Using Webforms to Convert 3000 Screens

By Mike Howard
Unicon Conversion Technologies

Second of two parts

    Webforms, like Winforms, are from Microsoft. They are created and maintained in Visual Studio, have full GUI facilities and are maintained completely outside the COBOL program. But that is where the similarity ends. Webforms are full ASPX .NET and therefore employ a completely different method of processing.

   With Webforms, the user PCs are not connected to the host through any terminal services software. The host server must have a Web server installed on it. User PCs connect to the Web server through a Web browser and the Internet or an intranet. The user typically has an icon on their screen that starts the app when the user clicks on the icon. This launches an instance of the Web browser and gives it the URL of the Web server and the name of the Webform to be displayed. The form displays on the user PC.

   Now remember we fired up a Webform, not a COBOL program. The form is presented onto the screen but there is no application program running on the server. The user enters the data into the form and presses a function key or screen button and the Webform creates an event request and sends it to the Web Server. The Web Server receives the request and the Webform’s “code behind” processes the request by calling an application program to service that request. When the application program has performed its function, perhaps to obtain account information from the database using the account number entered by the user, it terminates and returns that information to the Webform code behind. The Webform code behind populates the form with the information and sends the form to the terminal.

    The main thing to appreciate is that it’s the Webform that calls the application program to perform an event request. The application program performs the request and terminates. The program responded to the form. The form is in control, not the program. When the form is on the screen there is no application program running on the server. This is stateless processing. An application program cannot “call” a form to display on the terminal, it can only respond to a call from a form and return to that form. The form however can invoke or call another form to be displayed. This processing does not fit the procedural code of most HP 3000 programs.

   Basically there are two competing methods involved here, the stateless processing of the Webform and the instate processing of the application procedural code. In addition, in the stateless process the forms needs to be in control of the programs and in the instate process the programs needs to be in control of the forms.

Engineered to make it stateless

   To make it work, the HP 3000 application programs have to be re-engineered into objects containing the logic required to service a form request. This is a massive undertaking. To enable a Webform front-end to work with a converted HP 3000 procedural program back end, Unicon created an interface manager called the Procedural Code Interface Manager.

   We used to offer our tools for do it yourself projects many years ago. Although the customers were always very happy with their results, we knew that they had incorporated many items that in time would prove problematic. Most DIY conversions are done by people with no prior migration experience and they haven’t yet learned what not to do, or what fits together better for the long run.

     Today we only perform migration projects, although these are often very performed on a joint effort with heavy customer involvement. We do not simply present a predetermined shrink-wrapped option to the customer – we ask the customer what he would like to see his application system migrated to. If he doesn’t know, we provide him with a list for options with benefits and disadvantages. We then produce a migration plan specific to the customer’s migration needs.

3000 Screen Conversions to Windows .NET

By Mike Howard
Unicon Conversion Technologies

Before 1998, all of our customers were asking us to migrate their mission-critical applications to Unix. What a difference the last 10 years have made. Today our customers’ new platform of choice is predominantly Windows. This is true for migrations from the smaller DEC VAX systems though the midrange HP 3000 systems and up to IBM mainframes. It’s true that over 25 years we have migrated more customers to Unix than Windows. But today that ratio is changing fast.

The decision is purely the customer’s choice. So why do more of our customers choose Windows? Each has their own reasons, from finding it easier to recruit Windows-knowledgeable staff than Unix staff; to consolidating all systems onto one platform type throughout the organization; to wanting to establish a Visual Studio .NET shop.

So what does an HP 3000 application look like after it is migrated to Windows? To a large extent that question is answered by what method is chosen to perform the migration. But the most obvious distinction in appearance are an application’s screens. Let’s take a look.

    Screens are perhaps the most important aspect of a successful migration project, because this is the primary interface to the user community. It is imperative to ensure that the migrated screens satisfy the needs of the users. Screens can be converted to look and feel almost exactly as they did on the HP 3000. Or they can be enhanced with additional GUI functionality. Sometimes screens are migrated as-is for one department and with a new GUI for another department.

     For example, users in a department who are used to speed-typing data into the system may find it very detrimental to their job function to have to deal with the point and click of a mouse. On the other hand, some users may find it beneficial to be given selection list boxes or dropdown selection boxes to help them better manage their data input process. 

     On the HP 3000, a user logs onto the system and then, often through use of a menu system, calls the program that contains the screens the users want to use. The program presents the screen to the terminal and in the accept case waits for the user to enter the data, at which point the user will hit a function key, and the program will continue on to the next instruction in the logic path.

    Thus, the HP 3000 online application code is procedural code. Throughout the process the program is fully resident in the memory (in-state) and it is always in command of the processing, and the screens will be presented to the terminal by the program in the order determined by its logic path.

    Although screen processing can be performed by using COBOL and statements, most HP 3000 programs use VPlus intrinsic calls to perform screen functions. VPlus forms are maintained separately from the COBOL program.

    HP 3000 VPlus screens can be converted to three types of Windows screens: COBOL SCREEN SECTION screens, Winforms, and Webforms.

    COBOL SCREEN SECTION screens are the standard way of processing screens in COBOL. The SCREEN SECTION is a relatively new section that comes after the LINKAGE SECTION in the DATA DIVISION of the COBOL program. The screen is defined in the SCREEN SECTION, then presented to the terminal by DISPLAY screen-name and ACCEPT screen-name statements in the program. SCREEN SECTION screens are contained entirely in the COBOL program and maintained as part of the program.

    Winforms are from Microsoft. They are created and maintained in Visual Studio, using the standard Visual Studio IDE, and of course they have full GUI facilities. That means Winforms are maintained completely outside the COBOL program. When the program wants to use a form it invokes the form.

    The calling of a SCREEN SECTION screen or a Webform screen in a converted COBOL program is similar in concept to calling a VPlus form. The program is in full control and the screens are presented to the user terminal as the program executes along its logic paths. This is a normal procedural code process just like the HP 3000’s COBOL uses. And just like the HP 3000 system, the user logs onto the Windows server from a PC which is connected over a network. The only difference is that instead of using terminal emulation software to connect to the server, the user connects using a Windows Terminal Services connection or a Citrix WinFrame connection.

Next: Webforms in action, and stateless processing distinctions

Strobe sidelines its 3000 emulator work

A decline in the amount of non-3000 business at emulator vendor Strobe Data has pushed the company's PA-RISC system emulation project to the sidelines, reports Strobe's Alan Tibbetts.

The vendor was among three whose hats were in the ring to create a solution that would permit non-3000 computers to run MPE/iX applications and software. HP has made an MPE/iX emulation license available, but none of the emulator vendors has released the rest of the solution.

Allegro Consultants was mentioned in the early talks about emulation, but president Steve Cooper long ago put rumors of an Allegro-branded product to rest. Over the past five years Allegro has been mentioned as a partner in a project that Strobe would lead, since Allegro boasts one of the best stables of PA-RISC experts in the world.

Strobe's business revolves around emulating Digital minicomputers and the HP 1000 mini, systems which are used to control processes in real-time computing. The current economic lull -- HP was still reporting declines in all of its businesses except services -- has set the 3000/PA-RISC emulation work onto Strobe's back burner.

"We are just trying to survive the lull in government orders right now," Tibbetts said. "The trouble is that the sales of our [Digital] PDP-11 line are down. The PDP-11s became unreliable more quickly and we have sold a bunch of them in the past, but the easy ones have already been captured."

Stromasys, the emulator vendor whose labs are in Europe with sales offices around the world, announced this summer that it was putting its PA-RISC emulation solution into alpha testing this fall. The Stromasys product won't rely on hardware components, going to an all-software solution that provides cross-platform virtualization. The emulator will permit MPE/iX to boot up and run on Intel's Xeon-x86 processor family as well as AMD's PC chips.

Tibbetts said that Strobe has leaned itself up in order to weather the lull and it continues to meet with customers to secure new emulator sales in the 1000 and PDP markets. He added that he's traveling to New York State this week to install an emulation product at BAE Systems, which is testing US military jet engines using 1985-era minicomputers.

The sidetracking of emulator work at Strobe can be viewed in more than one perspective. HP 3000 community members have long wondered if competing emulator solutions could survive in the MPE/iX marketplace. The market has a strong inventory of used hardware, much of which could be considered an upgrade for owners of older 3000s. Companies have left the market which might have been emulator customers, had HP made technology licensing available sooner to the vendors' R&D teams.

But Strobe's Willard West, who was the first to announce an emulator product in 2002, has said his market has an extraordinarily long lifecycle. Just because a company didn't need an emulator in 2009 does not mean the requirement won't arise four years later.

The sales cycle of an emulator also depends on the durability of the computers being emulated, Tibbetts added. "The HP 1000s have remained reliable longer than the PDPs -- which is good for the owners of  HP 1000 systems, but that leaves us with a slump right now. The good news for us is that even old-style HP quality is not enough to keep disc drives running forever."

Tibbetts said that the 3000 emulator project, which would leverage some of the technology the company uses in its Kestrel HP 1000 emulator, hasn't been canceled at Strobe. The company competes with Stromasys in the PDP marketplace, where Strobe has been serving customers who saw system vendors give up on minicomputers long ago.

"In the minicomputer marketplace, DEC and Data General and HP fought valiantly for quite a few years," Tibbetts said. "Then they all just kind of went away, and here we are, supplying a solution to the people that bought into the minicomputers at the time."

A persistent viewpoint, expressed by 3000 owners who are migrating, asserts that emulators will never make a substantial difference to the lifespan of the MPE/iX marketplace. While Strobe and Stromasys don't believe their products will alter the end-date of minicomputer use, their solutions give companies and governments a way to contain costs and stay in command.

A decision to fly Kiowa helicopters another five years in the US military means that minicomputer test systems must stay online that much longer, Tibbetts pointed out. Projects to migrate to alternative solutions in the real-time computing world can deliver failure consistently.

"In the past they have tried to go to other solutions," he said of real-time system owners. "They've found that the realities are that minicomputers just worked differently than PCs. I've seen lots of money flushed down holes trying to get a PC to do what a minicomputer had done."

The system distinctions for HP 3000s versus PCs are not as pronounced, he added. While that makes the emulation's tech prospects healthier, the marketplace could be tougher than in the real-time markets. "What makes it a little scary in thinking about the 3000 [emulation] is that you don't have that same deep penetration of technology," he said. "You don't have your tentacles deep into the customer's processes the way the real-time system does."

The technical promise is profound, however. Tibbetts said that he's going to BAE to upgrade an HP 1000 that had no provision for standards-based network connections. A simple serial port on the computer will be transformed into a port for telnet protocol -- the kind of quantum leap that a 3000 hardware cross-platform virtualizer could deliver five years from now to hit a moving technology target.

Not a word from HP about extensions

We're well into the first full week of December, so customers are asking if HP will consider extending its support deadline into 2011, or even beyond. This has been the month of the year when customers, some running migration projects, have found a gift of extra time delivered by HP.

When we got this year's call about this perennial holiday wish, a podcast was born. Our 6-minute report might have no news from HP, but it describes the kind of deal to keep 3000 customers in a relationship once they migrate away from the server. Taking a page from HP, customer credits play a role. Have a listen and see if there's another place to look for stimulus to your support and supplier relationships.

Yes, things could be worse — for everyone

You could be using IBM's AS/400 servers to run your business, exhorting Big Blue to pursue the path to goodwill instead of profit.

In this holiday season I've stumbled upon a steaming pile of snark about your Transition. There's a shortage of goodwill in many places, but maybe nowhere as obvious as the Web site IT Jungle, where an editor in chief has called most of you stupid. He's even measured the folly of running a newsletter like ours, though he missed calling us out by name by one word.

Timothy Prickett-Morgan writes in The Four Hundred this week to exhort his readers, who love their AS/400s as much as you have adored your HP 3000, that things could be worse for his faithful. In almost 3,000 words of manifesto he chirps that no matter how dire the future looks for a return to IBM's hegemony of the 1980s, life under the ticking clock of AS/400 futures could be worse.

I think the first thing to realize is that things could be worse. Imagine if this newsletter was called The Three Thousand and all of us, seeing the incredible RISC technology that Hewlett-Packard had on deck for its future PA-RISC workstations and servers in the late 1980s, had banked our careers on the MPE operating system, with its own integrated database management system and COBOL applications.

None of us were that stupid, of course.

I can weather that schoolboy name-calling, because in an era of Photoshopped integrity, respect is in short supply. But only from the distance of a New York office could a man with a few decades of IT experience think your Transition arises from stupidity. You believed, like a lover or a disciple, to nurture your relationship. Now your life after the affair is different; your career may be better, perhaps worse.

While it was not Prickett-Morgan's main mission to hoot at your challenge, he did lead with his slapdash foolishness to start preaching to his choir. My aim is to represent your reality in about half as many words. The HP 3000 has been that kind of efficient -- which is why so many of its customers' applications will live on other environments in the decades to come. Precious few will ever boot up under OS400, though.

There's a saying in the IT industry about storage devices, one that applies to all technology choices. There's only two kinds of disk drives: those that have failed, and those that will fail. Nothing outlasts change. But so long as your choice stays in front of change for the lifespan of your career -- as well as the legacy of your decisions -- your choice isn't stupid.

Not a single technology will escape the day of its demise. The signs of IBM's disregard for the AS/400 are right inside Prickett-Morgan's sermon. "The point is, the AS/400 used to lead in technology development, and in a lot of midrange accounts, IBM was not embarrassed or ashamed to lead with it. I haven't seen that IBM for a long, long time."

Nor will you again. Things have changed too much for technology companies like HP and IBM to need to revisit swaggering, innovative behavior that both delighted and imprisoned customers. You were an IBM refugee, some of you, while choosing the 3000. But the unique technology HP created also kept you inside Hewlett-Packard's campus. It was a collegial life when you knew your HP rep no matter how little you spent, when an HP VP like Marc Hoff would pass out business cards with his home number on the back -- so you'd stay satisfied and not be tempted to live off-campus.

HP felt such nostalgia for those days that when the company absorbed Compaq and competing products, Carly Fiorina's team felt the desire to add the word "Invent" under a new logo. Eight years later, half of HP's invention budget has disappeared, making a migration from R&D to Mergers and Acquisitions. As former HP exec Chuck House notes in a new book The HP Phenomenon, it's hard to make acquired companies' inventions deliver like your own innovation.

OS400, MPE: These were tools created and honed in an era when HP couldn't be seen, like it is today, with its third generation logo in every Starbucks store. HP needed invention to thrive in the 1980s. By the 1990s it settled for a reseller market. By now, it just needs customers for things other companies build. So it buys 3Com, or any of the other billions of dollars worth of R&D magic created in companies too small to have a truckload of flyers in Starbucks.

But to that matter of stupidity in a career: The Four Hundred and Prickett-Morgan are deluding themselves in thinking their own day of dunce-dom can be averted by passionate sermons. I reported on the day the 3000 community members built a football-sized advocacy poster a few miles away from a computer conference where top HP execs could still be expected to attend. The poster paper was recycled, the conference no longer exists, along with the defunct user group that mounted it. The HP execs are still around -- those who haven't taken retirement packages or migrated to companies where R&D is more essential than M&A. And those who remain are talking more, and listening less, especially to sermons. Forget about the home phone numbers.

It's an easier landscape to navigate while your vendor pretends to love your career choice. Once you're in  Transition terrain, the journey toward a secure future is littered with doubt and risk and courage and hubris. Alongside the rocky path, you sometimes see editors in chief and analysts and competitors saying that things could be worse. They could be you.

The truth is that they will be you someday. And once they're transported to Transition turf, they'll hope to have a map of how to land on their feet. They'll get to see what HP did poorly in its migration mantra, as well as how your community stepped up to fill in HP's gaping holes to plan for migration and homesteading. The AS/400 group already has an iManifest advocacy group, a canary perched in the mine shaft of IBM's futures.

Prickett-Morgan spends much time lecturing what IBM should do to revive AS/400 prospects. We have done as much here with the NewsWire, promoting the business choices that a $60-, then $70-, then $80-billion corporation should follow. Being prescient about the outcome of unheeded advice is easy enough. What is harder, and deserves more respect, is making a nourishing menu out of offal that your vendor serves you.

When your vendor's faith fails, like every disk drive, it might look like it did in the 3000 world -- but more insidious, because unlike HP, IBM has not yet admitted how little ardor it feels for the AS/400. To quote facts from our editor in chief, when your platform's division vanishes like the AS/400's has; when you estimate that only 20 percent of your community is investing agressively in your platform; when your Unix division feasted on a lousy deal offered to your legacy customers, then it's "a stupid way to play the midrange game."

If there's stupidity here, it's in HP and IBM overlooking businesses that produce profits. I had a lunch with a 3000 software vendor last week where he said, "I can't figure it. There was still money in the 3000 business when HP walked away. It's not like it was costing them to keep it running." But the bill that came due for HP was a sweetheart's promise to dump a competing product during the Compaq merger. MPE and VMS couldn't coexist in HP's shortsighted vision. But we see many of the same signs in the OpenVMS world that appeared in MPE and OS400 communities. Their members are all the Worried Well, to use a healthcare term.

Here at the NewsWire we hope to be able, with your support and continued interest, to dispel the needless worries and keep your courage up with facts, ideals and honest appraisals. It's an adventure making a career of enterprise IT these days, not a lesson that dispenses dunce hats from editors who know better than to be so smug about things being worse elsewhere. Yes, comparing is the most human form of writing the stories of our lives. But things being worse in a Transition community don't make the AS/400's world look ripe for a resurgence. Thinking legacy shouldn't be an epithet, or services will fund price-cutting, or a unique database will take back Oracle wins, or that new hardware sold under an old brand name (odd, that one) -- well, maybe all those ideas were just a wish for Father Christmas.

I wish Timothy Prickett-Morgan the best of luck in his upcoming business transition. I can be disappointed in this colleague's misstep, but you don't have to feel envious of not being an AS/400 customer. Everything in life is retiring someday, both systems and editors in chief. Until then I hope to spend very little time dancing on ground that I consider a graveyard, while I avert my eyes from my own plot nearby.

Does IA-64's future fail on emulation ability?

It's a good question to ask when a customer is considering where to migrate 3000 applications. Common sense advice from migration service suppliers says "It's all about the apps," meaning that target choices are determined by which applications a migrator must choose. But often in the 3000 marketplace, the applications remain the same during a migration, as companies execute a lift-and-shift move of code.

When the app remains the same, then choosing via architecture and environment is the fork in the road away from the 3000. Towards the x86/Xeon world of Windows, or into the land of Unix and HP's IA-64 Itanium designs? (HP-UX and IA-64 are a matched set of solutions, since Itanium is the only host for HP's Unix.) An analyst said recently that only three architectures will survive the consolidation of solutions, and Itanium isn't one of them. Joe Clabby has promoted IBM's solutions before his latest report, which claims the z architecture of IBM mainframes and IBM's POWER architecture will be survivors, along with Xeon.

But the reasons Clabby dismisses any survival for Itanium don't fit the technical view of one of the 3000 community's best IA-64 experts. Gavin Scott, a VP at support and development house Allegro Consultants, says that Clabby's wrong about x86 emulation being the fatal flaw in the Itanium fabric.

Clabby, who once advised his clients that Itanium was a good investment of development dollars, now faces away from HP, if not Intel. x86 compatibility is so important that it keeps IT planners away because their 32-bit apps aren't welcome on Itanium.

“From a dropped features perspective," Clabby said, "one of the most important features dropped in Itanium design was the chip’s ability to handle 32-bit computing. During the course of its development, 32-bit  emulation mode was removed from the Itanium feature set, making it impossible for IT buyers to run their existing 32-bit applications on the Itanium 64-bit processor.”

Scott says 32 bits are a small matter in choosing IA-64, which he calls by its HP/Intel name, Itanium Processor Family.

In reality, virtually nobody cares about running x86 on IPF. The only possible users would be Linux, where software is typically portable and recompiled anyway, so Linux users probably don’t see it as a huge issue either way, and a Microsoft Windows Server Ludicrous IPF Version user who wants to run old programs along with Oracle or SQL Server or whatever other limited excuse there is for the existence of Windows for IPF. I would think that the software emulation probably got added to Windows too, making it a non-issue.

I suspect the Intel software translation/emulation is maybe even better than the old native hardware feature was.

The first few implementations of Itanium ran IA-32 (standard x86) code natively in the hardware, Scott explained, the dropped the feature in preference of "a software translation/emulation module that I believe Intel developed and made available for use with Linux, so just as Aries makes PA-RISC work, the Intel software lets you run 32-bit x86 code whether or not your IPF chip has the old native x86 support or not."

Scott is referring to the Aries emulator in HP-UX, software which permits apps written for PA-RISC to operate on an Itanium processor. HP says it has no plans to drop Aries support in HP-UX, something that app developers who don't want to rewrite HP-UX apps for native Itanium count upon. But serious computing gets re-coded for new architectures, not emulated, Scott says.

"Generally people seem to find that for important, CPU-intense programs, Aries is not fast enough," he said, "and they really need to recompile into native code."

There are better reasons that ermulation to show why Itanium choices cut across the tide of movement toward Intel Xeon solutions. The architecture hasn't developed a large critical mass of customers compared to what HP calls its Industry Standard Servers. That lack of mass makes development choices harder to fund at Intel as well as within HP -- although Hewlett-Packard shows a great deal more faith in Itanium's capabilities.

The truth is that every solution has a migration in its future. But if the major effort of moving away is years away, a company can do well with a niche solution if the architecuture is elegant, efficient and stable. That's what's given the 3000 such an afterlife, a design beyond HP's plans for the system's demise.

Migrations lift, shift, exchange commands

Speedware announced the third phase of its online tool transfer from HP yesterday, as the migration partner rolled out the old MPE-to-HP-UX utilities on a new Web resource. The tools include a Commands Cross-Reference, an MPE to HP-UX Programming API Cross-Reference, as well as a cross reference for MPE to HP-UX System Administration Functions. All are in sync with the most reliable means to replace a 3000 application, something Speedware's Chris Koppe calls lift and shift.

At this year's e3000 Community Meet, Koppe related the story of how essential it was for a client to retain the logic and architecture of its 3000 apps in a move to HP-UX. ScreenJet's Alan Yeo, a provider for tools for do it yourself migration projects, said that some customers making a migration have asked "I'd like my bugs migrated, too."

In our video from the Meet, Koppe reveals background from the migration story of Australian insurance firm ING, which Speedware helped migrate during 2008. The alternative to lift and shift is replacement applications. The ideal situation for minimum change is the same third party app hosted on a new environment: more often Windows for the typical 3000 user, but sometimes HP's Unix.

Koppe said that ING's CIO didn't want to expose the company's data to scrutiny during the migration. Moving the data to Eloquence, the CIO said "if we have to look at the data, the project is a non-starter." Compliance issues would have risen up if the data had to be massaged in any way during the migration, Koppe said.

Further along in the video, after Yeo's lift and shift admonition and Koppe's peek at secret data, the Support Group inc's David Floyd made a pitch for ample migration of a system's documentation. If the expert on how a 3000 app leaves for whatever reason, including an untimely demise, "it's the people in this room who'll have to solve problems, because it becomes mission-critical knowledge at that point."

Interim homesteading, of any duration, precedes a migration. Engaging an offsite expert who's learned an application from an in-house system manager -- while transition proceeds using HP's cross reference utilities -- provides insurance for the lifting and shifting.

<> Cross-Reference

Snapshots form pictures for 3000 repositories

Official documentation for the HP 3000 has a lifespan, a period of time that's not measured like a book's bindings or any crumbling foundation of a library. Manuals and documents about how to operate a 3000 thrive upon the interest and care from the community. Speedware said at the latest e3000 Community Meet that it wants to be a repository for such 3000 knowledge.

Chris Koppe, the company's marketing director who is also the 2010 Connect user group president, reported that Speedware took snapshots of the documentation that was removed from the HP's Web servers last December. "If you're missing anything that was in HTML, some see us," he said at the Meet. Documents which used to be available in either HTML or PDF formats now only appear as PDFs. Koppe said that while Speedware still can't host official 3000 documentation, HP advised them to "take a snapshot of all of it last year -- early, just in case."

HP spread that advice around the user community about this time last year, when it had begun to issue its final communications with the community. The vendor's migration effort may be erasing some edges of HP's picture of documentation, so outside respositories are important to preserve 3000 practices. "As part of the migration," said Eloquence database creator Michael Marxmeier at the Meet, "some documents might just vanish, and it's difficult for a large organization to restore them."

HP gave customers that advice to capture any needed documents last year, then took its Jazz server offline for good to remove scores of documents and programs. Early this year the vendor struck deals with several companies to host white papers, training materials and free utility software. The 3000 system and software documentation was also a part of those deals, but it was licensed with a caveat. Outside companies can't offer these docs until HP stops serving them.

That kind of change can happen overnight, but at the moment HP has promised that it will remain the repository of 3000 documentation until 2015. The vendor's support business is scheduled to end five years earlier -- a point in time when the more repositories exist, the better coverage for the community.

Chris Bartram, the founder of the 3000's Technical Wiki and host of dozens of public utility programs at 3k.com, said he believes HP's long timelines for exiting 3000 services are part of a strategy. OpenMPE, which also wants to be known as the 3000's repository, endured years of delays and HP deliberations about the vendor's plans to hand off the stewardship of 3000 intelligence.

I wished OpenMPE good luck when they set off so many years ago, but I firmly believe that some at HP knew it was probably in their best interest to drag things on long enough -- without actually saying no and pissing people off -- so by the time anything was handed over, there would be so little demand left that HP could be sure they had milked all the "conversions" (and related new hardware purchases) they could. I guess it's getting close to that point -- so I'm not sure if I'm happy for OpenMPE, or sad.

The challenge in preparing for a far-off transfer of information like manuals, or moving support contracts by the end of 2010, is that any new resources must ramp up and then wait for their turn as stewards. Speedware, which contracted for hosting of 3000 manuals, must keep them archived and ready for whatever day HP decides manuals will not be online at HP anymore. "The idea here is to make sure that nothing gets lost over time," Koppe said, "so it has a home somewhere."

Whether it's Speedware, with its contracts, resources and HP data in hand, or OpenMPE -- trying to get its HP docs cleaned up to host on a new Jazz/Invent3k server -- any alliance of 3000 community members won't be earning much from doing this repository work. The only real profits come from showing love for the beloved server still at the heart of so many careers and companies.

"We're not really making any money in this market anymore," said Bartram, who sold 3000 e-mail application software during the 1990s and still supports it. "So it's still more of a labor of love -- or love lost."

Minisoft joins PCI compliance team

Penalties for unsecured commerce via credit cards run up to a half million dollars for companies using the HP 3000, Unix and other environments. The card industry's new PCI standards were supposed to leave the HP 3000 unprepared for the July, 2010 deadline to comply. But a few vendors have stepped in to add security that could satisfy PCI auditors.

And in a best-of-both-worlds development, the newest entry for PCI compliance tools runs with both the IMAGE and the Eloquence databases -- so 3000 users en route to migration can have encrypted connections now, and later.

Minisoft announced its database connectivity tools have been updated to include security that can help in PCI compliance. Starting today the company's ODBC, JDBC and OLE database middleware drivers incorporate the SSLv3 and TLSv1 encryption technology to secure connections. Minisoft says that its new options for the middleware "allow a user to specify the PCI-compliant levels along with the type of encryption (Change Chiper Spec Protocol) required by an organization's auditor or compliance officer."

In matters of PCI compliance -- important at the e-commerce companies where the 3000 was once strong in number -- those auditors determine what will escape the credit card penalties.

Visa and Mastercard set up the PCI security measures, and the card companies are requiring every merchant and processor to comply with thorough practices which include encryption capability. The HP 3000 was never adept at encrypting data, in large part because the system was secured by its unique OS architecture. Viruses, malware and hacks are not part of the 3000's pedigree.

But encryption is essential to passing a PCI audit, so the Minisoft products adopt three of the better-known modules for protecting data in transit. The vendor calls its software "compliant with the PCI Data Security Standard." The DSS is widely accepted as a crucial part of a total PCI compliance plan.

Earlier in 2009 the HP 3000 got another member of the encryption team to become PCI compliant. IDent/3000, a PCI compliance utility written, sold and supported by Paul Taffel, added features to keep some Ecometry sites in the running to gain PCI compliance.

Taffel created IDent when Adager's CEO Rene Woc put him in touch "with a couple of Ecometry sites who realized that there was no way to meet PCI requirements with existing MPE features. These sites fed me with requirements, and I came up with a collection of solutions to take care of each requirement."

Now Minisoft offers its PCI solution, an element that might be viewed as an essential tool in a box which IT managers will need to fill to satisfy certified PCI auditors. Minisoft's tool has a substantial added value. Its middleware operates with Eloquence, the database most like IMAGE. So when 3000 sites complete their migrations -- using lift and shift methodology for minimum risk -- the same middleware suite is waiting on the Unix, Windows or Linux target platform. It even supports the Mac.

One important point to remember is that PCI is a standard which can be interpreted in more than one way. A subjective appraisal from an auditor leads to certification. As Taffel said in our summertime story:

Most small companies can self-certify that they’re PCI compliant, but the bigger ones have to use external auditors, so they’re the motivated ones. The PCI requirements are not 100 percent clear. Everyone who reads them comes away with a different understanding of what they require.

The Minisoft ODBC, JDBC, and OLE DB middleware drivers support MPE's IMAGE, Eloquence 8.0, Windows 7.0, and Windows 64-bit SQL Enterprise Server. The drivers run on HP-UX, MPE, Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and Macintosh operating systems. The PCI capabilities are available in an upgraded version for existing Minisoft customers.

Enduring risks to survive viral times

NewsWire Editorial
By Ron Seybold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP Q4 results show business servers stalled

Hewlett-Packard reported its fiscal year and fourth quarter results late Monday, results that drew good news from services business, PC and printer sales, and little else. While the headline news showed an increase in Q4 profits over the same 2008 quarter, HP achieved its rise on cost cutting. Its total sales dropped 8 percent versus the prior fourth quarter and 3 percent for all of fiscal 2009.

That's a $114 billion year in sales, with HP reporting a total profit of $10.1 billion. The 2008 numbers hold the records for both categories -- and that was a fiscal year where EDS didn't contribute for two of HP's four quarters. Enterprise Server sales, part of the ESS group in the chart below, were off during 2009 by about $4 billion.

The numbers were brightest in the services sector which contributed most to 2009 sales. Once HP added EDS to its portfolio of acquired companies, the unit delivered both profits and sales that rose throughout the year. Services has kicked in upwards of $1 billion per quarter in 2009 profits, becoming the new printer group of HP's financial desires. The EDS unit came close to topping HP's PC business in sales, all while earning three times as much profit. Services now represent almost 38 percent of all HP profits.

PCs sat at the center of analyst questions in the briefing held after the US markets closed. HP is taking market share from Dell, but sales revolve around the least expensive products in the Personal Systems Group lineup. Wall Street and investment experts didn't ask about the Enterprise Storage and Server unit or the group's Business Critical Servers division. ESS generated more profits than in Q3, but its $481 million in earnings was 30 percent below the same 2008 quarter.

The latest numbers for the BCS products, such as the Integrity HP-UX server line and the ProLiant Windows servers, wouldn't inspire confidence in prospects for a renewal of former's sales growth.

The HP-specific enterprise servers which make up the Integrity line saw a drop in year over year sales of 33 percent. Even the arrival of blade server options couldn't show a rise, with sales off 8 percent.

The results in enterprise servers looked like a situation where the small businesses led HP to better profitability while the HP-UX options for midrange and large companies brought up the rear. HP's CFO Cathy Lesjak had to point to incremental growth to assert improving conditions for the company's server operations. Increasing sales volumes for Industry Standard Servers (ISS) that run Windows drove up operating margins for ESS, she said.

"Although each business unit in Business Critical Systems was down year on year, each grew sequentially," Lesjak said. "Business Critical Systems and Storage improved 6 and 11 percent, respectively." Sequential comparisons are used to show overall sales trends, but business booked during a Q3 does not compare well with sales opportunities much deeper into customers' calendar year.

The newest G6 platforms in ISS, delivered during the summer, contributed to those Windows servers' 15 percent sales rise between a quarter ending July 31 and the one ended October 31. HP pre-announced these servers in the middle of Q3, tamping down demand for existing server sales that would then rebound when the new servers became available.

"With its compelling value proposition, we are seeing rapid adoption of this [G6 ProLiant] platform, with approximately 50 percent of ISS sales now coming from G6," Lesjak said.

HP made forecasts for its 2010 business, at least in the near term. It expects a quarter to start fiscal 2010 of about the same sales as the just ended quarter. Earnings will drop sequentially, HP predicts, while the full fiscal year should show sales of about $118 billion.

Small migration steps shadow resistance

At this year's e3000 Community Meet, a roundtable discussion offered insights into why more migrations aren't completed by now. After all, it's eight years since HP announced its exit from the 3000 business. What's holding up some sensible companies? For the 3000 site accustomed to managing its own development and operations, one barrier seems to be in-house experience.

Rick Goldman of Spellbinder Systems Group shared a typical tale of resistance. Small steps can soften the blow of change, he said, but moving something task-specific into enterprise-wide design can throw up a hurdle. Spellman is consulting on Speedware implementations as well as migration.

"In some cases people don't want to move because they want to avoid risk -- not realizing the risk they've got in staying on the 3000," he said. "They're afraid of introducing some new mix to their technology." The reluctance to extending a point technology like replication is one example Goldman shared.

The consultant said at the Meet that a company he advised had put together a quick parser for Quiz reporting, and generated equivalent code using Crystal Reports. Now it had a poor man's replication monitor for the data, and periodically offloaded major databases. But up to date replication, where the data was fresh? Too much of a leap.

"The problem was that because they didn't do any formal, true replication, the data was always stale. That was acceptable. But the moment you start introducing something else, you need real time replication. This is where they get scared, because they haven't had to do that before. Even shadowed IMAGE databases, way back when, used to freak people."

Change, to almost nobody's surprise, is the fear that's acting as a counterweight to migrating away from a platform which HP promises to leave in about a year or so. "Doing replication onto another platform, despite the fact that we have much more heterogeneous environments with lots of platforms, there are still emotional limits to what people want to make their jump with," Goldman said. "They don't want to take the leap because it's scary and they don't have the expertise in that area."

OpenMPE's march to source halfway home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Houston, we have HP-UX training, free

Even though many IT pros disregard the word free, and cull it from e-mail, the old-school HP 3000 community remembers genuine gifts to customers. Source Direct, a supplier of enterprise hardware, is sponsoring free training in the Houston area in three weeks. The source of the training makes it easy to identify the value you'll get on Dec. 9.

On that Wednesday from 11-5 you can receive HP-UX training from Bill Hassell, one of the best recognized Unix gurus in the HP community. Two years ago, the Greater Houston Regional User Group (GHRUG) included Hassell in GHRUG's user conference. Hassell has demonstrated enough HP-UX savvy and experience to fill a full day of pre-conference training at the HP Technology Forum. His training during that HPTF day was being sold at $495.

GHRUG may not have mounted a public meeting this year, but the user group has delivered notice of this free training to its membership list. As HP 3000 members of GHRUG have made transitions to HP's Unix, they need the kind of administration tips that save time. The cost of the training is already saving them money. There's a free lunch, too.

To reserve a seat and get directions to the event you can contact Dave Crawford, Regional Client Business Manager at Source Direct -- (713) 473-5368 or dcrawford@sourcedirect.com

IT pros who've recently arrived in the HP-UX environment can also walk away with a CD of "powerful HP-UX tools" as part of the half-day at the Sheraton Suites (2400 West Loop 610, Houston 77027). As part of a Source Direct University program, the event promises power and discovery.

The presentation is intended to share little known but powerful tips and techniques that will enable HP-UX System Administrators to prevent mistakes that lead to downtime, as well as increase security and reliability.

The information in this seminar will increase Sys Admin productivity through streamlined administrative tasks, increase responsiveness to problems, and productivity tools that will extend a Sys Admin’s ability to manage a complex multi-system environment.

The event also serves as notice that Hassell has joined Source Direct, after 20-plus years of work at HP and more than a decade on his own as an independent consultant. His seminar is aimed at an IT pro who's moved beyond beginner status on Unix, "designed for intermediate and senior system administrators, and will cover many of the most common areas of managing single and multiple HP-UX systems. This seminar will present  techniques for standardizing systems, advanced scripting techniques, managing user accounts, and common security techniques."

Source Direct and Hassell also point out that the half-day offers best practices and tools that do not exist on most HP-UX systems. System administration can present more of a roll-your-own experience in the Unix environment. Learning how to make HP-UX utilities and commands work to reproduce MPE/iX talents could ease a migration -- one already accomplished, or a transition still underway.

Micro Focus extends ACUCOBOL future

For more than a year after Micro Focus acquired the ACUCOBOL family of products, Acu users had grave doubts about the merger. Micro Focus sold one of the most popular, competing COBOL compilers. It paid $40 million for the entire entity of Acucorp, its Extend development suite, even Acu's Chief Scientist Drake Coker. Buying your competition to gain prospects, while retiring their tools, is commonplace in the computer business by now. Just ask any of the customers whose ERP or CRM apps now belong to Infor. (MANMAN is among those put out to pasture.) Micro Focus announced Project Meld in 2008, in which two products were to do a Vulcan connection to become as one.

So it came as a surprise to the enterprise solutions community when ACUCOBOL regained its development future at Micro Focus this year. Peter Anderton of Micro Focus explained the turnabout at the e3000 Community Meet in September. "We told our customers we were merging Micro Focus and AcuCOBOL, and they told us we were daft," the Englishman said with British candor. "And we were."

Migration service suppliers had a hard time visualizing an ACUCOBOL that would survive. Mike Howard of Unicon Conversion Technologies pointed out that a customer couldn't purchase AcuCOBOL since the acquisition. Anderton said that's changing now, and his company has a roadmap available that visualizes an ACUCOBOL 9, created by Micro Focus.

ScreenJet's Alan Yeo passed along a copy of the roadmap. His product includes a module to migrate VPlus 3000 screens using the AcuCOBOL GUI, one of the strongest elements of Acu.

The roadmap also pledges loyalty to R/M COBOL, another competing product acquired by Micro Focus. Anderton's forecast for R/M sounded more pragmatic at the Meet than the language used in the roadmap.

RM/COBOL is a trusted and mature technology. Our primary objective for RM/COBOL users is to ensure that your  existing applications continue to work at their best and are fully  supported both in terms of the platforms they are available on (such  as Windows 7), and to provide the high level of user support and fixes that you have come to expect.

If you are starting a new cycle of developing COBOL or mixed  language solutions from scratch, we would recommend that you  consider one of our other product lines: ACUCOBOL which offers  the highest levels of compatibility with RM/COBOL, or Net Express/ Server Express which offer the ultimate in scope, functionality and  performance.

HP 3000 customers might recognize the "trusted and mature" label from their days reading HP's tea leaves about the 3000 futures. Not good. (HP's software products for the 3000 gained that kiss of death regularly through the 1990s, until products like Business Report Writer, Transact and Allbase 4GL became antiques.)

The news that Micro Focus will sell ACUCOBOL for new projects offers some hope for the Acu future. It might be more impressive if Acu was sold into more places than R/M COBOL shops, but that could prove to be true in the year to come. Acu doesn't have its own sales force, and it's hard to judge how many products a Micro Focus rep can peddle. (Again, there's the 3000 experience, where a consolidated HP salesforce with both MPE and HP-UX to offer sold nearly every customer on Unix. Many sales came out of the hide of healthy 3000 shops.)

But like the 3000, ACUCOBOL has unique advantages that can be spread to COBOL sites moving away from the 3000's COBOL II. Acucorp took the time to give its compiler the understanding of MPE intrinsics, because Acucorp intended to sell the product to 3000 shops as a COBOL II alternative. Micro Focus COBOL simply demands you excise these 3000 directives before you can compile and run on a new platform.

Micro Focus lives and breathes .NET architecture, though, something a Windows convert will crave to get to "Native Windows," as Howard calls his company's conversions. At the risk of being too cheery, the new map seems to extend the boundaries of COBOL choices for migration projects. You can see a road that permits a "Lift and Shift" migration using Acu, especially if Windows is not on your trail.

A New 3000, to Mitigate Risks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links show the Way to SQL Server flexibility

A serious share of HP 3000 migration projects target SQL Server as an IMAGE replacement. The Eloquence database is a sleeker, faster, more 3000-friendly solution, plus it runs across all three major migration environments. But SQL Server is a Microsoft product, tied to Windows, the most popular migration target.

All those follow-the-crowd reasons show why a brief announcement from Computing Solutions Ltd. (CSL) could help migrating 3000 sites.The UK company sold Linkway an IMAGE-to-ODBC utility starting in the 1990s. Now the vendor is tossing its development hat into the SQL Server arena.

CSL's SQL Server Job Monitor (SSJM) software is on sale at launch prices through this month, according to Tom Moore of the company. The utility helps supply automated monitoring of batch work (SQL jobs) to the Windows environment.

Linkway earned good marks from the community in the late '90s, while IMAGE was still gaining tools like the company's founding product. The company continues to support some 3000 customers still using its products and services. Batch work under Windows merits special considerations while making a migration, according to Unicon's Mike Howard.

Using a third party tool for batch management under Windows can be helpful, Howard says. "Windows has a basic job scheduler which is often sufficient for most customers, but if a more comprehensive product is required I would recommend Global ECS from Vinzant Software."

Drilling down into the database batch work is SSJM's specialty. The product can be used with SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, Moore said. "It supports exception reporting of failures of SQL jobs that need corrective action, as well as an interface to other monitoring software as required." One unique feature of the product is that "it particularly supports a wall-mounted display as an operator's support tool, showing colored statuses of all jobs for the monitored server."

As for the link between Linkway and SSJM, Moore reports that it's all a result of evolution of fundamental database utility technology.

CSL has continued on in software development, particularly in Web application developments on SQL or Oracle as clients need, whilst still keeping services running from the HP 3000 for non-migrated clients. There are still sites that have not migrated, but they don’t want to invest now!

Details on the new product and an offer to download a copy for a free 14-day trial are at the product's Web site.

Education takes up broader set of IT causes

By Birket Foster
Special Report to the NewsWire

Whoever imagined a conference agenda with the discussions on the appropriateness of using iTunes to distribute e-learning content, or open-source versus proprietary applications? How things have changed!
 
This week I’m attending the Educause conference in Denver, where I will be taking a dive into the modern world of educational computing looking at these topics and more.

The world of computing for education used to be really simple. Early HP 3000 adopters included many higher-ed and K-12 organizations. There were consortiums that were formed to build common applications iN Washington state, California and other places. The HP 3000 market had several providers that sprung up – SRN provided fundraising software, degree audits and more. Bi-Tech provided financials and many customers flocked to conferences. There were even conferences within conferences, as there was a SIG-ED track at Interex.
 
But the modern campus landscape has evolved to include massive IT infrastructures – internet, wireless, servers, secure networks, mobile computing, peer to peer file sharing, High Performance Computing, and Learning Management Systems (LMS) dot the landscape of the modern campus.

ID management with application data provisioning -- application integration for allowing the appropriate access based on role -- is the new challenge. This allows the integration of library, LMS, bookstore, cafeteria, vending systems, as well as e-mail, printing and file shares. The are lots of systems to present these credentials to. There is a need to have Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans and understand how to recover even if the servers were virtualized.

It’s interesting to see the issues, ranging from defining what a department is to the percentage increase of Adobe’s latest licenses. (It’s up to 50 percent for some colleges). There’s also been a large amount of discussion about the support for office and Windows 7 for Mac devices, especially through Safari and Firefox.

I'll have more to share as the conference unfolds.

Birket Foster is CEO of MB Foster, supplier of HP 3000 migration services and tools, as well as data management and datamart solutions. You can also follow the Educause Twitter stream by using the #EDUCAUSE09 tag.

IBM midrange users manifest new activism

IBM made a gallant effort at capturing users who pondered an HP 3000 migration seven years ago, but the alternative midrange iSeries server has seen declining share of Big Blue attentions. Now a group of iSeries (and AS400) owners, vendors and leaders are mounting an effort to make the iSeries manifest a brighter destiny. The campaign bears a striking resemblance to the OpenMPE advocacy -- with the distinction that IBM hasn't canceled the iSeries futures.

The iManifest initiative took off in the spring in Japan. What does the iSeries need that IBM sales and marketing isn't supplying? The launch manifesto doesn't call out IBM's shortcomings, but aims to rally the users to recognize their systems' value.

More widespread usage of IBM i is the best way for corporations to strengthen their management capability and business power. We have started activities to add to the user community as many new companies as possible. We ask that users renew their firm confidence and belief that IBM i is the best infrastructure available to support managerial and operational innovation.

2009 is the 20th anniversary of the iSeries family, which started when IBM migrated its System 36/38 customers to the AS400. At the same time HP was moving its HP 3000 sites to the PA-RISC 3000s and MPE/XL. iManifest is trying to ensure that HP's 3000 history doesn't repeat in a fadeout of the iSeries. The initiative recently gained new members in the iSeries chief scientist Frank Soltis, as well as the top application supplier Infor -- which owns the MANMAN customer base in the 3000 world.

Much like PA-RISC, IBM uses its own chip design to power the iSeries (now being called Series i). This POWER architecture is in its sixth generation, and Soltis is the primary creator of the architecture used in IBM's Power Systems. He's also retired from IBM after decades of toil in the technical trenches for the community.

The users of iSeries systems will remind you of that huge share of the 3000 community: Small-to-midsize companies that chose an integrated IT solution in the 1980s and '90s, only to see industry-standard choices dominate the vendor's roadmap. IBM hasn't joined iManifest; that might be tantamount to admitting the product line is in need of a spark. Over in the iSeries press, Chris Maxer of iSeries Network reports that a vendor rep in Europe has received only non-official support from IBM.

LANSA's Martin Fincham notes, "While I have no official word from IBM, I want to go on-record and say that I have personally received enthusiastic and practical support for iManifest EMEA from a number of IBM'ers around the globe. I cannot thank-you by name here, but you know who you are."

HP officials in the 3000 division were not much impressed by the future of IBM's integrated business alternative in 2002 and 2003. The decline in IT sales during 2008 and 2009 hasn't been kind to these non-standard products, and the press reports a steady drain from sales of the Series i. HP said it would weather IBM's pursuit of the HP 3000 migration crowd. Declining share would put pressure on solution suppliers such as LANSA, a forecast we heard in 2002 from then-e3000 Business Manager Dave Wilde.

As the market share becomes smaller and the prices drop, it becomes difficult to fund the marketing and sales channel to keep a vertically integrated system in place. One thing that’s going to happen is the margins will drop for a solution like the AS/400. Their sales volume will drop because of the differences. The other thing that happens is that a channel partner doesn’t want to test on as many platforms, just one or two mainstream platforms that are an easier sell.

Since then IBM has renamed the system twice, pumped two new generations of OS and architecture into the computer. It's also consolidated the division with the Unix version of the iSeries, another move that has the customer base worried. In one view, Wilde's predictions have come true, though probably on a longer timetable than HP imagined. The same extended timeline can be observed for HP 3000 migrations.

But the iSeries community isn't going gentle into any perceived good night. It's raising funds for marketing in the US. Independent software vendors like Infor and LANSA propose to market more than just applications -- and fund that vertical system's sales where IBM has not.

"The match has been struck. It just needs a little gasoline to light the bonfire," said Dan Burger writing in IT Jungle. "The manifest is IT activism. It comes from a loyal customer base that is irate about the mediocrity of IBM i marketing and is fearful that the mediocrity will creep into research, development, and sales of an outstanding product."

Had this sort of activism -- you might even call it community organization -- taken place for the HP 3000 before 2001, HP's decision to depart might have had a different timetable. Or not, based on policy and marketing beliefs like those which make an iManifest or an OpenMPE inevitable.

Connect board election nears finale

The Connect user group for HP enterprise customers will close its voting for a 2010-11 board on Nov. 12. This election of directors is following a pattern HP 3000 customers will recognize from OpenMPE board voting. The number of seats open equals the number of candidates on the slate. For any company pursuing an HP 3000 migration, however, this organization has a lot to offer in networking opportunities.

In situations like an election without a contested seat, members understand their vote won't influence the outcome of the balloting. But voting will keep you engaged and more interested in what the board of directors will propose for the year to come. This year's slate of directors includes a candidate from the HP 3000 community running for re-election. Steve Davidek of the City of Sparks, Nevada is volunteering for a term that runs through 2011.

Connect members are the only people who can vote. Membership is only $50 for a year for an individual. You can cast a ballot after looking over the slate at the Connect site, then following the link to vote. 

One of the best resources Connect offers is a lively Twitter feed, managed by Kees den Hartigh. The Community Manager and an officer of a Netherlands user group, den Hartigh posts news from the HP that's the destination of HP3000 migrations, offering Unix and industry standard system updates. Follow den Hartigh on Twitter via @Connect_WW.

Connect is also building a 3000 user group community online, led by its president-elect Chris Koppe of Speedware and Speedware product manager Nick Fortin. The 3000 NewsWire's Twitter feed is part of the page, which is working to gain momentum among members. The Connect site has introduced an upgrade to the user interface for the group just last week.

3000 tools lose one, gain another UK entry

Birth and death are both parts of the 3000's ecosystem, even on the sixth anniversary of the system's World Wide Wake. The Wake was concocted by Alan Yeo of the UK-based company ScreenJet in 2003, a worldwide celebration in October of that year to mark the end of the 3000's manufacture. A half-dozen years after dozens of meetings lifted a glass to the 3000's HP lifespan, Yeo has introduced a new product for 3000 sites, while another UK company has closed its book on its programmer's environment.

First, the obituary. Whisper Technologies ended its 18-year run as a supplier of programmer tools, according to the company's founder Graham Wooley. (Tip of the hat to Duane Percox of QSS, whose development labs used Whisper's products.) The UK's Whisper built and promoted the Programmer Studio PC-based toolset, selling it as a development environment which understood exchanges with the 3000 but could be used to create programs under Windows. Robelle responded promptly with a Windows version of Qedit, and the 3000 ecosystem had a lively competition for programming tools for more than five years.

The birth was first announced at this fall's e3000 Community Meet. Yeo introduced EZ View, a tool for migrating the 3000's VPlus forms to industry-standard XML forms. As Yeo suggests in the video above, EZ View promotes a no-changes transformation of 3000 app hosting. Whatever the behavior of your 3000 apps today for the user base, EZ View will copy it faithfully to another environment so no retraining is required. At the same time, the door to .NET Windows or anything which XML supports can be opened.

At QSS, where the ghostscript/ghostpdl porting project is underway, Percox passed on this report from Wooley, who founded Whisper back in the era when the 3000's OS was called MPE XL. Wooley told Percox:

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.

Meanwhile, EZ View is opening possibilities for companies who want to leave VPlus behind. While it was a good screen development tool for 3000 integration, VPlus was long ago passed by Visual Basic, and then Microsoft's Visual Studio in flexibility and industry support.

But the key to ScreenJet's new product lies in its ability to copy what the 3000 did. Users operate an app that's been through the EZ View transfer in the same way they've been using a 3000 app. The devotion to the old look and feel is important to minimize retraining. It also lets a 3000 shop test a migration step while the app remains on the 3000.

“We have the only VPlus migration product that runs on the 3000 as well," Yeo said. "You can switch to our API and the XML forms files.”

COBOL offers you can't refuse

For a 50-year-old language, COBOL seems to have a lot of new options and energies lately. Especially for 3000 customers who are making migrations, the ones looking around for their next platform and language. For millions of companies around the world, COBOL is an offer they cannot refuse.

We've recently heard from Chuck Townsend, a COBOL and modernization consultant who helped launch the software vendor LegacyJ. He recalls that LegacyJ "implemented the HP COBOL syntax, the HP Intrinsics (excluding IMAGE), the HP Macro capability and you might remember the VPlus capability as well." So LegacyJ offers a COBOL for use on platforms other than the 3000. One that claims to know something about the 3000.

Then there's ACUCOBOL-GT. It was easy to believe that ACUCOBOL would decline in favor of Micro Focus COBOL, when MF bought Acucorp in 2007. But Alan Yeo of ScreenJet reminds us that:

The ACUCOBOL product is still available, and we have migrations that are still in progress with our ACUCOBOL GUI conversion for VPlus products. In fact, Micro Focus are adapting that technology as the Thin Client GUI for the Micro Focus COBOL products. Like the 3000, rumours of ACUCOBOL's death appear premature.

Now that Micro Focus owns the product, it may not be as easy to ask for ACUCOBOL by name, but the GT suite still appears for sale on the Micro Focus Web site. What's even more interesting at that MF site is a pep talk by analyst Dale Vecchio of Gartner, above. The research VP comes across as a consigliere (mob elder statesman) in a six-minute sermon about why retirements are good for IT's future. He seems to invoke that image with his comparison of IT practices and the methods of The Sopranos.

Let's be clear about why Vecchio is speaking in the 6-minute video at the Micro Focus site. (Registration required.) He's advising IT managers and directors to get busy. Gartner people like to incite. Make changes, he says, or you'll believe the same thing Albert Einstein said. "Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal," Vecchio quotes Einstein. It appears Einstein actually said something like this, but then Vecchio adds to the quote, "no good can come of it." 

(Web resources agree that Einstein said technological progress, not change. This distinction has always been the undoing of change cheerleaders like Vecchio. Progress is something the IT pros must accomplish. The analysts and vendors will only supply the change, unless you hire them for it. We'll leave it as an exercise for our readers to determine the context of the quote from Einstein, who's invoked for everything from IT to baby development videos.)

The good news, Vecchio says, is that the people in IT are retiring who believe change is no good. It's a bit naive for Vecchio to think that stubborn IT managers and CIOs are standing in the way of improvements, unless they own their companies. Change -- whether it's adopting Micro Focus COBOL instead of the ACUCOBOL solution, or embracing even wider like cloud computing or the .NET distinction -- needs to show proof of success, or it's just an experiment.

The need for proof is what keeps 50-ish IT professionals on the job when they'd rather be retired. What you know remains an asset to your company. Proven success keeps COBOL running much of the world's business computing, 50 years after the language was invented. It's hard to refuse something that's worked for this long -- if its community keeps reinventing it. If your IT efforts include care for languages and programs, like so many do, then caring about your next COBOL should be an issue to investigate.

HP's history becomes a phenomenon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COBOL migration options: More advice

Last week we examined a COBOL to Java path for 3000 applications which are migrating to other platforms. The story called out two suppliers, Veryant and LegacyJ, who have promoted the Java path to 3000 customers. Those companies were reading that article and offer even more detail on getting to Java, the "write once, run anywhere" language that's still got fairy dust on its collar 12 years after it went global.

Alfredo Iglesias of Veryant tells us that " the majority of our customers find the idea of leveraging their COBOL and application expertise while deploying pure Java applications is very attractive." You can move away from COBOL completely, too.

If someone who knows the COBOL application takes the time to study the Java libraries that isCOBOL provides for the runtime environment, it is possible to take our generated Java code, clean it from the COBOL ‘accent’ and continue development in the Java programming language.

Then there's Daniel Meyers of LegacyJ, the company named after its mission of getting legacy applications into Java. He says the company "has had HP-compatible COBOL and COBOL II solutions -- among 16 others -- for years." I think we'd all like to know more about another COBOL that, like AcuCOBOL, has had COBOL II intrinsics designed into it. Excising 3000 intrinsics from COBOL II can be detailed work, although UNICON reports it's got an automation tool to do this to 3000 apps.

Meyers told us in a scrappy e-mail that not only does his company's solution offer the same kind of cross-language COBOL-to-Java utility, he asserts that Veryant copied some LegacyJ concepts. (It's nice to know that the COBOL to Java jump is so established that two products can make similar claims.) We'll leave the two vendors to slug that copy issue out, but Meyers said this about LegacyJ.

12 years ago we solved the COBOL transition problem by providing a cross-compiler / translator to allow re-hosting without re-engineering, moving your applications over to the Java Virtual Machine environment. If you’re on an HP 3000, you can modernize more rapidly than other approaches.

Our high-speed COBOL compiler is written in C and generates an intermediate Cobol/Java code that can be maintained in COBOL or Java, works in any Java Virtual Machine-compatible environment, and is primarily used in Windows and Linux server situations. We generate Java bytecode, which operates with a runtime module to facilitate the operation on the more modern, affordable platforms that lend themselves to further modernization steps.

Veryant’s approach is much like ours, having been copied without permission from our original, patented technology -- though they decided to write their compiler in Java, trading speed for some notion of portability.

Veryant stresses that portability in its offer. Its isCOBOL points the way out of rejuvenating COBOL leadership on a development team, even while giving COBOL experts a role to play in the transition. Iglesias likes to refer prospects to a case study of Donato's Pizza, which "is leaving COBOL behind and rewriting its core business applications in Java."

Although many of Veryant’s customers use isCOBOL as the perfect bridge to leave COBOL programming in favor of Java programming, the toolset is currently designed for those customers that would like to continue to develop, maintain, debug in the COBOL language and deploy in the Java Runtime Environment.

Veryant customers... do not have to learn the Java programming language, Java scripting, Ajax, Web programming, etc. They are able to play in the Java sandbox using the COBOL programming language (including Object-Oriented COBOL), a standards based-COBOL compiler, a graphical, portable debugger with remote debugging capabilities, and a COBOL-friendly IDE based on the Eclipse platform.

Iglesias goes into more detail in his comment underneath the original article. Of note: isCOBOL will need some cleaning of its COBOL "accent" to make the code genuine Java. The isCOBOL Java is suited for the Java Runtime Environment, something quite different from Java programming language itself.

Unwrapping the Myths of Security

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

Review by Steve Hardwick, CISSP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving COBOL? isCOBOL offers Java path

Migrations away from the HP 3000 mean leaving a fine-tuned COBOL behind. HP shaped COBOL II to include intrinsics which plug directly into the IMAGE database and the 3000's OS. Customers who move to another platform need to rewrite those intrinsic calls for a new COBOL. AcuCOBOL needs far less revision that other COBOLs, because it was designed in 2001-02 to incorporate most of those same 3000 specialties.

But if you're going to be doing any rewriting at all, why not aim for more than a new COBOL that acts like the old one? If a transfer to Java from COBOL is your desire, a software company called Veryant has a language that claims to speak both languages.

Java got a jolt of news this week while its bridegroom, Oracle, gathered the Oracle faithful at its annual Oracle World. James Gosling, considered the father of Java, reported that Java's NetBeans development environment and Glassfish, an open source application server, are more popular than ever. Gosling said this week that Glassfish, as free as any Linux distro, has been downloaded at the rate of a million copies a month.

Except that Oracle already has its own development environment. Plus an application server that it loves. There may be some overlap in that acquisition. But a million copies a month carries a lot of clout. It's things like Glassfish that make Java look attractive during a move away from COBOL. That's where Veryant's isCOBOL could take a role in the move away from COBOL. It all depends on what caliber of Java you get out of it.

Remember, we're talking about migrations that will require revisions of COBOL here. These sites are already committed to rewrites, somewhat automated but which require testing. When you've got the hood up, can you get all the way to Java? isCOBOL compiles COBOL code into Java. In the late 1990s, a time of great optimism for Java, the 3000 community not only had an interest in the language, but third party did its best to make the technology transfer a reality. Chuck Townsend of Synkronix pushed the Java stone up the 3000 hill, but not even his IBM experience could give PERCobol a place to rest in 3000 shops. And that product understood COBOL II's extensions, according to Townsend.

Alfredo Iglesias of Veryant would love to work with a 3000 site on that kind of adoption. Veryant's isCOBOL came to our attention when Speedware's Nick Fortin pointed it out after our article about the two migration COBOL choices. With isCOBOL there may be three, and Transoft has certified its Transoft U/SQL Adapters for use with the isCOBOL Application Platform Suite.

You'd be among the very first to choose this isCOBOL for a 3000 project. "We do not have any customers yet that have used isCOBOL to replace HP COBOL II," Iglesias said. "We would be glad to work with any interested in the future." Migration can offer such groundbreaking opportunity. Java may be worth the experimentation, considering those millions of adopters out there.

Iglesias admits that the COBOL II specialties will demand some replacement. "I must bring to your attention that isCOBOL does not offer any compatibility to the HP 3000 extensions to the COBOL standard found in HP COBOL II. That means that they will have to be removed by the customer or a migration company in order for the code to compile and execute with isCOBOL."

isCOBOL was also on the radar screen of our author of the "Deciding Between COBOLs for Migration" article. Mike Howard mentioned it in passing at first, calling it no major player. It seems the adoption rate to date in the 3000 world confirms his view. Howard has his own assessment of isCOBOL's utility as well.

It is a COBOL that has no COBOL compiler. And yet the development process is to

1. Write the COBOL source code
2. Compile it to produce an object
3. Run the compiled object

And this is what the developer sees when he programs in isCOBOL. But in fact, the compile step actually has two steps in it. 1. Convert the COBOL source to Java source; 2. Compile the Java source.

So the actual process is

1. Code the program in COBOL
2. Convert the COBOL source to Java source
3. Compile the Java source
4. Run the Java object code

This process clearly demonstrates one additional item: how accurately COBOL can be converted to Java. For this process to work, the converter must be 100 percent at all times.

You can actually stop the "compiler" after the COBOL to Java conversion step and get the converted Java code. Unfortunately, it isn't much use, because the conversion was simply done for the Java compilation to take place — and the actual Java code is horrible. A better application code converter would be written to convert the COBOL to Java to produce code so that is good, maintainable Java.

HMS host makes do with 3000 hosts for now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Itanium: Failing HP-UX futures, or more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3000s still under Boeing's wings

Large customers have been among the earliest and most active migration sites, but some companies with high-flying profiles, like Boeing, will use the 3000 beyond 2010.

The aircraft manufacturer is making efforts to leave the platform as soon as possible, but the timing of its migration isn't tied to any HP support schedule. Long-time NewsWire reader Ray Legault from Boeing checked in last week and reports that some key applications may take awhile to move. Third party support and outsourced services are in place to let Boeing's application owners work at their own migration schedule.

"There are just some Finance, QA and Manufacturing apps that are left," said the Boeing systems integrator. "They want the platform to disappear ASAP. It may take a while to migrate."

If finance, quality assurance and manufacturing sound like mission-critical apps, that might be mitigated by the app's reach into the Boeing operations. The company generated $60 billion in sales last year. It's long-anticipated Dreamliner 787 is scheduled to arrive in the market just as HP ends its 3000 support.

In Boeing IT, the group which owns the application establishes its migration plan. The plans which are in place vary in approach and schedule.

"They let each business system owner and a architecture board decide where each app will migrate to," Legault said. "An off-the-shelf [replacement] is the main thought, even if it has reduced functionality. One app does not have any off-the-shelf options, so they are re-writing it into Oracle/Unix, slowly."

Legault says Boeing plans to use Halifax and Beechglen for 3000 support when HP drops its 3000 support services at the end of 2010.

Just A Minute: Eloquence Update at the Meet

Eloquence database creator Michael Marxmeier gives a presentation at the recent e3000 Community Meet in this video, shot handheld from the front row of the SF Airport Hyatt hotel meeting room. Presenters had to limit talks to 15 minutes or less; most were even briefer. We grabbed a minute of his talk for the camera.

Marxmeier's slides are not yet part of the Meet's archive page we reported on earlier today. In this video he has a slide up which describes the following overall technology enhancements for the latest release of Eloquence 8:

• Implements new thread model for Eloquence database server (improving on the default HP-UX threading)
• Provides base for future enhancements
• Aligns Eloquence technology to newer hardware and OS capabilities including multiple CPU cores, CPU core speed increases made more moderate, and larger memory sizes.

Functional enhancements for the latest release include

• Scalability
• Database replication
• Point-in-time recovery / incremental recovery
• Monitoring improvements
• Programmatic access to achived database transactions
• query3k and utility program improvements

Community Meet slides go online

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

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

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

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

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

Our 3000 reports move into a 15th year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Potential in the 3000 Sector

NewsWire Q&A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deciding Between COBOLs for Migration

[Editor's Note: Conversion and migration supplier Unicon Conversion Technologies sent us a white paper recently that outlines decisions to enable 3000 conversions to Windows. Unicon's Mike Howard attended the latest e3000 Community Meet, where I heard plenty of COBOL discussion. Here's Howard's take on COBOL choices if you're headed to Windows.]

By Mike Howard

When HP announced it was discontinuing the HP 3000, there were four main Windows COBOLs: RM COBOL, ACUCOBOL, Micro Focus COBOL and Fujitsu COBOL.

But in May 2007, Micro Focus acquired ACUCOBOL when they bought Acucorp. Shortly after they also acquired RM COBOL when they bought Liant. ACUCOBOL is very similar to RM COBOL but has more features and functions. Micro Focus immediately incorporated the RM COBOL product into ACUCOBOL and stopped selling RM COBOL. Micro Focus is now incorporating ACUCOBOL into the Micro Focus COBOL product.

So today, for new Windows COBOL customers there are two COBOLs -- Micro Focus and Fujitsu. In summary, Micro Focus is an all-embracing, all-platform COBOL with excellent support, but it is expensive. Fujitsu is a Windows product with limited support but an extremely attractive price. We have found that both products are very stable and very fast in production. Both charge the same for support, 20 percent per year. The differences lie in cost of ownership vs. response time of support.

Micro Focus COBOL: This is the big COBOL player on the block. It has compilers for Windows, Unix and Linux, and has excellent support across all these platforms. It has good documentation and it also has excellent award winning customer support department that provides training courses and ongoing product support. The Windows product is fully integrated into Windows .NET (MISL code) and the Visual Studio IDE. The compiler, runtime and debugger are excellent products as is the support of relational databases.

A new customer buys both development licenses and runtime licenses. Each programmer needs a developers license and each application server needs a runtime license. In very rough figures a developer license is $5,000 per developer and a runtime license is about $20,000 per CPU per server. So five developers would be $25,000 and a 4 CPU dual core server would count at 8 CPU’s for a runtime license cost of $160,000.00; for total cost of $185,000.
 
Fujitsu COBOL: This is a very good COBOL which is fully supported by the Fujitsu Corporation in Japan but sold and supported outside Japan by a small company (maybe 10 employees) in Bend, Oregon called Alchemy Solutions.  Alchemy Solutions rose from the old Fujitsu COBOL Software department – I think Fujitsu decided to close it and the department management created Alchemy Solutions with all the staff of the old department.  Although Fujitsu has compilers for Unix (but not IBM’s AIX), this is really a Windows-based COBOL. Customer support is essentially limited to an online question submittal process; which may not sound very supportive, but the guys who provide the service do an excellent job. Support requests are normally answered within 24 hours.

It is an excellent Windows .NET Visual Studio product and highly integrated into the .NET framework. The compiler, runtime and debugger are excellent products as is the support of relational databases. Each programmer needs a developers license, but there are no runtime charges. Developer licenses at about $5,000 per developer. So a customer with five developers would cost $25,000 for the developer licenses — but remember, there is no runtime charge of any kind.

Partners assemble at Community Meet

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

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

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

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

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

Social nets can narrow-cast to wide group

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

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

Social Network Harm and Help: Advice & Wisecracks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get connected today for Community Meet

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

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

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

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

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

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

New clouds conjure up established IT needs

Cloud computing will require just as many sound IT practices as anything operating at an internal datacenter today. But a pair of key offerings should be at the top of the list for any HP 3000 customer who's considering a shift to the cloud when their datacenter goes virtual, hosted and maintained by outside resources.

Security becomes essential in the cloud picture to a degree far above everyday operations. A company's sensitive and competitive data, from HR profiles to sales reports, will all pass through a network more easily exposed to breaches. A cloud computing resource needs to pass muster on elements such as datacenter door access, or security of any wireless networks at the datacenter. Donnie Poston of the Support Group inc, a vendor that's moving toward more cloud services in the 3000 community, outlined the top three elements tSGi considers important in providing cloud computing.

"The top three things that anyone has to provide are security of access, a 24x7 uptime and access to data, and adequate bandwidth," he said. If a customer is putting its critical applications into the cloud, these elements can be guaranteed with a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

SLAs with outsource agencies might be new to the 3000 customer still operating in a localized datacenter environment. Connectivity guarantees are part of remote hosting services from vendors such as DST Health Solutions. DST is a Business Process Outsourcer, the type of supplier that hosts servers and systems for clients in the healthcare industry. In 2006 DST purchased Amisys, the largest healthcare software vendor in the 3000 community.

3000 customers who face migration as an inevitability could shop patiently for cloud services and get more value than moving next year. An SLA signed in 2011 is likely to have more offered for less subscription fees than a deal during 2010. The hard deadline for HP support customers arrives on Jan. 1, 2011. The more traditional a cloud based solution's software — SAP, QAD, IFS for manufacturers, for example — the more there's to gained from waiting.

Those solutions will have to work hard to compete with open source cloud services, according to tSGi's Sue Kiesel. "If you look at open source, we already have a way of getting a low-cost entry into this environment," she said. "Open source is one of the things that's making cloud computing as viable as it is today."

The Support Group is working on a complete open source cloud computing offer, she added, including Customer Relationship Management, Demand Management, analytics to serve Business Intelligence needs, tools for Business Process Management. Desktop tools will be available that "look just like Word, and just like PowerPoint, so you can't see the difference anymore."

The tSGi team envisions specialization in sectors such as geographical location, business sector and even service to government agencies. In the US that last category got its first dedicated cloud provider from a surprising source: the government itself. Apps.gov opened for business this week to supply business apps, cloud IT services, productivity apps and social media apps to US government customers. The Federal government has a CIO in Vivek Kundra who said in a press release yesterday

Apps.gov is starting small – with the goal of rapidly scaling it up in size. Along the way, we will need to address various issues related to security, privacy, information management and procurement to expand our cloud computing services.

Will we see you one week from today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Counting on clouds to save green?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP celebrates '84 alliance with Canon

Even while we're exploring the 3000 community circa 1984, HP looked back at that year in a press conference today to announce new printer ventures with Canon. When the 3000 "Mighty Mouse" systems were rolled out in 1984 -- the first office-ready minicomputer for HP -- another Hewlett-Packard breakthrough surfaced that year: The HP LaserJet, powered by print engines built by Canon.

HP and Canon have become more competitors than allies in the 25 years since that rosy honeymoon. But today HP announced it will sell Canon printers to HP enterprise customers. HP held a press conference today and issued a press release on creating the sales alliance along with a Managed Enterpise Solutions unit inside its printer/camera business group.

That IPG unit at HP looked less healthy than in prior years when the Q3 numbers for FY 2009 were reported last month. HP wants to leverage its presence inside enterprise computing to sell computers, a chestnut of a strategy. If you're an enterprise-grade customer, expect more HP offers about managing your printer needs. At the heart of the business is that so-rich ink and supplies commerce, of course.

HP retires docs link while experts retire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community Meet assembles members, polls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speedware illuminates endings for 3000s

Hewlett-Packard calls 2010's last month the "end of life" for the HP 3000, and community partner Speedware is carrying the term forward to 3000 customers, too. The vendor that supports HP 3000 migrations also supports 3000 applications for homesteaders, but 2010 is sparking a discount in the cost of both its migration and support services.

Marketing VP Chris Koppe says there's more than one way to view what will happen at the close of 2010, but end-of-life (EOL) is a valid definition for some customers. He adds that community members are counting on another HP support extension.

"It's time to raise some of the alarm bells for those who haven't acted yet," he says, "and say there's no more extensions." Speedware believes the hardware still working at 3000 sites is physically aging — because HP hasn't updated servers since 2003 -- and it puts a lot of weight behind the end of HP's support services in December, 2010. A discount off future migration or app support engagements with Speedware is underway through the end of 2009.

Like others who are serving customers in the community, Speedware knows of large companies still working with their 3000s, despite business continuity and risk management issues. "Some are just slower to act than others," he said.

The exit of an HP support option at the end of 2010 means more to larger customers, Koppe admits, than smaller sites. Companies that homestead don't rely on HP as a central IT resource the way these larger, brand-name organizations do. Homesteaders are moving to third party support firms now, he says, "since it's wiser not to do that at the last minute."

For the migration-bound site, time is growing very short to meet an end of 2010 deadline. Although migrations can be accomplished in under one year, 15 to 18 months is more of an average. Testing of migrations -- either the lift-and-shift of proven apps, or kick-starting replacement programs in a new environment -- takes more than half the time of a migration. Companies might be tempted to compress their test cycles in order to start later than this fall. That's another risk than an earlier start can help avoid.

Koppe says Speedware wants to offer a migration solution that fits all sizes of companies, not just those with deep pockets. "Companies that have tighter budgets tend to be more open to combinations of outsourcing and in-house resources," he said. Speedware's offer is to discount its Detailed Modernization Analysis, a first step in what it calls modernization rather than migration. A Detailed Modernization Analysis (DMA) and earns an investment credit worth up to 50 percent of the cost of your DMA, applicable towards the cost of a Speedware migration.

The investment credit offer is only available through December 31, but a reduction in costs could start some migrations moving. "There are five different tiers of resource offerings geared to every level of budget," Koppe says, "because some people don't have the financial budget to outsource everything, but they can get the physical resources to do it. They're looking for a more cost-effective or cheaper solution."

While every migration manager wants to be successful, there's two levels of accountability to that success. Quality of migrated code is one level, and then there's "being accountable for the outcome of the project: managing it and guiding the customer in their testing activities," Koppe says. Managing preparation for deployment, preparation for transitioning an organization, embedding staff onsite  -- these are on the high end of Speedware's five levels of engagement.

Low end modernization might include teaching a customer how to use transition tools. "It's do it yourself, but with some education on how to do it," he says. Then there's mass migration of code, handed back to the customer. Both of these levels put the accountability of outcome on the customer's shoulders, "and I've seen customers very successful with do-it-yourself projects," Koppe says.

Matching UX Servers with 3000s

As some 3000 customers migrate, their planning turns to accurate replacement of HP 3000 servers. An application leads to HP-UX, and the next step can be sizing the replacement server to meet or exceed the 3000's performance. This exercise may lead to some surprising values.

HP created its PA-RISC servers for both MPE/iX and HP-UX in families, named with letters such as D, E, F, G, I, K, L, N and A. While the last two letters are familiar to 3000 customers, the rest of the alphabet can be tricky to translate. If you've been getting along on a Series 937 3000, how high a letter of HP-UX server is required to keep processing power on the upswing?

"A customer isn’t really interested in hardware equivalency," said IT manager Mark Landin, "they are interested in performance equivalency. As I [learned in performance class many moons ago,] the answer to every performance problem is, “It depends.” For instance, the disk IO available on “modern” 9000 equipment far exceeds the FW-SCSI limitations of the 3000 systems. How much that impacts your perceived performance depends on if your workload is IO-intensive or not."

So what's the letter equivalent of a Series 937? Support provider Gilles Schipper of GSA says a G-Class HP-UX machine would be a equal match, but finding such a relic would be pointless. Why bother, when an rx2600 server, far faster than the 937 or its UX equivalent, can be bought on eBay loaded with 12GB of memory for $200?

For those looking into the history of comparable HP-UX and MPE/iX servers of the past 10 years, Schipper explains it all.

Like the 9x7 family, the corresponding HP-UX servers are in the F-class, G-class, H-class and I-class models (HP offered more choices than the equivalent HP 3000 family).

Within each lettered sub-class, there are numbers to designate the various models within, such as: F10, F20, and F30; G30 through G70; H20 thru H70, I30 thru I60 The difference in the letters and number designations are associated with differences in CPU speeds and chassis sizes, respectively.

The 3000 family chassis size was designated with a model number suffix, as in 937LX, 957RX, 957SX. (The LX was small body, RX was medium size body, SX was wide-body). The E-class of HP-UX machines would be equivalent, roughly, to the 9x8 HP 3000 family. The K-class is equivalent to the 9x9 HP 3000 family.

Schipper went on to note that RX means something very different in the current HP server nomenclature. The x stands for Itanium-based architecture, while something like an rp7420 denotes a PA-RISC-based server. Even though HP stopped selling PA-RISC Unix systems at the end of 2008, former 3000 customers who have migrated are running these systems as 3000 replacements. At the American Airlines Credit Union, business continuity coordinator Jesse Davis reports that Summit Information Systems migrated the credit union into an rp7410.

Choosing a modern rx server for HP-UX, driven by the Itanium chips, nets plenty of advantages over those rp units. Schipper notes that "Unlike PA-RISC, Itanium offers multi-core capability, among many other more advanced features. In general, they are smaller in size, significantly faster than the PA-RISC CPUs and consume less power."

Moving to a rx2600 can seem faster than the 15-year-old 937 technology, depending on database performance. An rx 2660, 3600 or 6600 are considered the entry level of HP's UX server line. As Integrity servers, they have the full confidence of HP, at least for a future of more than five years. 

Hardware replacing and investment is no longer the long-term relationship that it was while the Series 937 was in its heyday. Landin suggested a try before you buy plan. "I recommend taking a good guess, lease or rent it for a while, put a production load on it and see what happens," he said. "If it’s not stout enough, rent something bigger. Repeat until you are happy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emulators will arrive too late for some

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Generating your Legacy to Improve

NewsWire Editorial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emulator history assists in HP licensing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawson leads Aussie ERP firm to iSeries

A longtime HP 3000 customer headquartered in Australia is heading away from their HP 3000 ERP suite, taking a trip down the midrange lane to IBM's iSeries. The 3000 customer that's been in business since 1946 says they're looking for better technology to handle business growth.

RYCO Hydraulics, with operations in North and South America, Europe and Asia as well as Australia, will be moving to a Lawson Software ERP solution to replace its HP 3000 applications. The company will be serviced by Lawson along with IBM Partner Synergy Plus. The Lawson suite which will be installed during 2009 is QuickStep, software billed as easier to deploy than traditional ERP replacements used by manufacturing firms.

ERP has long been a core sector for the 3000 community, but the iSeries-AS/400 world counts tens of thousands of customers in manufacturing, too. Infor, which now owns the customer base and software rights to the MANMAN app for ERP, built its core business on the AS/400 marketplace. Even though the future of the iSeries looks sketchy to some veterans in that community, Lawson's suite operates in other environments as well. Cross-platform migrations -- where the initial deployment can be moved to another platform later with minimal fees and retooling -- are becoming a common strategy for 3000 sites looking for a change.

Australia has lost other HP 3000 customers over the past year or so. ING Software migrated its in-house apps to HP-UX servers using Speedware's migration services, citing a lack of HP lab support for patching its MPE/iX apps. Other companies Down Under point to a dearth of used systems and parts for their 3000s.

The QuickStep solution that's replacing 3000 software at RYCO is a recent addition to the Lawson product line, as well as an application that runs on platforms other that what IBM now calls the Series i. Lawson promotes QuickStep as an implementation of M3, formerly Intentia's Movex ERP suite, that starts to deliver in weeks instead of the usual ERP transition timeline of months. QuickStep is a "pre-configured" version of M3. Lawson calls the suite a low-risk solution.

"These are prototypes that can speed software implementation by pre-configuring 70-90 percent of specific processes within the applications," Lawson's QuickStep summary says. Lawson reported in a press release that it won RYCO's business by having a deeper understanding of the hydraulics firm's business sector than competing ERP suppliers.

But both Lawson and Synergy Plus also deploy their solutions on IBM systems other than the i -- notably the Series x for Linux, and Series p for IBM's Unix. According to the AS/400 news site IT Jungle, Lawson is retrenching this year, in part by acquiring the M3 suite that's more popular with Series i customers and those outside of the US.

Lawson is a major player in this IBM midrange market for integrated systems, whether those computers are called AS/400s, iSeries or Series i. It hosted an annual conference this year whose musical headliner was Don Felder, one of the founding members of The Eagles. While it's hard to imagine Lawson staying competitive with ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle without Series i growth, the vendor is positioned to transition its customers from any platform with slowing sales -- in the same way that it's moving RYCO off the HP 3000 in the months to come.