
ascii
get /export/002_iccm_extract_1161.csv ICR21161

quit

The file is then presented to the FTP client. On the HP 3000 it was something like....

RUN FTP.ARPA.SYS < FTPT0070 > FTPS0070  

Then both the output file, FTPS0070, and any JCWs set by the FTP program were inspected to test the success of the FTP session.

cat FTPS0070

Connected to xxxxxx.co.uk

220 Welcome to FTP service - xxxx.
331 Please specify the password.
230 Login successful.
200 Switching to ASCII mode.
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV. 550 Failed to open file.
221 Goodbye.

In particular,  the 3-digit status codes were analysed,  looking for error codes like "550".If you do something similar in your FTP scripts,  then all I can say is welcome to a very different world.

Karsten Brøndum adds:

Here's a completely different approach. 

Depending on your skills in the Java area there is a nice LPGL package called ftp4j (which requires Java 1.4 or later) that i have used a couple of times. (By the way, ftp4j will do both SFTP and FTPS). I've found it way easier than to fiddle with files with text files containing commands, especially when it comes to error handling.

Program for legacy with a legacy dev tool

Good tools don't always survive bad times. When HP pulled its plug from the 3000 dynamo, popular development tools began to slide. One of our favorite COBOL legends and 3000 consultants, Bruce Hobbs, was looking for ways to connect to the legacy community for such a dev tool, Programmer Studio.

"I have a vague recollection that you published something awhile back regarding the demise of Whisper Technology, and the situation for anyone now interested in using the Programmer Studio product," Hobbs said. "Could you please point me in the right direction?"

The genesis of Programmer Studio comes from the days when HP was still buying print ads for the HP 3000 in the general computer industry trade press. Ads that astounded the installed base -- like the one at left -- because they were so rare, and resonated so well with the established consumers. The 3000 had giant corporations using it, something HP had to admit from time to time while it labored to create a business computing market for Unix. Whisper popped up often when we surveyed the legacy developer community in December. This is unsupported software, but it's still in use at the occassional programmer's bench, such as the one that Michael Anderson operates at J3K Solutions.

I was never much for purchasing tools for development. However, since the late '90s onward, I used Programmer Studio from Whisper Technologies as a "character based" editor. In the latter years of working on MPE, the languages I used also included Java, Perl, and SQL.

To date I still use Programmer Studio to develop software on the HP 3000, HP 9000, and flavors of Unix including Linux. Now that I am using languages like JavaScript with HTML and CSS, Programmer Studio knows these, as well as COBOL, Suprtool and Quiz.

(In a bit of circular technology, the Robelle programming tool for the HP 3000, Qedit for Windows, also knows a lot about Suprtool -- since Supertool is also a Robelle product.)

"But today I don't use the HP 3000 much any more, nor Windows," Anderson added. "For years Programmer Studio kept me tethered to Windows as my favored editor. Recently I've started using JEDIT on Linux. JEDIT doesn't know how to access the HP3000, so for that I still use Windows along with Programmer Studio."

Authors and creators tend to dig in with their tools. Hobbs asked about Programmer Studio because of its reputation, but he understood the software had not survived the HP purge.

But for that matter, that kind of afterlife is where other 3000 software resides today. The developer of the Programmer Studio has moved on to other things, according to the Whisper Technology founder Graham Wooley. In 2009 he said

Unfortunately Whisper Technology is no more.  As the developer, Greg Sharp had looked after Whisper and Programmer Studio by himself for the last three years, but he has now moved on to other things and the company has now closed.

The UK's Whisper built and promoted the Programmer Studio PC-based toolset, then sold it as a development environment which understood exchanges with the 3000, but could also be used to create programs under Windows. Robelle responded promptly with a Windows version of Qedit, and for more than five years the 3000 ecosystem had a lively competition for programming tools.

Survival is one of the better measurements of quality, but good technology sometimes has to succumb to business issues and investment strengths. Such was the case for HP's business with the 3000 and MPE. Like Programmer Studio, MPE is no longer supported by its creators. Unlike Programmer Studio, MPE has third party support, as well as an emulation engine being sold this year. These things are markers of survival.

An experienced 3000 developer like Hobbs probably won't care much about support for a programmer's tool. Wooley's company was a lively bed of 3000 ardor in the 1990s. At one point, he placed a bet with Adager's Alfredo Rego. Wooley was so concerned about HP's treatment of the 3000 in 1993 that he wagered with Rego that HP wouldn't advertise the system -- mostly as a prod for HP to do so. Wooley lost his bet, happily, when Hewlett-Packard put ads in both US and European publications for the 3000 at the 11th hour of that year.

An abandoned but beloved product is usually passed along from one user to another, with each exchange marking another step into the public domain. HP's been vigilant about MPE to keep the OS out of this sort of drift. People admire it in the same way that Programmer Studio advocates praise that product.

The difference is that you'll still be able to buy support for MPE from independent professionals, some of whom have a source code license for the software. Adager is on that source code holder list. So are the indie support firms Pivital Solutions, Allegro Consultants, Beechglen Development and Terix. They are all eating their Wheaties, surviving into our new era. 

 

 

 

 

 

Comparing Costs of Staying for 5-10 Years

Last week's CAMUS online-phone RUG meeting included a comprehensive exam of staying on MANMAN for at least another five years. The proposal, outlined by Terry Floyd of the Support Group, showed a cost exceeding $40,000 a year to keep running an HP 3000 with the ERP application plus crucial support for hardware and all software.

His estimation, for a Series 939 low-end system with 30 users' worth of MANMAN (all numbers are annual)

Hardware support - $5,000
MPE/iX support - $2,000
MANMAN application support - $10,000
Support for vendors of third party software - $10,000, on average
Electric power and cooling - $12,000

Including miscellaneous costs of $3,000 yearly, that's a total of $42,000 to stay on MANMAN each year. "That doesn't even include salaries," Floyd said. "These are costs directly related to MANMAN." One user pushed back on the third party software support costs, saying the estimate was low.

One way to cut back on these costs would be to run MANMAN on the cloud, Floyd said. This development, if it ever emerges for the MANMAN community, would be via the Stromasys emulator, which sits in a Linux cradle. Linux is even supported by the HP Cloud, a newcomer to the virtual server vendor lineup. (HP-UX is not supported). The cloud reduces hardware-related expenses and wipes out electrical, versus a cost of $200 a month per user.

(Stromasys officials on the call said they thought Floyd may have been referring to one of the possible options for people wanting to migrate off the 3000. There's been no testing or instances of the emulator running from a cloud service yet.)

So while looking at the numbers and the state of 3000-based cloud options, one of the larger points that Floyd made in his review is that MANMAN, even today on current 3000 hardware, could remain a viable place to stay with manufacturing IT -- so long as the ERP instance has up to date modifications for interfaces and integration, properly documented so they don't become tribal knowledge. Plenty of MANMAN sites have modified their application. Mods are part of the MANMAN Way.

"Interfaces and integration are certainly the best places to spend dollars on improving MANMAN," Floyd said. But the cloud is not free, just a lot less costly. Estimating a 30-user implementation -- plenty of the remaining MANMAN sites are small -- he still came in at $6,000 a month. That's $72,000 against the $17,000 plus the expense of purchasing the 3000 and its storage devices.

"You're spending a heck of lot less than that just for the electricity," Floyd said of the cloud solution.

Of course, most companies running MANMAN -- or nearly any other application -- have long ago paid off capital costs for hardware. The costs that remain fixed are the OS and application support ($12,000 in Floyd's estimate) plus the third party software support at $10,000.

Let's see, $22,000 plus that $72,000 is $94,000 yearly. You're up in the cloud in this picture, running a virtualized 3000 server. The license for that virtualization software and its support fee varies, but nobody is reporting much under $10,000. It's a big advantage when you consider the emulated 3000 will operate many times faster than a Series 939.

So someone who stays by rising to the cloud will be up in the $100,000 annual range for five years, annually, using the solution with the longest lifespan (virtualized OS, virtualized hardware) with an application that's just about the most senior in your community. Factor in the costs of purchasing MANMAN over 10 years and you'd add $25,000 yearly. (This is, of course, another cost that most MANMAN sites have paid off long ago.)

But even if you're able to do computing from the cloud, "IT costs do not go away," Floyd said. "Even if you're in the cloud, for any manufacturing company, better utilization requires an IT function." That IT function is a programmer for ongoing development of modifications, at the least. FORTRAN programmers might be hard to find in the middle of nowhere, Floyd added. Lots of US-based manufacturers using MANMAN operate in such small towns, to keep labor costs contained.

The counterpoint of all that expense of working to stay on MANMAN? "The biggest cost of leaving MANMAN is data migration and implementation of the new system," Floyd said. You would retain the cloud costs, the OS and vendor support costs in this scenario -- while the MANMAN site must pay for SAP, or Oracle, or some other ERP solution.

When calculated with this much detail, "It's not a crazy idea to think of staying on MANMAN another five or 10 years," Floyd said. Mobile connectivity will demand bandwidth that might not exist. "MANMAN is cheaper to operate than either an on-premises replacement or a cloud-based replacement. Inertia is the driver, especially if you're retiring in the near future."

The companies using MANMAN aren't retiring, of course. They face a cost to select, acquire and implement and migrate data to a replacement ERP system from "hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars," Floyd said. "Why did all those companies leave MANMAN? Ten years or so ago, they might have had management with some high ambitions."

Or did they really leave because their users lacked a basic understanding of MANMAN, so relied on tribal knowledge in the organization -- "and then they forgot the way their were going things the way they were. And then a couple of really key users left. And you wonder how this stuff works, and why it works like it does. If you change the heck out of MANMAN and didn't leave a good trail, there's no way you could keep track of why you did that modification."

But after more than three decades in the field, there just aren't many bugs left in MANMAN. The 3000 sites that tracked their mods, can keep knowledge of their implementation documented, can keep a FORTRAN developer available somehow -- these are the sites that have added up the costs to stay on an app that was first released in the 1970s, even it hasn't been changed in more than 15 years.

Where Everybody Knows Your CPUNAME

The iconic TV show Cheers splashed a theme song about the fictional Boston tavern every Thursday, way back in the 1980s. It was a drinking outpost "where everybody knows your name, and they're all so glad you came." If attendance works out well for Stromasys at its HP 3000 Social -- four weeks away -- they're likely to have the same sort of turnout. The Tied House will be a place where everybody knows your name because so many will be familiar to each other. That's what more than three decades of community gives you.

This week the blue and white postcards arrived in mailboxes announcing the combination of Social and Training May 9-10. We found one in our mailbox, but word of the event is spreading beyond the reach of the US post. Vladimir Volokh of VEsoft called to report he'll be at the Tied House. Neil Armstrong, developer and curator of Suprtool, has also been tracking the event closely.

These VIPs of your community will be joined by people experienced in 3000 matters who seek a way around aging HP hardware for MPE. And there will be some stopping by to see the names that they know and meet new ones with something in common. Everybody there will be listening for news about licensing. Right now this is a rare brew that prospects are thirsting for if they want to emulate a production machine.

That postcard doesn't share much of the agenda for the meeting, some details of which are revealed at the Stromasys RSVP webpage. (The whole thing is free, by the way, right down to the heavy appetizers where everybody knows your name.) More to the point, it doesn't reveal the strategy that will drive your feet to that bar where everybody will know your name. Your interest in the emulator is assumed. Knowledge and experience and boasting and whining, laced with humor, were always the prime reasons for attending an HP 3000 user group event. In the absence of a user group, this kind of gathering will have to provide those usual incentives. Expect a lot of "we migrated awhile ago, and here's how it went" along with "we don't want to, and here's the license and support issues we need to solve."

The technology is not an issue. The training on May 10 will prove that to anyone who hasn't seen a demo yet, and the take-home freeware A202 version will give attendees an easy way to do a proof of concept. 

Will the system administrator who's moving away from Powerhouse -- slower than expected -- be at Tied House, or the Computer History Museum the next day? Stromsays is keeping track of the RSVPs. Such an attendee would be interested in how the licensing is going with IBM, the keepers of the Cognos products. Powerhouse users have recent memories about investigations about their licenses, with demands for upgrade fees.

We've begun the effort to get Charlie Maloney of IBM, formerly of Cognos, to tell us anything about licensing Powerhouse for the emulator. No comment yet, after about a week of attempts. But Charlie is busy being the Software Sales Representative at IBM Software Group, Information Management, so he might need repeated attempts. I'll keep trying.

I anticipate that if the Tied House and CHM are filled with more than tire-kickers who want to talk about an emulator in demonstration, they'll get down to license discussions. An IT analyst up at a higher education institution said if license fees to move to the emulator match the annual HP 3000 hardware maintenance contract, it's a deal-breaker.

The issue that would destroy the cost-neutrality concept would be software licensing fees. To save costs during our migration to the ERP software, we let software maintenance lapse on all of the utilities that were permanently licensed -- that is, all of those that would continue to run without a refreshed license key each year.

It almost sounds like utility vendors on that system haven't earned a dime during the migration. Taking those utilities onto the emulator, sans support, is only even remotely possible if the emulator is stopgap on the way to a migration. We'll leave it to the reader to judge if its fair.

Migrating customers will look at these license vs. support tradeoffs and see the challenge of staying with MPE. They've made the decision to stay with hardware that demands a support contract of significant investment, but at least their software licenses have no surprises. It doesn't mean the software is anything close to free, since the 15-20 percent application support fees are in place. All that IBM, nee Cognos, will charge for its 8.49F Powerhouse is Vintage Support.

The tough part for that analyst is that his Powerhouse license is 8.49E, not F. The F version had all of its platform-upgrade fees removed, we learned. The way from 8.49E to F is as uncharted to me as Maloney's reply.

There's always the possibility that customers who know each other's name could get together to arrange a group negotiation with such upgrade-fee vendors. Stromasys won't do this officially; it's up to the emulator customers. As for those utility support dollars, they ought to be going to the vendors if those utilities are key to keeping a production system online. That's the 3000/MPE tradition: guaranteed uptime.

We hope it's a rich brew of license and support insights at Tied House, blended with the eye-opener of the training that includes a Linux cradle for the emulator the day after.

HP hardware: bargain, but needed now?

It's an interesting time for 3000 hardware these days. Prices have dropped severely for unlicensed HP iron. Meanwhile, there's a no-cost way to use a computer to run MPE/iX, thanks to the Charon HPA/3000 emulator, Model A202, freeware edition. Times are plentiful for ways to run MPE software, if the license is not much of an issue.

The HP-brand hardware is flowing so freely that I had a reseller ask if I wanted to buy an N-Class at an astounding price. Nothing that the rest of the public couldn't get off eBay. However, in that offer anybody would have to come up with their own license for MPE/iX.

Nothing's perfect this year about acquiring an MPE server. On one hand you have the option of real HP iron, power-hungry but the genuine engine. However, the HP-badged boxes need disks and memory and components in reserve for real support, the kind of items that a system manager would scavenge from things like an $1,800 N-Class. A support contract for MPE, as well as the hardware, is part of that equation. If you've got an MPE/iX license, let's just say it's about a $2,000 investment, plus the ultra-important hardware-MPE support contract purchase. 

And you need that MPE/iX software support no matter what you're doing, unless you've got enough experience to be selling those services yourself.

The bottom line on an emulated, virtual HP 3000 is higher, unless you're freewaring it. You can expect there are nominal consultants -- retired but available -- who'd use the A202 to discover bug fixes and workarounds. The better ones will have the real HP iron, running tiny, 9GB LDEV 1 disks. The beefiest drive you can put in a 3000 is 146 GB.

But I have to admit, I thought for awhile about that offer of an N-Class for under $2,000. It was a kind of a "get it while you can, the price won't be better than this" sort of decision. For a production or a development shop, it's likely to be different. A manager could figure that a 5-figure cost to acquire Charon emulator software, plus support for it, could be balanced against the cost to maintain a stable parts depot. Emulation installs mean that hardware support goes way down, to about $100 a year for a typical Intel-Linux box. But adding any kind of 3000, emulated or iron, to our offices would be news. Operating my own MPE system has never been a part of my 28 years of working in our community.

People who know MPE very well might say they're not surprised. I have generous readers who correct the flubs in syntax that show up here. But in those decades of writing and reporting about the HP 3000, I have never worked for a company which owned one, including my own company (since 1995). However, that doesn't mean that there haven't been days when I felt I could make use of one. Just the other day, Vladimir Volokh said "you wouldn't have written that, if you'd had a 3000 to use and test that command."

As close as genuine 3000 iron ownership ever came, I think, was when used 9x7s were everywhere and the Newswire was roaring along in the Y2K era. Our net.digest tech editor John Burke bought one of those 9x7s -- for a song -- and since he was an editor of ours at the time, that was enough for me.

My first 3000 publisher, Wilson Publications, used dial-in timesharing access to a Series 42 in 1984 to produce The Chronicle. The terminal access came via PC 2622, the software later known as Reflection. It ran a typesetting program that generated our printed galleys down at Futura Press in Austin. But within four years we worked on the bleeding edge of desktop publishing, using tiny Macs and a LaserWriter and a 5GB shared disk that crashed as often as MPE/XL 1.0. And so the HP 3000 became a subject, rather than a tool we used ourselves. 

I am a little surprised that nobody has yet picked up that N-Class 220, even unlicensed, that Cypress Technology offered via eBay. It seems quite the bargain for somebody who wants genuine HP iron. But for a tinkering editor, or someone who wanted to check a command or syntax or filesystem processes, the freeware A202 might do.

We're still here if any owner or reseller wants to spread the word about hardware, via a modest ad. I'd love to hear when that N-Class sells. It's the lowest price I've ever seen for one of these models. Only something free, but without the ability to work in production, could be considered less expensive. 

Why There are Always Parts Available

Last week on the 3000 newsgroup, HP hardware supplier Cypress Technology was offering an N-Class HP 3000 for $1,800. Cypress was even including an option to custom-configure the server at that price. The 3000 was selling without a license that could be transferred. But even this kind of investment would make an adequate disaster recovery system, given that it has a copy of MPE/iX already loaded on it. Even more useful would be the parts from the server -- a value at $1,800.

The Cypress box is a single 220MHz CPU with a 1.5Mb cache, 4GB total memory, a 9GB boot disk drive (how quaint; just a bit larger than a $7 thumb drive of today) and a 147GB main storage disk drive.

Hewlett-Packard once told the 3000 community that the vendor could provide custom legacy support through 2010, but the offering would depend on parts availability and the age of the HP 3000. But older systems might have parts which are no longer on the HP warehouse shelves.

But no matter how old the HP 3000 might be in your shop, you can be reasonably sure that spare parts will not prevent you from keeping it working. Five years ago this month, Wyell Grunwald offered a "practically free" HP 3000 on that same 3000 newsgroup. All that Grunwald wanted was the cost of shipping to send the 200-pound server onto its new home.

After one quip about this early '90s server making a good bookend, another community member said they could use the system for parts. Imagine, an HP 3000 PA-RISC server built in 1990 — yes, 23 years ago — still has parts available in your community.

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

You can't overlook how underpowered the Series 922 is compared to any other HP 3000. After all, the entire PA-RISC line only started to ship in 1987, and only in significant numbers a couple of years later. Code-named SilverFox Low at its introduction, that Series 922 was a very early model 3000, just three systems off the start of the PA-RISC line.

The harsh numbers: This HP 3000 has just five percent of the horsepower of the smallest Series 979 or HP's smallest N-Class server. And now, there's an N-Class out on the used market, selling for less than a beefy laptop, albeit without license.

While you would not want to carry a lot of computing on a swaybacked steed of a 922, the fact that it remained a parts repository 18 years after it was built might give a homesteader some comfort. HP warned everyone starting out in 2001 that 3000 parts were going to become scarce in five years' time. So long as your community stays connected and communicating, the Hewlett-Packard support expertise in MPE is likely to get scarce long before many 3000 parts disappear altogether.

 

SM for Everyone!

By Bob Green

Vladimir Volokh of VEsoft fame called us to pass on an interesting story.

He was doing MPE system and security consulting at a site. One of his regular steps is to run VESOFT’s Veaudit tool on the system. From this he learned that every user in the production account had System Manager (SM) capability!

Giving a regular user SM capability is a really bad thing. It means that the users can purge the entire system, look at any data on the system, insert nasty code into the system, etc. And this site had just passed their Sarbanes-Oxley audit.

Vladimir removed SM capability from the users and sat back to see what would happen. The first problem to occur was a job stream failure. The reason it failed was because the user did not have Read access to the STUSE group, which contained the Suprtool "Use" scripts. So, Suprtool aborted. 

“Background Info Break”

For those whose MPE security knowledge is a little rusty, or non-existent, we offer a a helpful excerpt from Vladimir’s son Eugene, from his article Burn Before Reading - HP3000 Security And You – available at www.adager.com/VeSoft/SecurityAndYou.html

<beginarticlequote>

When a user tries to open a file, MPE checks the account security matrix, the group security matrix, and the file security matrix to see if the user is allowed to access the file. If he is allowed by all three, the file is opened; if at least one security matrix forbids access by this user, the open fails.

For instance, if we try to open TESTFILE.JOHN.DEV when logged on to an account other than DEV and the security matrix of the group JOHN.DEV forbids access by users of other accounts, the open will fail (even though both TESTFILE’s and DEV’s security matrices permit access by users of other accounts).

Each security matrix describes which of the following classes can READ, WRITE, EXECUTE, APPEND to, and LOCK the file:

• CR - File’s creator

• GU - Any user logged on to the same group as the file is in

• GL - User logged on to the same group as the file is in and having Group Librarian (GL) capability

• AC - Any user logged on to the same account as the file is in

• AL - User logged on to the same account as the file is in and having Account Librarian (AL) capability

• ANY - any user

• Any combination of the above (including none of the above)

...

Whenever any group is created, access to all its files is restricted to GU (group users only).

<endarticlequote>

As Eugene points out above, account users do NOT have Read access by default to a new group in their account. This was the source of the problem at the site Vladimir was visiting. When the jobs could not read the files in the new STUSE group, the system manager the wielded the MPE equivalent of the medieval broadsword: give all the users SM capability.

ALTUSER PRODCLRK; CAP=SM,IA,BA,SF,...

This did solve the problem, since it certainly allowed them to read the STUSE files, but it also allowed them to read or purge any file on the system, in any account.

What he should have done was an Altgroup command immediately after the Newgroup command:

ALTGROUP stuse; access=(R:any;a,w,x,l: gu)

or specified the correct access when the group was built:

NEWGROUP stuse;access=(r:any;a,w,x,l:gu)

Since the HP 3000 runs in a corner virtually unattended (except for feeding the occasional backup tape), we often forget many of the options on the commands that are used sparingly. Neil Armstrong, my cohort in our Labs, often does a Help commandname to remind himself of some of the pitfalls and options on the lesser-used commands, NEWGROUP being one of them.

Stromasys Social meets at historic brewery

The free HP 3000 Social next month on May 9 -- prelude to the first free Stromasys Training Day on May 10 -- will take place in a private section of the Tied House Brewery and Cafe at 954 Villa Street in Mountain View. The official Stromasys webpage for this spring's Social+Training event promises heavy appetizers and free drinks at the Social, starting at 6 PM.

The Tied House website reports that the bistro is the 4th oldest microbrewery in California, and Silicon Valley’s original microbrewery. The cafe and brewery share the same building, with the Clubhouse mug wall on one side and the brewing operation on the other. After pouring 10 million pints since 1988 -- and sending a coaster into space with NASA astronauts -- Tied House beer awards include Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals from the Great American Beer Festival, plaques from the World Beer Cup, and First Place Gold from the California State Fair.

The microbrewery is a 5-minute drive from the Computer History Museum on Shoreline Drive, where the Friday May 10 training takes place. A free lunch will be served during the 10-4 training that day. You can make your reservations for the Social -- as well as the next day's training on the world's only HP 3000 emulator -- at the Stromasys event's webpage, www.stromasys.com/hp3000event

Stromasys will give away a signed copy of the MPE/iX Administration Guide by Jon Diercks at the Social, according to the company's webpage. Vladimir Volokh contacted the 3000 Newswire and has offered copies of the classic MPE book by Eugene Volokh, Thoughts and Discourses on HP3000 Software. The book includes a chapter MPE security myths. Those chapters, as well as an article on POSIX System Management with VESOFT's MPEX written by Stromasys product manager Paul Taffel, are online at the Adager website. Training attendees will leave with Personal Freeware copies of the Stromasys emulator. Other prizes and giveaways may appear between now and the next four weeks.

The greatest prize, of course, will be the chance for 3000 community members to see one another in person. These are rare events -- the last one was the HP3000 Reunion in the fall of 2011. I'll be on hand and hope to see you at the Social as well as the Training the next morning.

If you're coming in from outside the Bay Area, it appears that the Hotel Strata and the Hampton Inn and Suites seem to be the nicest hotels that are convenient both to the Tied House and the Museum. If you're planning to avoid using a car -- that's my scheme -- the Mountain View Caltrain Station is less than a mile from Tied House. And for any visitors via air, Caltrain runs trains that end up at San Francisco's Airport (via BART) as well as the San Jose airport (via a 12-minute bus ride.)

Good tools making an impact, then and now

By Brian Edminster
Applied Technologies

I was always jealous of shops that could afford good tools.

Let me explain. Awhile back, I read about HP's history of trying to launch a successor to IMAGE. It was supposed to be called HPIMAGE.  It was supposed to be slicker than... well, it was supposed to have all the ability to dynamically index and/or restructure your data that a modern SQL relational database managment system allows, without losing the speed and robustness that makes TurboIMAGE famous. I can recall a few times that having the ability to dynamically restructure a database (while it's in production!) would have been handy. (See: zero downtime) 

Then again, a well designed database in a stable application normally shouldn't need that sort of thing with any sort of regularity. Lately, I'm seeing the need to re-structure/alter indexing as a symptom of not knowing your data's demographics and/or designed usage patterns -- especially as the application's data volumes grow.  

This need to restructure is also a side-effect of trying to use a single database both as an operational data store (current data only, for day to day production), as well as for research/reporting data warehousing -- where the data is relatively static, but may go back years. Again, that's lazy design. Don't try to make a sports car have the hauling capacity of a truck. You'll end up with neither.

What changes we did need to make, were done with:

1) DBUNLOAD/DBUTIL, PURGE/DBSCHEMA/DBUTIL, CREATE/DBLOAD -- if we were poor (and couldn't afford Adager or other similar tools), or

2) DICTDBU/DBUTIL, PURGE/DBSCHEMA/DBUTIL, CREATE/DICTDBL. This allowed unloading to a tape or disk file -- so if we had enough free space, we could skip using tape, and it was much faster!  Also allowed simple re-structuring of the database.

We could do the adding, moving, deleting, and changing the type of datasets; and adding/removing paths, and/or re-arranging order of items in a set. Unfortunately, this was only present if we were lucky enough to be users of Dictionary/3000, or the HP Customizer technology products like MM or HP's Financial software.

3) Best and fastest of all, Model 2 Adager. This even allows transforming the data types, in addition to adding new elements or sets.

But there are still very useful tools that remain on any HP 3000 which still has Predictive Support. Tools you might not know you’ve got.

 

The Predictive Support files in the SYS account include two very useful tools. While auditing the content of a system, I found : 

PSQUAD.PRED.SYS (yep, that's a March 1992 'CM' version of Quad, the customizable editor credited as being developed by Jim Kramer of Quest Systems and Kenneth Stout of Summit Information Systems). It's no QEDIT, to be sure. But Quad sure beats having to use EDIT/3000. 

There’s also PSUNLDDB.PRED.SYS and PSLDDB.PRED.SYS. Believe it or not, these are re-named versions of DICTDBU and DICTDBL!

To use these, 

• copy PSUNLDDB.PRED.SYS to DICTDBU.PUB.SYS, 
• copy PSLDDB.PRED.SYS to DICTDBL.PUB.SYS, and
• copy DICTCAT.PRED.SYS to DICTCAT.PUB.SYS

Okay, perhaps moving these files is bordering on unintended use, and not considered kosher. In that case, set a file equation for the catalog (file dictcat.pred.sys=dictcat.pub.sys), and alter file and group security so you can run the files as they sit.  

Either way, this gives you a tool that beats DBUNLOAD/DBLOAD for database capacity maintenance and manipulation — if should you be unfortunate enough to not have the proper tools like Adager, or even DBGeneral.

Stromasys to get social to train for Charon

The creators of the Charon HPA/3000 emulator are rolling out their community carpet in earnest next month. Stromasys is hosting a HP 3000 User Social on Thursday, May 9 -- one month from tomorrow --  and then training at the Computer History Museum the next day, on May 10.

There is a free lunch. In fact, there's a free social on the evening before the training, starting at 6, where refreshments will be on hand, along with 3000 community members. If you couldn't make it to the first HP3000 Reunion in September 2011, this looks like another chance to reconnect in person with your community.

At the HP3000 Reunion in 2011, the event included drawings for copies of Jon Diercks' MPE/iX Administration Handbook. Harris said she's reaching out to Diercks to include his book in the event. It's a rare item. In addition to being the only book devoted to HP 3000 management, the Handbook is listed on Amazon as a $228 item.

Postcard invitations promoting the event are going into the mail within a week, Harris said. You can RSVP at a special webpage www.stromasys.com/hp3000event

It seems likely that a copy of the Personal Freeware Edition of the HPA/3000 emulator will also be available for pickup at the event. A European gathering of emulator prospects included copies of that software, freeware which turns any Intel Core i7 PC/laptop into a 2-user HP 3000, with some help from VMWare and Linux.

We'll have more Social-Training details as they emerge. These odd-numbered years have been good for 3000 events. CAMUS, the ERP-MANMAN users group, is hosting its virtual RUG meeting on April 17 (via phone and webcast). CAMUS' Terri Glendon Lanza also said the group would be glad to consider supporting this Spring's User Social, too.

Living a Privileged 3000 Life without SM

By Brian Edminster

After reading the article on the safe and prudent use of privileges from yesterday, the subject touched a nerve with me. I've seen too many HP 3000 sites which have SM (or PM) capabilities assigned to production account users. They don't need it, and it adds risk and insecurity to a 3000. Along the same lines of error, PM is granted on insufficiently secured groups where production programs reside.

That first mistake is usually an instance of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly, usually due to laziness or ignorance. But the latter is a sign of careless security, or ignorance. The misuse of MPE/iX privileges is often triggered because application programmers are too lazy (or ignorant) of ways to properly design their applications. They could use the incredibly powerful and finely granular security provisions that MPE/iX allows to avoid this.  

At the least, they could instead have used a lockworded copy of what is commonly known in the 3000 community as the 'GOD' program. This lets the manager who invokes it temporarily gain 'SM' -- much like the 'su' (superuser) command in your favorite flavor of Unix does.  If something with finer granularity is needed, perhaps this is an opportunity for someone to port at least the concept of 'sudo' to MPE/iX.  

Sudo is a Unix tool that is designed to allow specific non-super-users restricted (and optionally logged) access to commands that normally require 'su'.  In MPE/iX parlance, it's a way to allow specific users restricted and logged access to commands requiring more than regular 'vanilla' user capabilities.  My take on this is that proper use of MPE/iX's privileges would make a "SuDo/iX" unnecessary, but your mileage may vary.

You might ask, what's the harm of allowing SM to an application user who is normally 'captive' within a logon, no-break UDC that forces the user into the application, and logs them off on exit?  How about the admin (who shall remain nameless, even though they're retired now) that accidentally did a 'Purge @.@.@;Yes' -- except they were thinking they were logged into a test server, not one of the production machines.

And as for regularly changing passwords to application databases, auditors are usually talking about "user application access" passwords. From a best practices perspective, these shouldn't be the actual database passwords, but rather should be values stored in a table of authorized application users and their respective privileges.

That said, if you find yourself with a need to regularly change the physical database passwords, put that call to the DBOPEN routine (or retrieval of the password to be used for it) into a XL library.  That means recompiling the library, not the application, when the passwords have to change.

And lastly, if your system has to be that tight, you probably shouldn't store user application passwords in clear-text in the database, either.  Instead, apply a one-way hash to the value when it's initially stored.  Then, any time a user supplies their password, it's run through that hash again and compared with the stored value. If they match, the passwords match.  

The folks at Beechglen have a callable 'MD5' hash routine just for this purpose. Look for heading about 'MD5 Checksum' at "http://www.beechglen.com/mpe/data-encryption. In poking around the Freeware section of Beechglen's site, I saw they have a program called 'su' that is essentially a more controlled version of the old 'GOD' program. I haven't used it personally, but anything that allows more granularity of control in granting access and power is a good thing.

 

 

Privileges litter the path to passed audits

Yesterday we studied the ways that migrated HP 3000 data can become forgotten while making provisions for an audit. Since some HP 3000s work as mission-critical servers, these active, homesteading systems must weather IT and regulatory audits. The 3000 is capable of passing these audits, even in our era of PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley challenges — all more strenuous than audits of the past.

However, establishing and enforcing a database update procedure is a step onto filling the gap in the security of an MPE/iX system. HP 3000 managers should take a hard look at how their users employ System Manager (SM) privileges. (Privileged Mode, PM, and System Supervisor OP should also be watched. Overall, there can be 21 capabilities to each user.) In their most strict definition, those privileges can expose a database. Hundreds of users can be created at Ecometry sites; even seasonal help gets SM users, according to one consultant's report, users which are seldom deleted after the holiday has passed. One site had a script to create new users, and each had PM capability, automatically.

VEAudit from VEsoft, using its LISTUSER @.@ (CAP("SM")) filter, can give you a report of all of the SM users on your HP 3000. You can even ask for the SM users where password="". (Now there's a good list to find: SM users who have no passwords.) There is no MPE command that will do such things, we are reminded by VEsoft co-founder Vladimir Volokh. Even after more than three decades of his business as a 3000 software vendor, he also offers consulting on MPE operations and management, and still travels the US to deliver this. 

Privileges are often a neglected aspect of 3000 operations, especially when the system's admin experts have moved on to non-3000 duties, or even to other companies. (Then there's the prospect that nobody knew how to use privileges in the first place.) Some SM users have disturbed the integrity of 3000 databases. It's easy to do accidentally. A creator of a database can also update a 3000 database — a capability that can foul up a manager's ability to pass some audits.

 

If you are worried about arbitrary access via QUERY, you can "disable subsystem access" via DBUTIL. This will, of course, only disable the access on QUERY.

Some less-adept auditors can also demand that a database's password be changed every 90 days. It's quite impossible to do, considering the database password is built into every application program.

So a database's security might be compromised through SM privileges, but it depends on the meaning of "update." This term can be construed to be as restrictive as using DBUPDATE to change an entry. It can also refer to UPDATE access DBOPEN MODE 2. 

To get very specific, an update can mean that the modify date has been changed in the file label of one or more IMAGE-related files. In a very general definition, an SM user can update the database simply by way of a restore from tape. (OP privileges permit this, too.)

Auditors sometimes ask broad questions, the sort of inquiry that fits better with the everyday use of HP 3000s in an enterprise. But for MPE/iX experts, "update" means any kind of modification capability.

So you can answer your auditor's question and say "no, SM privileges don't permit any of our users to update a database in another 3000 account." This answer is true, to the extent that the auditor's concern is about changing data — not just making a minor date change or using DBOPEN MODE 2. For auditors without MPE/iX and IMAGE expertise, well, they might not go so far in their examinations.

As for the SM user's ability to muck up an IMAGE database, it’s a mistake that is not difficult to make. An SM user who obtains a database password can corrupt an IMAGE database just by using the restore command. We’ve heard a story that such a user might explain, "Oops, I thought I was signed onto the test  account."

It's important to make a system fool-proof, because as Vladimir says, "fools are us." 

Decommissioned data forgotten in migration

"It's the most forgotten piece of the migration puzzle," said Birket Foster while he recently led a webinar on best experiences with 3000 transitions. "People are not always remembering that at the end of the day they want to shut off the old 3000."

What Foster means is that even after removing data -- the most essential 3000 and company resource -- project managers need to track what data they must keep to satisfy an auditor. Many companies will still need long term access to historic data. That's either a 3000 and its services that can be outsourced from a third party, or maybe even an emulator virtualization of a 3000, perhaps based in a cloud. Some audits demand that the original 3000 hardware be available, however -- not an Intel-based PC doing a letter-perfect hardware emulation.

After the Great War, the returning soldiers were not welcomed as productive citizens ready to return to work. This kind of veteran was called The Forgotten Man, from Golddiggers of 1933. Perhaps the information in aging 3000s is marching in the same kind of veteran step.

Managers have to consider if they want to move their forgotten 3000 data after a migration, or leave it in a searchable format -- several questions to consider for an auditor's satisfaction. Many 3000 sites we've interviewed have a 3000 running for historical lookups. This is the sort of task that would meet the needs of an audit.

 

"We often remind people who are migrating that even through the classic steps are assess, plan and execute, there's also decommissioning," Foster said. "So you can shut off the box."

Organizations which must meet extra-stringent requirements -- such as healthcare service providers facing HIPAA, or corporations bound by the Sarbanes-Oxley laws, or even credit card-processing merchants -- bear the greatest burden of auditing. For example, those PCI credit card audits are performed by PCI Qualified Security Assessors. One of the only companies, among the 302 listed as QSAs, which is likely to hold tribal knowledge of HP 3000s is Forsythe Solutions -- which once was a Systems Integrator for the 3000.

Archival 3000s have been an important part of the air travel business, due to the use of credit cards to process transactions. A few years ago, one consultant reported out on the 3000 newsgroup that more than a dozen MPE/iX systems demanded archives for old data.

"We have 21 HP 3000s," said Mark Ranft, "and 18 of them are the largest, fully loaded N4000 4-CPU 750 systems you can get." In 2010, he said, "We have migrations to Windows in various stages, but there is also a very real need for legacy data access after the migration. The alternative is to migrate all the data and all the archival history, and that can be costly."

And perhaps less costly with a good plan for decommissioning data, drawn up by experienced providers of daa migration services. Shadow 3000s run in the community with little to do but wait for an audit from one of those 302 QSAs. There's enough shadow resources needed to demand power, lightweight adminstration, and support contracts for these servers -- the budget that might help to defray the costs to decommission.

On the other hand, shutting off these systems hasn't become urgent in many homesteading sites who are transitioning. What might make it matter more are the systems a responsible 3000 IT manager will leave behind for the next pro who takes the job.

CAMUS schedules Spring webinar for April

The ERP and manufacturing user group CAMUS will host its every-springtime user group event on April 17, including discussion about the future of MANMAN led by community advocate and 3000 veteran Terry Floyd of the Support Group.

Terri Glendon Lanza, the founder of the Ask Terri ERP and manufacturing consultancy, has announced the call-in and PowerPoint meeting, which will begin at 10:30 Central US time. After an hour of talk and questions about the upcoming years for one of the oldest MPE applications -- still running in several hundred companies -- 3000 homesteading advice starts at 11:45.

Steve Suraci, owner of support and systems provider Pivital Solutions, talks first about Resources for Homesteading. Tom Bollenbeck of Ideal Computer follows up, on the same topic, at 12:05.

The user group's traditional and lively Talk Soup puts a signature on the meeting, which is free. An open discussion is scheduled to start at 12:25. You sign up at the Sign Up Genius website.

Up for discussion: MANMAN Modifications, and a possible CAMUS give-away. "Help us outline contents, actions, or a submission list for modifications with financial assistance from CAMUS," Lanza said in her April 2 announcement. "We could talk about the emulator during the open discussion if you want. Everyone is welcome."

 

Details for the webinar phone-in and log-on will be emailed to registrants prior to the meeting. You can send questions to Lanza at tlanza@camus.org, or call her at 630.212.4314.

CAMUS is also prepared to help support a springtime in-person 3000 Social and Stromasys Training event. This is allegedly being held in May, but we're waiting on final confirmation from Stromasys. Once again, the Bay Area's Computer History Museum in Mountain View has been proposed as the setting.

"CAMUS would consider helping sponsor events whenever it may happen, spring or fall," Lanza said. The user group was one of the sponsors the HP3000 Reunion, held at the Museum in September, 2011.

Hope floats today for a 3000 resurrection

As a former Catholic altar boy, I learned a lot about resurrection during Springs in the 1960s. But the headline above isn't early April Fool's blasphemy. Some 3000 users -- more than a dozen, like disciples -- believe that an emulator in their market is a reason to believe in the server's revival.

They're somewhat correct, but how accurate is a revival of MPE/iX, versus the hardware to host it? Stromasys has accomplished the latter miracle with Charon HPA/3000. Servers as common as bottled water are running MPE/iX today, in production environments or proving the concept that PA-RISC systems have come back from a state of doom. Some are even succeeding with untested chips from AMD, somehow, rather than the approved Intel processors.

We've just approved a comment here on our blog that invests the emulator with these regenerative powers. HP would need a revival of its spirit to start to sell proprietary servers again, but at least there's powerful spirit among a few customers. None of them are paying HP any longer for the 3000. We'll get to that in a minute, and how it affects the salvation of critical MPE/iX applications. But to that prayer:

I say that with the advent of Stromasys and the interest from application developers who wrote for the HP 3000, there is now the opportunity for the community to form a company to begin marketing MPE/iX. The world is ready for a stable, secure, alternative to the out-of-control Linuxes and the costly well-known operating systems.

This manager doesn't want his name or company mentioned, but I assure you he's real and in charge of several HP 3000s. Third parties provide MPE and 3000 support at his site, and he runs HP's final low-end model of 3000, an A-Class. Although this is the season of miracles for hundreds of millions, marketing MPE/iX would demand a change of ownership at Hewlett-Packard. To kick-start it, people like our manager above would have to become customers of HP once more. The company took a conservative view of "customer" and "owner" five years ago this month. Nothing's changed there yet.

 

The issue of enabling Intel hardware to host MPE/iX is settled. Over and over, we've heard that the emulator runs the 3000's OS just as well as HP-built iron, the boxes HP stopped building nearly 10 years ago. The big rock to roll back is the status of software ownership. Many of the largest software companies take a dim view of operating their programs on fresh hardware. At least without any notice of the shift in platform.

Some companies -- and the 3000 veterans know who they are -- want a license fee upgrade if there's significant performance boosts on the new platform. The change that triggers this is the HPCPUNAME. Unless it still reports "Series 929" or somesuch, this emulated installation is a newer 3000.

Other software vendors are simply delighted their products will continue to work at customer sites. A customer site, however, is often defined as a company which pays a regular fee to maintain a relationship with the vendor. There's a lot of dropped-support software running out in your community. Vendors always have to live with this. Now there's a new wrinkle with the change of platform.

"If I was a paying customer of a software vendor, I'd keep quiet about using the emulator," one vendor said. He added that he's got no problems with his own customers using Charon. Any company prohibiting a switch "would be stupid, because you'd be losing revenue."

Earlier this week, however, I heard a statement that's true. "There's no application company yet which has approved a license for running software on the emulator." There's one story of Cognos permitting Quiz to run on a production emulator at an Australian insurance corporation. Warren Dawson, who plunged into the emulation pool, got it arranged by his Cognos reseller. Who's dealing with IBM these days, since Big Blue bought Cognos long ago.

IT managers can be lured into beliefs that run afoul of the computer vendor's catechism, however. Some managers believe they own their software once it's abandoned by the vendor. HP made its case that MPE/iX will always belong to HP, and always did, even while people were buying support from HP in 2008.

At a user meeting that year, the business manager of 3000 operations at HP Jennie Hou made HP's position clear.

Hou confirmed the clear intention that HP will cede nothing but "rights" to the community after HP exits the 3000 business."The publisher or copyright owner still owns the software," Hou said when license requirements beyond 2010 were discussed. "You didn't purchase MPE/iX. You purchased a right to use it."

Several years ago, a European Union judge gave an advisory on a case about PC software. The judge said if a company walks away from a product, anybody has any right they'd like to use it in any way. There's a lot of defining to do to arrive at "walks away." It was only one judge. But things are changing very quickly in the world of intellectual property.

To see the cross that such hopeful disciples bear, look at what I wrote five years ago, after hearing HP's statement and seeing the slide below.

We were writing about independent support and source code -- which at the time wasn't released. Now MPE/iX source is in the hands of seven companies. One recently reported they'd used their source to create workarounds for support customers -- just the limit HP hoped for the use of its MPE/iX source.

I wrote in 2008

It's a mystery how HP can give any significant use of MPE/iX to third parties in the years after the vendor won't offer services for the 3000 community. A third party owns nothing under these rules, but should build a business model and employ experts on this basis? Risky business, that.

A third party will just have to hope to rely on access to MPE/iX source. And nothing else but hope. In any contract no better than a typical customer's, a support firm would own nothing but that Right To Use what HP owns. Support for the third party support supplier for MPE/iX from HP? Shut down, by 2010. Support suppliers could consider that deal a sketchy foundation to build a business upon.

The 3000 community can only hope that's not HP's intention for support providers: To make any alternative support for the 3000 community remain sketchy. HP retains its ownership, but the intention of this 2005 announcement was to "help partners" do support business. Here's that HP 2005 statement, as a reminder of Hewlett-Packard's intentions. 

"When HP no longer offers services to address basic support needs of e3000 customers, HP intends to offer to license HP e3000 MPE/iX source code to one or more third parties — if partner interest exists at that time — to help partners meet the basic support needs of the remaining e3000 customers and partners."

You generate partner interest with customer purchases, now that HP's made hardware emulation legal. Then you step out of the way and let licenses evolve. For the disciples, the back half of that resurrection is a revelation they must arrange on their own.

OpenMPE's afterlife lives on a live server

Eleven years ago this spring, OpenMPE was calling itself OpenMPE Inc. and proposing a business around the HP 3000. The organization was just getting on its feet, led by Jon Backus, a consultant and systems manager who ran his own business and took the first steps toward advocacy for the computer HP was cutting from its futures.

The hopes and dreams of a shell-shocked community of 3000 lovers came to the window of OpenMPE. But even in 2002, the group of volunteers' founders knew the holy grail was hardware to replace the boxes HP would stop selling in about 18 months.

A petition, in the form of customers' Letters of Intent, got presented to HP during that year's Interex 3000 Solutions Symposium. 

The document is asking customers if they would support the new organization’s mission to enhance and protect the HP 3000 community’s lifespan, though software development and creation of an emulator that mimics the HP hardware on Intel processors.

And after a decade, the community got its emulator. The software that's now making ripples in the calm pond of 3000 use emerged from hard work at Stromasys, to be sure. But OpenMPE laid the first tracks to demonstrating user interest, as well as an MPE license for emulated 3000s. The HP license is one of the few that were written specifically for the emulator. (Minisoft has announced another.) The other evidence of OpenMPE's work is an HP 3000, hosted at the Support Group in Texas, where it holds software that still matters to MPE managers.

OpenMPE pays a nominal amount to maintain this server inside a hardened datacenter. That's evidence there's still a trace of business going through OpenMPE, although the Support Group volunteers more than a payment can cover. (That's the way volunteers roll, after all. Nobody got paid a dollar for working with OpenMPE, although there was plenty of pay-outs of public scorn.)

But host software on an HP 3000 and you become one of the beacons across the inky landscape of MPE in 2013. One customer wanted a copy of GCC, the Gnu C Compiler that's the bootstrap code for all 3000 open source riches. Mark Klein created an MPE/iX version of GCC to enable printer and file sharing, Internet addressing and advanced networking, perl and so much more on a 3000.

One source for GCC is on Brian Edminster's MPE Open Source server, a repository of free software. But he tipped his hat toward the OpenMPE beacon while answering a question posted on the 3000 newsgroup.

There are several third-party software support providers that could help -- you can find 'em through searching the 3000 newsgroup. And there's also a few of us that are keeping copies available for download on sites of our own.   

I have a site that has it as part of a 'OpenSSH sftp client' install (which also happens to include perl as well). But at the moment, probably the best place to get GCC for MPE/iX is from a site that's a partial copy of the old 'Jazz' server at HP.

The direct URL is: http://www.openmpe.com/jazz/MarkK/gnuframe.htm

As the page notes, GCC was ported to MPE by Mark Klein. The community owes him a debt of gratitude for this, even thought the latest version available isn't quite so current anymore. In spite of that, Mark's work has made it possible to port quite a bit of software to MPE.

Klein volunteered his hours to create the MPE GCC, and more than 30 people volunteered their hours through nine years to make OpenMPE a player during the darkest era of the 3000 -- those springtime months of 2002 when it was so easy to hear the HP user group Interex trumpet the "migrate, and soon" message that HP was hawking. Plenty of sites did, although not nearly as soon as HP hoped. During that era, however, HP got to be instructed about how to curtail business for a business computer community -- hearing all the things it overlooked for the transition, denoted by OpenMPE's volunteers.

March was the time of year when OpenMPE volunteers ran for elections, starting in 2002. Although there are just three directors at the group now, it still has its friends in places like Measurement Specialties, where former director Tracy Johnson manages 3000s and a shadowed OpenMPE server. Or at Applied Technologies, where Edminster supports the ideal of free software that drove OpenMPE during its first year. Or out at the datacenter building in Texas, where the live 3000 still dishes out software that homesteaders find useful, once they search for it.

3000's endurance replaced easier than yours

System managers who are in charge of HP 3000s might be concerned about the endurance of their hardware. Those who use systems built in the 1990s feel lucky as their 3000 disks keep spinning and the data flows into and out of servers like the Series 929. This is the smallest of the 9x9 3000s, installed in many places as the best 1990s value for entry-level computing.

More than a dozen years later, these 3000s remain on the job. Senior management in these companies might want to ride the lucky tiger as long as they can, to forestall the expense of transitions. However, there's an IT element much tougher to replace than an 18GB drive, a power supply or a processor board.

During an interview this week, a manager who inherited a 929 preached the gospel of newer hardware. It's a problem that has a solution in the wings, as Stromasys makes its way into the homesteading market with its CHARON emulator. This manager said running MPE/iX on Intel PCs sounded "loopy," but he hasn't dismissed HPA/3000. He did look away from a component even more essential than hardware. While that HP iron might go down, the manager going down can also be a major issue. The knowledge of the 3000 is like gold at most homesteading shops, even if management doesn't have a golden budget for the server anymore.

Birket Foster of MB Foster likes to call this the "lottery factor." What if a 3000 manager's circumstances changed overnight, like in winning the lottery? A big annualized jackpot could mean a retirement, and a homesteading company would need a replacement. In-house training before such a change could prepare a company for the day that its 3000 expert goes down, even while the hardware hums along.

This manager's major concern "over anything else, is that I have a super hardware failure, and I can't get any support or replacement parts for my 3000. And while it's down, I'm out of business." Many companies run their HP 3000s around the clock, every day of the week. During the interview, it was suggested that even getting sick could amount to the same concern. That's not in the cards, he answered.

He did have a plan for succession, something a lot of 3000 users haven't formed. The company would hire somebody to come in and learn the 3000 operations over six months, before the IT manager might retire. This can be a difficult situation to engineer as a contingency. If you're not ready to retire, you would find it tough to approach your senior management to say, "let's hire up some IT expertise and make it 3000-ready."

This difficulty becomes a reality at any company where a migration has been "put on the back burner" for 4-5 years, one manager said. Another noted that migration was taking a lot longer than planned, and still another in that confectionary company said migrations have been discussed ever since HP triggered the end of its plans for the 3000. It's money that people are not forced to spend immediately, says Foster. So they don't.

"It's money versus risk where most people end up," he says. "At some point, though, they want to know how much risk they're really facing. It's not really about the hardware risk," he added. In some cases, even a Series 929 could handle twice the business load that it shoulders every day, if sales rocketed. The most critical point of failure is the 3000 expert at the company. Outside help to manage MPE applications, as a backup resource, can mitigate that risk. But it's got to be trained to know your business processes today -- even if senior management sees the 3000 as a less-than-golden resource.

Learning to step in for a manager who goes down, like one at a Florida insurance group did in 2010, takes time. This might be a period where transition planning -- not a migration, but selecting a replacement app -- could mitigate risk over a longer term. The IT pro who knows MPE/iX is the golden goose in these fables. 

Searching for help in all the right places

Today a long-time 3000 site in the candy business called to find out if anybody was available to help with a little contract work. Maybe about two or three years' worth, because that's how long it would take this 3000 stalwart to pull out of their existing 3000 applications.

They've already pulled out of some. Oracle Financials now takes the place of an MPE/iX app, for example. But while Oracle is more popular with the market's experts, the in-house software that it replaced performed better.

The search for 3000 expertise led us to recommend a couple of favorite webpages. The OpenMPE contractor-consultant page has added new consultants in the last few weeks. Over at LinkedIn, the HP 3000 Community is fast approaching 600 members. And while LinkedIn would like the employer prospects such as our candy company -- and its Call Center, Order Entry, Order Fulfillment and Sales Audit apps, all running on N-Class servers -- to pay $295 to list a job opening, it's not needed. You can start a discussion in several places for free about an available job.

Three months ago we dipped our line in the water to attract two dozen applicants with 3000 experience in just under 36 hours, using the redoubtable 3000-L mailing list. We heard from long-time consultants, independent contractors, and even 3000 pros who thought their current company's use of MPE/iX looked a little shaky.

LinkedIn will take on any discussion in the 3000 Community group, regardless of whether it mentions jobs or not. It's hard to describe how many of the nearly 600 are available for work there, but it's not a miniscule percentage.

There's also an HP 3000 Jobs subgroup, which is part of Bill & Dave's Excellent Machine out on LinkedIn. Apply for the Bill and Dave's membership (it's free) and the Jobs subgroup is open to your offering and your seeking, too. Bill and Dave's is another 780 members big, and it's got lots of retired HP 3000 expertise in there. You never know who will want to take on an outside contract, after leaving the good ship HP.

AcuCOBOL's bench is a means to transition

COBOL-only 3000 sites have been working with the same set of tools for many years. HP closed its languages lab early in the previous decade, so Hewlett-Packard's brand-name source code managers and the like were last enhanced sometime late in the 1990s. That age doesn't matter very much to the strategy of homesteading. Suppliers such as Robelle have enhanced editors like Qedit in the interim.

There are options for improving COBOL development and managing application maintenance and creation. COBOL has many experts and advocates in the 3000 community. One of our favorites is Alan Yeo; his company ScreenJet created an interface between the 3000 and the development toolbench from Acucorp, AcuBench. Yeo has been a realist about the transition of AcuCOBOL toward a melding with Micro Focus COBOL. It's taken a long time so far -- AcuCOBOL hasn't achieved its melding in more than four years of plans and work on the project.

But the state of an AcuCOBOL-Micro Focus meld doesn't change one axiom: better COBOL project tools will help a 3000 site which is migrating. Micro Focus acquired AcuCOBOL's expertise and its customers in 2007, and first talked about a Project Meld in 2008.

"If you're COBOL shop and you're on the HP 3000," Yeo explained, "and you wanted to move to a very structured and complete environment -- where you've got a lot of development tools, debugging tools -- then the Micro Focus environment wouldn't be bad. But as of this minute, they haven't got anything that's as good as their AcuCOBOL GUI product."

Yeo was quick to praise this AcuBench IDE solution. It's software whose current data sheet looks minted from 2009, and states that it supports Windows environments as current as Vista. However, Yeo's ScreenJet software supplies a VPlus to ACUCOBOL-GT and AcuBench Conversion module.

This VPlus conversion tool kit extracts screen information from a VPlus formfile and delivers it as ready-made GUI screens to the AcuBench IDE (Integrated Development Environment), as though the screens had been created initially in that IDE.

A 3000 site moves to AcuBench and AcuCOBOL as part of a migration -- essentially a lift-and-shift project. The AcuCOBOL-GT compiler is engineered to adopt MPE/iX aspects such as COBOL II extensions. "That was the beauty of the AcuCOBOL stuff," Yeo said. "You could develop anywhere and run anywhere." The software outputs industry-standard COBOL, starting with COBOL code already driving HP 3000 applications.

Micro Focus has advanced software for development managing and team organization, some acquired from Borland (another company assimilated into the Micro Focus lineup.) As an example of the scope of some of these products, the AcuBench IDE offers drag and drop techniques to further enhance application screens, to employ additional GUI elements such as Radio Buttons, Check Boxes and List Boxes.

In contrast, a product such as Micro Focus Caliber includes components used to author applications, visualize both user cases and process flows, and simulate user interaction. These tools, which are next-generation software for most 3000-centric developers, can relate such visualizations to application requirements. A review module in Caliber is essential to letting business stakeholders discuss and collaborate on such visualizations.

Business stakeholder discussions can help bring IT to the boardroom table. Collaboration to create and improve applications feeds the value of an Application Management Portfolio, and APM makes apps shine as key assets.

Plug in Linux Appliances for 3000 backups?

Out on the HP 3000 Community of LinkedIn, managers have been apprised this spring of an offering from Beechglen Development called Triple Store. The essence of the advice is sound. Make multiple backups, because it's risky to rely on just one tape -- and too time-consuming to simply make multiple tapes.

(Not a part of the LinkedIn Community for 3000s yet? Join us -- we're well on the way to being 600 members strong.)

Triple Store proposes a primary copy goes to local user volume storage on your 3000. The secondary local copy goes out to a Linux Appliance, as Beechglen calls it. There's a third copy that goes into SSD storage in a cloud which Beechglen hosts offsite.

You can look over the pricing in a single-page datasheet from Beechglen, but it's that Linux Appliance that might be the newest wrinkle in a multi-copy strategy. This particular application encrypts the backup and applies compression. Secure FTP (SFTP) can pass the backups from standard HP 3000 73GB user volumes to this Appliance. For those who unfamilar with the appliance concept, it is a separate server powered by Linux and loaded with an application dedicated to backups.

Brian Edminster, our backup advisor for 3000 operations, keyed in on the Triple Store's appliance, too.

The greatest novelty is having a Linux-driven appliance to act as a secure intermediary. It appears to be to sending backups ultimately to one's own Network Attached Storage (NAS), off to Beechglen's cloud, or onto SSDs (which are being used as the removeable media). I already do backups for the systems I administer in a similar way.

 

Edminster said that he does a Store-To-Disk, usually to a separate user volume dedicated to holding backups; then he does an FTP or SFTP of this disk-backup to a NAS device, "where it's backed up by an enterprise backup tool."

Not addressed -- but implied in the marketing piece for Triple Store -- is the mechanism for recovering a backup from the backup appliance archive (or from SSD or cloud to the appliance, and then to your 3000).

Sure, you can just FTP/SFTP it back to the 3000's file system, should you need a backup image that's no longer on your user volume. The problem seems to be that won't preserve the MPE-ness of the Store-To-Disk backup files. Unless you take special steps, you might lose the MPE/iX filesystem characteristics of the backup -- making it difficult to restore from without additional processing. Not good.

I've been looking into simple ways to do this (preferably an FOS-only solution), and have been experimenting with a number of methods.

In the weeks to come, we’ll look forward to a report from Edminster on how to do this sort of multiple store using a limited amount of non-MPE software.

Emulator connects to terminals, POC efforts

What was restarted as a pilot project more than four years ago at Stromasys is now a full-fledged product. The CHARON-HPA/3000 operations inside Stromasys are receiving continued investment, according to company officials. The emulator is a proof of concept project at several companies who've contacted us, but it's a full-fledged software solution at the vendor which created it. 

The software's starting to caper through springtime on laptops and low-cost desktops across North America and elsewhere. One manager who briefed us about the POC work at his site said he put up the A-202 Freeware edition on an HP desktop with an i3 Core Intel chip. The desktop came off eBay with a $150 price tag. The demonstration yielded "a sigh of relief I could hear across the room." Top IT managers are happy to see a way for MPE applications to run onward into the future, independent of HP-built servers. 

Installing the emulator software and setting it into service requires an ability to know how to put an IP address into a terminal emulator, in order to connect over a network. Any A-202 freeware users who have limited networking skills are presenting special support needs to Stromasys. The company says it's working in a couple of directions to find a method to help such users in a cost-effective manner.  

Stromasys has two versions of the HPA/3000 documentation, one for the A202 Freeware Edition and one for the Demo-to-Production Edition.  The company is restructuring these documents to turn them into User Guides, an upgrade from the comprehensive collection of notes available at the moment. Fortunately there are very few issues that only concern Freeware users, so having to spend time supporting freeware users — with advice and instruction that doesn't benefit the vast majority of its customers and prospects — has not been an issue. 

Product manager Paul Taffel is at the nexus of this springtime growth. "The momentum is certainly building," he said, "and it really is fulfilling to talk to users who had no hope of finding a solution like CHARON, and to be able to show them such a high-quality product." 

 

The HPA/3000 edition of CHARON will have a fresh release this spring, "and we have also started working on some major enhancements to improve our high-end performance."   

Every 3000 manager uses either physical terminals, or a terminal emulators running on a PC (or very rarely on a Mac) to connect to their HP 3000. "This doesn't mean that they're running old-fashioned applications," Taffel said. "It's still the way that everyone who uses an HP3000 connects users to it." 

Some sites may use fancy network connections to allow users running PC-based programs to access information stored on the HP 3000, without using a terminal emulator. But pretty much everyone uses software like Reflection or Javelin to open up a terminal emulator window when then need to log on to the system to issue commands or start up programs.  

There are very few users still using serially-connected physical terminals (which require a DTC to connect to an HP 3000).  Almost everyone who is using Reflection, for example, uses it to connect to their HP 3000 over a local network.   

Contrary to our earlier reports, Stromasys believes the HPA/3000 will work with DTCs, although it hopes an enterprising user to try to hook one up and report their findings. And while Alan Yeo has reported that CHARON won't work with DDS tape drives, Stromasys says that's not true.  

"My home test system — that  $1,300 one — has a DDS-3 drive built in," said Taffel. "Warren Dawson (our first user) built his test system with a tape drive, but then decided against building one into his production system." 

VMware can demand some close management in a few cases. When the CHARON Freeware Edition is run inside VMware on a laptop, users normally connect to the virtual HP 3000 machine by running Reflection on the same laptop. Despite the fact that Reflection and CHARON are running on the same physical PC, you connect them to each other using the network. If your laptop is plugged into a wired-network, Windows is provided with an IP address on the network -- and you must configure your virtual HP 3000 to have an address on the same network. When you do this, Reflection can talk to CHARON with no problem. 

In VMware, things get much more complicated if your laptop is connected to a network using a wireless adapter. Stromasys has solved the problem of connecting Reflection to CHARON using a laptop connected to a wireless network. 

If that laptop isn't connected to any network (wired or wireless), then connecting Reflection to CHARON requires yet another solution. This configuration is also being documented as part of the User Guide. 

Freeware users of HPA/3000 are providing opportunities to solve problems such as wireless access points from inside VMware, and document it for the greater good of the 3000 community. Freeware users expect support for their experiments with emulation.

Still Patching After All These Years

HP solved the problems of the 3000 and MPE with patches, revised software which Hewlett-Packard still distributes today. Probably not as seamlessly as it did while the company supported the system. But just as inexpensively: MPE/iX is one of the only HP operating systems with free patches. The still-engineered and fully-supported OS lineup requires an HP support contract to retrieve patches, even the critical ones.

Patches resurfaced in my reporting this afternoon while I interviewed a consultant to a large site, one where 22 HP 3000s once ran altogether. Today it's a couple of N-Class servers. He was feeling good about the chances for a Stromasys emulator there, partly because the customer is already running on MPE/iX 7.5. The final generation of the OS is required to run the Charon HPA/3000 emulator.

"We got away from using Large Files, too," he added. "I think HP never did fix that corruption bug in those." That would be the >4GB corruptor, discovered in 2006 by Adager and finally fixed in '07 by HP's IMAGE/SQL labs. The repaired software required a millicode patch, the first one HP'd written for the 3000 in 16 years. You can get that patch via HP's Response Center website. But that's not how most 3000 managers are getting these patches today.

The number of HP contract-holding 3000 administrators has dropped since the 2007 date of patch MILNX10A. Most people are calling into HP's support line, then plowing through the confusion that arises when you ask for something related to HP and a 3000.

"If one has a functioning support center logon, then yes -- you can download the patch via the Web," said one indie support provider. "I find most people need to call the support line. I always tell them to take their patience with them, as it can be challenging to get past the initial call handlers.  ("No…my 3000 is not a printer…")  You’ll eventually get to the one (?) person still handling MPE patching requests."

We are told, by Allegro Consulting's Donna Hofmeister, that "the magic incantation when dealing with the Response Center folks is to use transfer code 798. That’ll get you to an MPE person."

MILNX10A is important enough to patch, especially on a 3000 that's got databases that are still growing. One traditional advisory in the 3000 community is that "there are three things that can happen when you apply a patch, and two of them are not good." So that limits an administrator's gusto for patching -- but this corruption problem was a big enough deal for HP to label that patch critical.

The patch repairs access to any in-house applications that have used Large Files, or do a sort with a temporary file that can exceed 4GB. If your app has not been modified since March 30, 2000, it's safe. That's when HP introduced the Large File feature.

Large Files has been engineering which HP worked to remove from customers' 3000s. A 2006 patch was designed to turn off Large Files and get those files on the 3000 converted to Jumbo files, much better engineered. Jumbos were at work where our consultant was arranging an audition for the emulator.

MILNX10A is not stageable because it requires a installation job. It is most easily installed by using HP's autopat.  Autopat, at its conclusion, will say "stream this.job." A couple of blinks later, milli.lib.sys (and friends) is updated.

MILNX10A won't be enough to fix this corruption problem. HP's repair also requires MPENX11A. Unlike the millicode patch, MPENX11A is not stageable, as it is a patch that requires a reboot. A manager can use Patch/iX to get the patch staged and schedule a reboot.

If you don't know if you should apply this patch, contact your support provider. If you're patching, pay attention to when you run 'unpackp.' We'd love to hear any experience you might have while navigating the free phone support from HP for these patches.

Freeware emulator user reaches for support

In one of the greater gifts to the 3000 community, Stromasys has unleashed software that permits a 2-user HP 3000 to appear on the hard drive of a PC anywhere in the world. The Charon software could replace consultants' aging 3000 systems immediately after a download and install. These consultants could then demonstrate this emulated 3000 to homesteading companies. A sale to the company might take place.

However, the HP 3000 rose to its highest peaks with the benefit of other emulation, decades ago. The server's oldest software employed proprietary terminals. When PCs displaced terminals because of those desktop computers' industry standard and flexibility, one software product made it possible: terminal emulators. WRQ shipped Reflection. Minisoft distributed MS 92. More than a dozen years ago, a freeware terminal emulator, QCTerm, rolled out of the labs at AICS Research.

When these emulators emerged, prospective customers had questions during proof of concept testing. During the years while that era's emulation was proving itself, tech support was a call-in experience. I don't recall how a company might handle a technical support call from a non-customer. At Adager, the tech team was often contacted about how to repair IMAGE/SQL databases. That kind of call would earn a non-customer some advice, because that's a full-service model being preserved by some vendors.

And freeware? It didn't exist in anything but the most rudimentary bulletin board system-driven downloads for PCs, or the Interex swap tapes for MPE software.

Terminal emulation is still with us, in the form of entrenched applications that rely on linking to a Reflection, MS 92 or something else like QCTerm. Now there's a second level of emulation in the Charon solution. It's not clear yet how the markets, the customers and the vendors of freeware will handle this kind of inquiry.

 

On one hand, it seems obvious that a software company couldn't really be expected to support freeware users 1-to-1. There's not enough revenue to support that expense. However, 3000 emulation is trying to prove its worth this year. It's going to need some of that personal attention for dug-in 3000 managers and consultants.

This afternoon we got a call from a consultant who'd run up against this emulator-to-emulator handshake. Did I know, Dan Miller asked, how to achieve a connection to a 3000 using Reflection and Charon?

We've never pretended to be that smart here, but we know people who can answer that question. Dan got a referral, and we hope to catch up with the answer to his question. He had many others for Stromasys last fall, and must've gotten answers enough to start his proof of concept installation for his client. He might be trying to get a serial connection -- bereft of any outside network -- in step with the emulator, but that might not be true. Dan's is the first question we've seen about Reflection and Charon.

These days, tech support for freeware is handled by user communities, email, SourceForge message boards, explicit user guides -- the kinds of advice channels which can't really walk you through an installation. We don't know where the future is on freeware and support, but it's an interesting aspect of this year's emulation debut.

Advice on reductions helps manage risk

Most managers of 3000s cope with the same challenges seen on other platforms: fewer resources, layoffs and retirements, aging hardware. Yes, even in the marketplace of HP's Itanium or Windows servers, hardware gets older. Not like the 3000s, those boxes which will, by this fall, be at least one decade old.

If the server is built well, if the budgets hold up, if the headcount doesn't shrink, enterprise server owners won't have to manage any risk. What're the odds of that? Since you'd probably admit that you can't dodge all of those, MB Foster held a Wednesday Webinar yesterday to outline the stategies for how to cope with less.

Any special demands for the 3000 didn't come up during the 1-hour webinar. It didn't need to be highlighted, because the elements of risk management are universal. It's just a matter of degree. Do you have an aging workforce, or is the company thinking of using younger IT pros? There's a career retirement trend out there for the professional who can afford it. Foster said 5,000 people born between 1945 and 1960 retire every day. That's ages 53-68, probably the largest slice of 3000 managers.

The odds are stacked against implementing change without a complete plan. Even an optimist would shudder at figures that MB Foster's CEO Birket Foster shared from the Standish Group. By that group's research, 90 percent of the replacements of ERP systems will finish over budget, behind schedule -- or be scrapped altogether. That slender slice of orange in the pie chart represents the lucky companies who got what they wanted, on time and in budget.

Of the ones that finish, companies are averaging about half of the functionality they pursued with their change. Swapping in an off the shelf app for 3000 application could well overlook customizations for spreadsheet interfaces, for example. "And the spreadsheets weren't part of that IT system, they were part of what the user base used," Foster said.

A company is likely to be just one merger or acquisition away from doing more IT with less resources. The 3000 has built-in restrictions that can leave it serving more computing than intended: storage, memory, capability to connect with the latest peripherals. But even the migrated customer can benefit from a plan to mitigate risks.

For example, Foster said a company needs $100,000 on average just to deal with planning for the challenges related to a merger. An application portfolio plan, which starts with a professional assessment, can help a company determine not only what they should do, but what they can stop doing.

"It gives people an opportunity to look at all of the processes in their business," Foster said of a portfolio project. "It helps standardize business practices, so the best ones move forward in a merger."

One newer trend in business is analyzing key performance indicators. The HP 3000, or a replacement, can be delivering data needed to access these KPIs. "You pull that data out of your database and put it into a dashboard," Foster said. You can get ready access to that data by using a data mart -- or as Foster said, "putting your data in a fishing pond instead of an ocean." These data marts are fed by an Operational Data Store, or a data warehouse. 

Data warehouses are far from new strategies. The 3000's app family was developed for warehouses as far back as the middle 1990s. But a much newer concept, cloud, also harkens back to 3000 roots. "The cloud is a just a modern version of the service bureau, Foster said. His partner in the webinars Chris Whitehead added that using the cloud "is an effective way to mitigate some of the costs and fewer resources you will have if you've gone through a big round of layoffs." Foster took note that using best of breed applications connected through the cloud still demands you assign an "application of record" to each customer datafile. It could be shipping, billing or a CRM system, but you must decide.

One segment of the webinar held special meaning for the 3000 site which is homesteading. Complete plans on how to weather reductions of resources include plans for aging hardware. 

"You can figure out what hardware can go away," using a portfolio plan in an era of cutbacks, Foster said. The estimation should be based on the hardware's business fit, its stability and quality, and its maintainability. Mean Time to Recovery of Operations is "the other side of your disaster plan, understanding the cost of recovering. This helps determine how long a company could afford to be off-line if a system failed.

Mergers help define movement, but the rise of mobile computing also will tax aging resources. "You'll have to think about how mobile fits into your picture. Maybe some of your operations don't have to be done with a web browser. A shipper could look up a status over a smartphone.

But that fishing pond, the reservoir that spills out of a classic data warehouse, delivers insights that can begin with 3000 data. Any 3000 customer who's thinking of moving off the platform will benefit from creating these ponds out of their oceans of data.

"There's a real benefit of being able to have replication of data that exists on an HP 3000 into a seperate repository," Whitehead said. "You can redirect all of the users to that environment on say, Oracle or SQL Server, so they can do their reporting. It facilitates the transformation if they do make the change in ERP -- and stops individuals from hacking away at the production environment, too." 

 

CHARON sets 3000's future

Editor's note: ScreenJet founder Alan Yeo attended the recent Stromasys briefing in Europe, where the company introduced and illuminated its HP 3000 emulator CHARON HPA/3000. Yeo has already covered the spirit and intention of the briefing, as well as the frank examination of the product's prospects. He also points out that the emulator's tech magic does not make it a direct store/restore 3000 replacement. But in his summary, Yeo says the solution is supplying a future for the 3000.

By Alan Yeo

Third of three parts

If you're adopting the Stromasys CHARON HPA emulator for your 3000 operations, you are going to have to do some serious planning on what does and doesn't get moved from your old environment. For example, on the peripheral side: DDS tapes? I don't think so! Your smart new Intel-based hardware isn't going to allow you to plug in that old DDS drive that you rely on for your backups. [Ed. note: In an update, Stromasys CHARON manager Paul Taffel begs to differ. The company also believes DTCs can be integrated, but it is waiting for a freeware customer to test that theory.] What's more, I think the jury is out on DTCs, as serial terminals and printers don't exactly fit with a modern Intel/Linux environment.

So if you're not already doing it, you are going to need to look at configuring and modifying your new HP 3000 environment to use things like Network Attached Storage (NAS) and networked printer devices. All of this may require an advanced level of expertise to configure.

Another important point made at the European event in Frankfurt was that Stromasys are logically supplying a new PA-RISC server (albeit emulated in software) when you purchase CHARON-HPA. They don't "do" MPE/iX, or third party utilities, and they don't sort out your software licensing for you, or know how to install or upgrade it. That is up to you to organise. Stromasys do not intend to become your support organisation for MPE/iX, Intel hardware, or Linux software issues.

I just mentioned Linux, which is a prompt to clarify an issue regarding the CHARON-HPA emulator. Whilst the Stromasys emulators for other platforms can run on Windows and Linux hosts, the HP 3000 emulator is only going to run on Linux. The only exception to this is the free/hobbyist edition that ships with a copy of VMWare Player and can be installed under Windows. As I understand it, there is no plan for a production Windows version, so I think that is a marker that Windows is itself now regarded as "Legacy."

My conclusion is that Stromasys have done an excellent job, and that their current pricing looks fair. 

 

They are certainly not giving HP 3000 users a get out of jail free card by giving it away. If you're using old HP 3000 hardware and versions of MPE/iX, then the upgrade to a modern CHARON-HPA/3000 server should be no more effort or cost than you would have incurred upgrading to the appropriate A- or N-Class HP 3000 (if they were still available). 

I think the free personal 2-user edition is going to be of great service to the HP 3000 community, as it will enable a large group of people to still keep their hands on an HP 3000 — so they will still be available to provide support into the future.

Times they are a-changing 

It's perhaps apt to compare this event in Frankfurt with the Ratingen event some nine years earlier, and realise how much has changed, and how much hasn't. Nine years ago if you read the Ratingen review, we got lost and drove around in circles. Today everybody has satellite nav, and probably on their iPhone, smartphone or tablet, none of which existed nine years ago. Nine years ago HP had a large support organisation at Ratingen and a huge production and software centre at Böblingen near Frankfurt. It's now all gone! Just shut down, or outsourced to Poland and Bulgaria.

Nine years ago HP was a big company in Germany; now it's just a few sales offices. Nine years ago there were a bunch of people in Ratingen wondering what the future of the HP 3000 was. On our February night in Frankfurt we finally got the answer: Hello CHARON!

As a final note, I did go back and read my old Ratingen piece from 2004. I'd concluded with "The meeting closed with the normal good-byes — but there was more than a sense that the paths of many of us, which had crossed if only infrequently over the last decades, might not intersect again as we set off in new directions." This has proved unhappily true. However, the upside of the Stromasys event was that as we departed, with freeware copies of an HP 3000 on a CD in our bags, I had the feeling that this time many of us expected to meet again in the future. 

By the way, for those of you wondering why the Stromasys emulators are called CHARON: the legendary Charon is the ferryman over the river Styx, carrying you from your old life to the next. I'll leave it to your investigation to work out how Stromasys is derived from that legend.

Alan Yeo is founder of ScreenJet, a vendor in the 3000 community that supplies migration and modernization software for MPE/iX solutions — as well as the organizer of two 3000 HP 3000 Community Meets and the HP3000 Reunion. 

Charon: Think of it as a 3000 upgrade

Editor's note: ScreenJet founder Alan Yeo attended the recent Stromasys briefing in Europe, where the company introduced and illuminated its HP 3000 emulator CHARON HPA/3000. Yeo has already covered the spirit and intention of the briefing as well as the frank examination of the product's prospects. He now points out that the emulator's tech magic does not make it a direct store/restore 3000 replacement.

By Alan Yeo

Second of three parts

I think the most important thing I realised at this event is the CHARON HPA emulator isn't a piece of technology that allows you to do a direct replacement of your current old HP 3000 with a piece of new hardware, by just doing a store and restore. The best way that I think I can describe it is: imagine that HP had just launched a new range of HP 3000 systems called the "B" and "O" Class to replace the "A" and "N" and that these new HP servers would only run MPE/iX 8.0. 

That 8.0 analogy doesn't quite apply, as the emulator ships with the final 7.5 version of MPE/iX. But you have to use the supplied 7.5 version, not your own, and if you are on anything earlier then you can think of this as an operating system upgrade as well as a hardware swap. So you probably are not going to get away with a STORE on your old system and a RESTORE with "KEEP" unless where you are coming from is an incredibly simple environment.  

Whilst your CHARON box can retain the same HPSUSAN, it can't retain the same HPCPUNAME — and it is almost certainly is going to be running a later version of MPE/iX for most homesteaders. So you are going to have to do a good inventory of what software and third party products you are running; if they will run under 7.5; and possibly how to re-install them — especially if they have any components that hook into anything in SYS. 

That means you are going to have to do some serious planning on what does and doesn't get moved from your old environment. But your reward could be improved performance.

How fast is it? The CHARON product manager Paul Taffel was very open about where the current sweet spot for performance of the CHARON emulator lies, which currently is anything up to the size of a low end N-Class. However they expect this to improve -- and unlike with the real N-Class hardware that officially topped at a 4-CPU system, using the Intel-based servers will enable Stromasys to create 6-way, 8-way and potentially even bigger CPU systems. 

One interesting thing was pointed out that hadn't struck me before: we have been used to CPUs getting faster and faster, but these days that isn't quite so true. Most of the new boxes deliver high-quoted MIPS by adding more and more cores, rather than the individual cores getting any quicker. For an emulator that uses two cores to emulate an HP 3000 CPU core, this means there is actually a ceiling on performance. That's the performance from each core. So it might well be a while before commodity Intel hardware can match a high-end HP 3000.

In reality I don't think raw performance is going to an issue for anyone who's homesteading on older hardware. Looking at the great table of relative performance created by Wirt Atmar at his AICS Research site, you would have to be running a heavily loaded 9x9 or 997 for this emulator to struggle. That's not to say that there wasn't one company at the Stromasys event that said it was beta testing the emulator for such a requirement.

Next time: Accommodating tape technology and NAS, and summing up CHARON and where it takes the HP 3000.