What the Community Is Doing Now

In less than one day from this morning, much of the world will close up its commercial concerns for a little while. Hanukkah is already upon us, and Christmas is tomorrow. Year-end in the IT business is a quiet time. But there's action in the advent to this period, if you look for it.

Hewlett-Packard has taken leave of action for these two weeks. The company has put on a salaries freeze as deep as anything now gripping North America's weather. The supplier of the alternative solutions for 3000 migrators will be shedding jobs as soon as 2009 begins.

"We believe it is prudent and responsible to reduce costs where possible," the company said in a statement this month. HP will reward "high performing" employees with compensation. The vendor reported record profits for its latest quarter, all while cooking up plans on how to pare down a workforce of more than 320,000. Even IBM's employee roster does not dwarf HP's today.

Employment is a 2009 issue for HP 3000 experts and veterans, too. Dale Pepoon lost his job at Circuit City tending HP 3000s last month. "I am open to contract or full time positions," he told us. "I am currently in transition. I have not been able to locate very many HP 3000 job listings, so I am trying to focus on my analysis and management skills when searching. It would be great to locate a company that is in transition to a new platform and needs the HP 3000 skills, but would be willing to train on the new technology or at least be willing to endure the learning curve."

There's hope for Dale. The largest migration services company in the community said that HP 3000 skills are even more important than experience in the target environment of a migration. He's also wise to emphasize the fundamental skills of managing enterprise IT. HP 3000 pros know much more than just the vitals of MPE/iX.

Circuit City has had its downturns along with the rest of the world's economy, the kind of setback that freezes plans to move away from the HP 3000. Hewlett-Packard, better staffed than any of its customers, finally turned off the HEART system on its HP 3000 cluster this fall. HEART tracked every beat of HP's orders for most of three decades. HP claimed long ago it had switched over every crucial enterprise app to SAP. Perhaps it's more true now than early in the decade, when the claim was made while 3000 Transition began. HEART had outlasted migration attempts for two decades, according to HP insiders.

"Most of you have no idea how big this is," said an HP VP to the internal IT staff in a memo, "so you’ll have to trust this old-timer… it’s HUGE!"

Other HP 3000s were recently turned toward the exits. Robert Mills announced to the 3000 community members this month who read the 3000 newsgroup that Pinnacle Entertainment "went into 'administration,' and I am one of the casualties of the first round of layoffs. I do not see Pinnacle remaining in that state long before they fold. When they do, that means that two HP 3000 979/400s will lose their home." Mills, like some in the community, is working at consulting that relates to the 3000 while looking for a more permanent position.

Unix is on the rise at places like Pinnacle, although it's only a 50-50 chance that it's HP's Unix taking over. Sun's solutions, and even SUSE Linux, are replacing HP 3000s. Oracle is often the platform in such cases, rather than the operating environment.

Meanwhile, Shoreline Community College, West of Seattle, continues to use an HP 3000 for its student information systems. Despite the best attempts of both Amisys and Ecometry/Escalate, both companies will have a significant share of their customers still running 3000s during 2009. Customers are just now considering replacements for systems like Series 937s, computers which were built early in the Clinton Administration. A tiny Integrity 2660 will replace a 937 nicely, and the 2660 is very affordable. The cost resides in moving software and training for Unix.

And since the HP 3000 is a big player in the history of computing, the history movement for the computer is gaining help. After this summer's MPE software history symposium at the Computer History Museum, Paul Raulerson will launch a history project next month, a not-for-profit Web site "funded primarily out of my beer money funds." Raulerson wants to preserve stories from the 3000 community, "and make them available to other people to enjoy and marvel at. The goals will be conservation and preservation of the histories and stories that surround the HP 3000 computer and related items of interest, such as the MPE operating system."

There's more 3000 history to be written in 2009, even as the effort to capture the tales of the past gathers volunteers and momentum. But this time of year is well-suited for reflection and revising of career courses. As well as R&R, of course. We're taking a couple of days off from the blog to reflect on the big stories of this year and enjoy the gifts of family and friends. We'll be back on Monday with our 2008 Top Story list, along with a review of what we predicted for this year and how our forecasts turned out. Have a happy holiday.

Retired 3000s pose problems of disposal

As companies migrate away from the HP 3000, some are discovering one last task which takes some extra effort to find a solution: How to dispose of a venerable computer asset by using the right salvage resources?

When you want to get that system out of the computer room, where can you take it? Like any computer system, specialized recycling companies need to be called. Christian Schneider of PIR Group has a Series 937 on hand the company hasn't powered up in five years. Disposal of about 75 pounds of computer and terminal is an unsolved issue at the development and integration company.

Schneider also noted that such systems are not lightweight, so shipping them off as a generous donation can require some freight expense.

Let's see, the SCSI SE drive weighs about 50 lbs.The 937LX is probably 20 lbs. The 12-inch terminal and keyboard are nominal. I was going to donate ours to a Chicago historical organization, but they already had one. Scrappers won't take it. The plastic housing is now listed as hazardous material. I was considering using it as a boat anchor, but it would kill the surrounding fish.

To be fair, there are many better options for disposing of an aged 3000 than being a boat anchor. There are scrappers which specialize in used computers. Like in Chicago, where there's Computer Recycling Chicago.com.

Depending on the model of HP 3000, many have value in their spare parts. An owner who's getting rid of a 3000 shouldn't expect much compensation for a system they're selling off for parts. But the operators in the 3000 community who are both selling used systems as well as supporting these servers need a supply of components. How much they need depends on the limitations of available warehouse space.

Governments are beginning to insist on responsible recycling. Purchasing a computer in California now includes a recycling fee built into the sale at retail and consumer spots like Best Buy. But Goodwill Industries' Reconnect takes on many computers, regardless of their working status.

Some vendors such as Apple have begun a free recycling program for systems which are being replaced by newer Apple models. You don't have to get rid of an Apple product, like an enterprise X Server, to use the free Apple service. You just need to buy an Apple product through Apple's Online Store or one of its retail stores. HP is not so generous, charging from $1 to $120 per item for recycling in the United States.

Just don't consider that boat anchor idea as more than a joke. You don't want to be a part of the Buy N Large movement that makes the movie WALL-E storyline a possibility.

Testing takes a multiple-level drive

    The most exacting part of migration projects does not appear as the code is created to mirror the HP 3000's work in another environment. Migration partners and customers alike report that testing consumes the majority of resource and time in every project. Only when the answers and operations are identical on both systems, measured over a reasonable amount of time, can a migration be considered complete.

    Migration testing takes place on eight levels, according to Chris Koppe, the director of marketing at HP Platinum migration partner Speedware. There's Unit Tests, determining if the code runs; functionality, checking the results of the code against a known application; then performance, integration, interfaces, processes, holistic system tests and finally user acceptance.

    Speedware finished up work on a migration at Tufts Health Plan this year. The customer took on the bulk of testing because they knew their business logic inside the application best.

    “At Tufts they wanted to make sure the application worked, because they wrote it,” Koppe said. In this kind of “lift and shift” migration, no rewriting or packaged applications are employed. A migration customer with this goal simply wants the same level of functionality on a platform that, like Tufts, they can describe as having less risk and more business continuity than an HP 3000.

   

Technology choices come from the customer, too, but only after they’ve been briefed on the potential of all prospective choices. In the Tufts project, the HMO chose Eloquence as its replacement database for TurboIMAGE, and then worked through multiple deployments of migration drops. For more than six months, the new target database ran in synchronization with the still-functional TurboIMAGE database. The Imaxsoft utility OpenTurbo managed the repeated synchronizations.

    Tufts was using NetBase, too, and it was replaced with replication technology inside the Eloquence database. “You have to educate the customers on all of the options,” Koppe said. “We train them in what they choose to use, and they select on the basis of what technology stack they want to live with for the foreseeable future.”

    Migration business in the 3000 community still presents a growth period for Speedware during 2009, he said. HP’s announcement of an extended Mature Product Support period in 2009-10 created a lull for the marketplace, but activity is restarting. With a mean time-frame of 15 to 18 months for a migration, companies starting in 2009 may just make the deadline before HP ends its support altogether for the system.

    One good motivator for the launch of migrations might be something which Koppe called a human resources map. “You have an aging set of programmers who are managing these systems,” he said. “If companies actually did HR maps, they’d realize that a lot of the people who know how to maintain their legacy systems are up for retirement in the next five to 10 years.”

Migration plan increases odds of success

    HP 3000 migrations get compared to Y2K projects a lot, according to Speedware’s Chris Koppe. Not only for the complexity and crucial stakes of the multi-year efforts. When a migration project succeeds, users don’t even see a difference.

    Koppe, who directs marketing for the e3000 Platinum Migration Partner, said his firm’s services team owns a 100 percent success rate in migrations so far, a period of work and research covering all of HP’s march to the end of its 3000 business. Staying perfect over more than six years boils down to three fundamentals.

    “We leverage automated tools almost everywhere,” he said. “The next cornerstone is proven methodology and processes. The last one is resources — and if you don’t have enough deep knowledge of the legacy system, you won’t know what it’s supposed to do on the target platform.”

    Speedware completed a migration recently of HP 3000 applications at Tufts Health Plan, an HMO running a mix of COBOL, PowerHouse and three dozen other technologies related to the 3000. At the end of a 30-month period, the HMO had 14 technologies running in concert on HP’s Unix, completed to move one batch and one online 3000 to HP-UX partitions mirroring each other.

   

Koppe said that Speedware is wrapping up four migration projects for 3000 customers this year. In a project that Tufts extended several times because of internal business reasons, the migration becomes “a non-event” to the company’s users, as invisible as any Y2K project.

    The work at Tufts shared elements common to many such projects at a medium-sized 3000 site. A pair of N-Class servers hosted apps written in-house, with extensive utilization of NetBase replication and Omnidex optimization of TurboIMAGE. But the trick to success in these migrations is not mastery of the new technologies as much as melding the new mix. And the complete span of the necessary work doesn’t reveal itself on a first survey.

    “We describe these as waterfall projects,” Koppe said, “where you’re not going to know everything that exists up front. You have to plan for a number of issues that will come up, and make sure your timeline has some flexibility in it.” Diving into the Tufts project revealed complex batch schedule dependencies, and “an application jumping between PowerHouse and COBOL at the user interface level.”

    Migrations in the 3000 community usually mark a “code drop” as a fundamental milestone, “and the first code drop at Tufts was certainly a challenging one” because of the complexities. But most customers sign up for their share of the challenge to succeed, the portion they know better than any migration service provider: testing.

    Speedware unit-tested its code for functionality, “and some customers want us to do all the testing for them. We have a very comprehensive testing workshop we do with the customers. It’s about a 50-50 split in terms of the work, because it’s not just IT people testing. Functional testing might be done by IT people, but user acceptance testing has to be done by the user community. The testing itself is very resource-consuming to an organization.”

Moving Remembrances, Moving On

ScreenJet commissioned editorial cartoons in 2003 about HP's migration push

The HP 3000 community is moving onward this week, the first after the Nov. 14 celebration of HP's exit announcement about its e3000 business. But the news that changed the community's world first broke on November 5, 2001, when the vendor community talked openly about the rumors it heard during October of that year. ScreenJet's Alan Yeo shared his story of what receiving the news felt like.

I heard on Monday the 5th of November 2001. Interesting date, since in the UK it's Guy Fawkes Night, "Gunpowder Treason and Plot" as the rhyme goes. It is the day we English celebrate the attempt to blow up our Parliament. To be honest I'm never sure if historically the people celebrated "the attempt," or that it failed.

I started ploughing through email that day when I opened one from Wirt Atmar [of AICS Research]. It was an "open" letter to [HP's e3000 General Manager] Winston Prather (so I'm sure he won't mind me quoting an extract).

************
Dear Winston,

I have heard on Friday and Saturday through the grapevine the same basic story a sufficient number of times now that I believe it to be true:

“HP will announce on November 14 that the HP 3000 line is dead. Last sales of the system will announced to be November 2003, with support through November 2007, with some migration assistance to HP-UX being offered.” I can say that I am deeply shocked, saddened, and angry, but I’m not surprised.

Yeo answered in a reply on that Monday, "We have until the 14th to prepare for the Tidal Wave that will hit us from customers. And I know of several customer sites where just this hint will be all it takes to undermine people that have fought long and hard to keep their HP 3000s." He added this:

Representing a relatively small organisation, one of the questions that potential customers always ask is “How do I know you will stay in business to support us?” My answer is “You don’t, but as a small company we need to keep your business, and unlike large organisations we are very unlikely to arbitrarily drop a product because something else looks more promising.” I believe very good vendor support is one of the reasons that the HP 3000 has survived so long and has developed such a reputation for robustness. Little did I suspect that this would happen with HP itself.

So where to from here?

The 3000 community reported on its reactions to and directions from that day, as well as how members are moving on. Some have moved away from the computer, but only recently. Andreas Schmidt, CSC Computer Technology Specialist reports

Yesterday we switched off the last three HP 3000 servers we ran in Europe for DuPont: a 997-800, two K-Series 9x9s. Two containers of documentation went away as well... and an eye-full of tears with this stuff. We had a small lunch together with the few remaining people who know MPE (including one guy from HP).

Others are still using the 3000 while moving. And a significant number of customers are moving away from HP as a result of the vendor's exit. That away-from-HP transition usually starts with a new support source from the third-party market. Connie Sellitto, Programmer/Analyst at The US Cat Fanciers’ Association, reports

Hard to believe it’s been seven years!  I was basically right where I am now — at the Cat Fanciers’ Association, still coding COBOL programs for use on our HP 3000 A400. We have just switched hardware support from HP to a third party vendor — feels like I’m cutting the umbilical cord!

Al Nizzardini reported from his current job, as Director of Technical Services at Amtek, that Nov. 14 found him in the Windows camp, but still managing a 3000.

I was at a Windows boot camp. Like many others I knew this day was coming. A buddy on mine, also a "3000 guy" called and told me of the news flash. It was like I lost a family member. It became my version of "The Day The Earth Stood Still."

John Hurt of Baseball Express remembers only skepticism that HP would ever leave the market completely. He has also heard from a support supplier about US Defense Department 3000s which seem unlikely to migrate. The DOD still has vintage disk drives in these systems.

I can't remember what I was doing last week much less seven years ago, but if I could, I probably thought to myself... Yeeeeaaah, riiiight.

The Department of Defense has bunches of still-running 3000s, and as long as they do, HP will keep an eye on them. My hardware guy with Datagate tells me about having to go someplace in Georgia to service and preventative maintain a DOD 3000 that still has Coyote drives.

But whether HP moves away or not, customers report they've gone, just now, in the next two years, or some time ago.

Add Trinity Health to the list of former HP 3000 sites. We are decommissioning our three HP 3000s this month.

It's a bittersweet time as a large portion of my career revolved around the good ‘ol HP. Made a good living off of it and met a lot of pretty cool people. The last couple of years have seen my HP 3000 involvement dwindle as I made my way back into the 'wonderful world of Windoze' and client server applications. Nothing I've ever worked on was as rock-solid as our HP 3000s. I’ll definitely miss them -- Pat Shugart

I had to leave HP 3000 work February, 2008. Primary Health in Idaho is still running AMISYS on the HP 3000. The new CIO refers to it as the old dinosaur. It still does the bulk of their business, with no replacement in sight.

I am now doing Microsoft applications now.  I have learned a new phrase, “Best Practice.” It means the Microsoft way. The bulk of our work is done on a HP Unix box -- Kent Wallace, Business Intelligence Developer, Healthcare Management Administrators Inc.

Some community members report they expect to leave their skills behind, but they've been working on the system steadily since 2001. A classic reply came from Joe Dolliver, who had his own consulting practice at the time.

I remember exactly where I was standing. I was just outside the Amisys headquarters talking to my former employee friends about a potential deal I was getting in Virginia Beach when my phone rang. I got a message from my longtime friend Frank Kelly, who had an inside track to the news that was about to be delivered by HP. Amisys was just three days from its client conference in Bethesda MD for its user base. There were going to be many Amisys clients in the area in three days and I had to just sit and not tell anyone. It was hard for me then to see what the future was going to hold, since I had made the bold jump from full-time Amisys employee to my own business in 2000.

I knew my business was going to be a short-lived business.I kept thinking in the back of my mind that I had heard rumors of the HP 3000’s demise before and we just let it pass because we all knew that this system was not going quietly and business would still be good for many years to come.

I am still working on HP 3000 systems running QSS software, but times have changed. We will be migrating sometime in 2009-10, and my prediction of living on the HP 3000 through my retirement is just not going to happen.

John Burke, our technical editor at the NewsWire at the time, saw his plans to survive on his 3000 skills dashed, as well as his faith in that year's 3000 leadership at HP.

I remember exactly what I was doing. Wirt spilled the beans early — I don’t think HP ever forgave him — while I was working on my business plan for life as an independent consultant. I will probably never get over my bitterness toward the HP executives who lied to us about the future of the HP 3000 at HP World (or was it still called Interex in August of that year?). Another thing I will always remember is the hubris of those same executives who were certain everyone would just move on over to HP-UX .

I was very fortunate. I had another career path I could follow. Many were not as lucky.

Some independent vendors, however, are still on the job, like John Stephens of Take Care of IT.

I had to dig out my Franklin Day planner entry for what seems to be a normal Wednesday for those times. I was temporarily not a consultant, as one of my clients had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to be their IT Director. So my day planner notes for that day are things like “Do Hugh’s review”, “Fix end-date in QUKGNBH”, and a reminder to clean the DDS tape drive on the HP 3000, a 927LX, if I remember right. Six months later and the company would be gobbled up, and a year (and one “successful” SAP conversion) later, I was released back to permanent consultancy.

But no mention of HP’s bombshell announcement in my notes. I do recall the event though, and remember thinking something like, “Wow, I guess someday soon I really am going to have to find a career.”

Seven years later, I’m still waiting on that career, still muddling about in more or less the same way as I have for 26 years now. Meanwhile, I’m making a living, and not finding too much to complain about.

Anniversary week winds down, goes onward

This has been a remarkable week for anniversaries. First HP's Unix — replacement target for Hewlett-Packard's favored path for 3000 migrations — celebrates its 25th anniversary. Two days later, Microsoft toasts the 25th year of Windows, the less-favored but more-often-chosen target from the 3000. Today your community commemorates the 7th anniversary of the pullout that changed our working worlds, HP's notice it would quit the 3000 business.

As we've noted in years 2005 through 2007, the exit date for HP isn't certain, although this year's lab closing makes it inevitable. Hewlett-Packard will never re-open its development center for MPE/iX, so for the few of you who've been holding out hope, the SS Return to Business will never make port again. You're porting your systems and apps, or steering a course away from HP — or at least its support business.

We asked around the community yesterday, looking for a few remembrances of that chilly November Wednesday when HP froze out its futures in your market. The stories had an air of acceptance in them. On the Kubler-Ross Steps of Grieving, Acceptance is the last. It gives the survivor the permission to move onward. You've moved, even if many of your companies still rely on the HP 3000.

Doug Greenup, president of connectivity supplier Minisoft, gave us one of the best stories of how the pullout played out for him — days in advance of Nov. 14.

I was at my desk here at Minisoft and a Hewlett-Packard corporate type called me and said she was faxing me a non-disclosure, and that HP wanted me to sign it ASAP. I got it about 20 minutes later and signed a faxed copy back. A different HP corporate type called about an hour later and said they were exiting from the HP 3000 business. They made the official announcement to the HP community a week later.

To be honest, it was a really sad day for us. A lot of “what do we do now?” And a lot of other emotions that I won’t go into here. I hope everyone is doing well. We still have a large number of HP 3000 customers happily running on the platform today. It was and is a great hardware platform!

In contrast, one of the most placid rememberances came from former Robelle VP David Greer, who was already retired from that company and travelling on a two-year family journey through Europe, sailing the Mediterranean. He even incuded a link to his pictures.

I was in Arles, France where the Mistral wind was blowing down the Rhone Valley. I doubt that I heard of the announcement that day, but I know that I heard the news from Birket Foster and you within a day or two.

We got a message about the fallout, the work that followed to move away from that day, from Ed Harms of the Florida FRSA Self Insurers Fund.

Since the announcement we have gone through three vendors to rewrite our software. We are doing it in-house and should be done next year.

And one community member, Donna Hofmeister (who was Donna Garverick at the time), talked about being on the IT staff at Long's Drug, one of the biggest 3000 customers ever, and seeing the inevitable end for HP's Unix as well.

I was at Long’s of course.  I have vague memories, since this was more than yesterday ago,of rumors circulating before the actual announcement was made... but can’t attach them to anything more substantial. I do remember saying that HP-UX was next.  I still think I’m right — it’s just going to take longer.

We'll have more on Monday, the start of the eighth year since HP called off its 3000 futures. Many community members are going onward, beyond HP's now-firming exit at the end of 2010.

Approaching .NET from VPlus

Medford, Oregon schools will be moving to the .NET architecture and Windows from their HP 3000 systems, according to Senior Programmer/Analyst Dave Vorgang. He asked the users who gather on the 3000 newsgroup to advise him about his project.

He said, "I have just began working on a project for converting our existing HP 3000 VPlus screens to use Fujitsu COBOL on the back-end and use .NET for the forms. What I plan to do is create routines to emulate the VPlus intrinsics.

"Our student system is homegrown. All done with COBOL/VPlus/IMAGE. I’ve been assigned the task of wrapping all the VPlus intrinsic calls to perform their vb.net equivalence — the idea being that we can simply take our existing COBOL apps, run them through a converter to convert them to Fujitsu, and then have my VPlus routines display the forms."

His first design demands 25 percent of the CPU resources to execute a Do Loop, "a routine which will perform the Vreadfields, which basically blocks execution of my application until _KeyEntered = True"

Advice from fellow users in the community arrived in short order, as contractors reported their .NET achievements and strategies.

Charlie Cookson, of Web Navigation LLC, told Vorgang

1) If you want to preserve your COBOL then you can create a .NET form and package up the data in the exact format the ViewRead would see it. On the HP 3000 you would have a listener program that would receive the data string. We used Minisoft’s Middleman to do this.

The receiving program would be a copy of your original COBOL where the string would be considered the return value from the View3000 Read. We used this method for several years.

2) We eventually took one screen at a time and did it completely in .NET. Again we used Minisoft for the connection. We did not use SlowDBC. We did DBFIND, DBGET, DBUPDATE, DBDELETE directly from the VB or C# code. This is very fast and allows all the features of a .NET application with the HP 3000 as a data server.

Then Paul Raulerson, a new 3000 fan but an experienced hand at Windows, gave a critique of the .NET code that Vorgang offered for examination:

Fujitsu COBOL has a WinForms designer that allows you to basically create the forms very quickly, and they of course run in .NET. You would need to recode small parts of your application to use input and output records (or some similar technique) to the screens. But honestly, you would find this far easier than trying to emulate the VPlus calls — albeit, it is not a terribly difficult task to do so.

However, I think you might be a bit unfamiliar with the Windows world, based upon your code. You never need to put the program in a loop looking for a keypress like you have; you would simply write a code “snippet” and attach it to the handler for the screen. Sounds a little weird, I admit, but quite easy to do.

Note that you don’t need to actually write the GUI screens in COBOL at all; you can do the screens very quickly in Visual Basic or some such and have then call the back-end Fujitsu COBOL programs. Visual Basic is easy to draw screens in. Very shallow learning curve.

Cookson then added

I have created CLASSES that my code calls that will update both the HP 3000 and my new SQL database. This allows me to dynamically keep both in sync. Eventually I turn off the H3000 update after all reports and screens have been converted to SQL.

By using .NET classes built to emulate the original HP intrinsic calls, you can do a mass change (usually with a little manual intervention) to convert your new calls. It still takes a little work and know how, but you can preserve your COBOL investment.

Experts inject value into eBay bargain

Picking up an HP 3000 on eBay has become commonplace today. Hardware brokers cannot justify selling any servers in the 9x7 Series which companies decommission. So too, HP has no interest in taking back these 3000s, even though every one has an MPE/iX license which comes at a dear price when an upgrading customer needs to purchase one.

Even the act of changing an HPSUSAN number will cost thousands of dollars, according to reports from the user community. Despite all these symptoms of a system with declining value, 9x7s still land in the hands of ardent computer customers as experimental systems, all the while doing everyday work in companies large and small.

So when Paul Raulerson purchased a Series 917 for a song on eBay, he acquired just the first in a string of valuable assets related to the HP 3000. Once Raulerson got a message off to the newsgroup devoted to the HP 3000, he learned how to bring up the system from a cold start, as well as the details of starting up a network. Veterans of 3000 management offered up the extra value, advice sent gladly and quickly.

I picked up what I think is a really cool 917LX from eBay, loaded with MPE/iX 6.0. I have successfully encouraged it to IPL and let me in, but just about the sum total of my MPE command repertoire consists of HELLO MANAGER.SYS;HIPRI and Control-A SHUTDOWN DTC. Oh, and my eyes glazed over and crossed when trying to figure out NMMGR. I’m not even quite sure what DTC means.

If a 3000 user has ever had to educate a new IT staff member on the 3000's networking, the counsel offered to Paul could be useful elsewhere, too.

The network was the biggest mystery to the self-anointed newbie.

In particular, if anyone could be point me to the information on how to configure the network card so I might actually be able to access it without being on a serial console, I would be most appreciative.

Craig Lalley of EchoTech, who supports HP 3000s along with Jeff Kubler, explained

(To get started, check out docs.hp.com)

As for NMMGR, I will give you the ‘Cliff notes’ version...

At the ISL prompt, where you type start norecovery... try typing ‘ODE’, for offline diagnostics... once in there type ‘run mapper’, this will give you an ‘ioscan’ type of listing. Look for the path of the ethernet card, you will need it for NMMGR.

Once the system has started enter NMMGR by typing ‘NMMGR’ after logging on as manager.sys.

F1 to open config, you may need to create it.

F3, I believe, is NS

F1 for guided config

Put the path and IP address in. Save it, on the way out, look for the F5 ‘utility’ key. Validate NS  and DTS subsystems... don’t worry about store and forward errors... just try re-validating again. If clean, go to the : prompt and type

NETCONTROL START;NET=name you just created

NETCONTROL START;NET=LOOP

and finally, NSCONTROL START

OpenMPE director Donna Garverick gave follow-on network startup advice

docs.hp.com/en/mpeixall.html -- you’ll want to bookmark this.

About NMMGR. You may already find that a network was defined inside of NMMGR. If so, there is a high probability that the path to your multi-function IO card (MFIO; which as I’m sure you already noticed, has many different ports/connectors on the back — hence the name) is already configured.

The really interesting question becomes — was this system ever configured to talk over Ethernet and TCP/IP or not? If all that you find is something call ‘dtslink’ — then there is some additional work to do. If you find ‘lan1’ then all that you should need to do is replace the IP address with <whatever> and start your network as Craig described. (Validating your network configuration is important.)

Finally, Karsten Holland of National Wine and Spirits offered confirmation of the value of the 3000 which Paul had acquired.

You have a very special new system to play with, unique in a lot of ways. One of the most profound things about the 3000 is its file handling. File labels carry a lot of information, including record length. Carriage returns, and line-feeds do not dictate your record size.

This is just one of the features that makes the HP 3000 valuable for transaction processing. Others include efficiency (a 400 MHz box could serve 300 users), database security (IMAGE has it’s own file-type “PRIV,” integrated with MPE, which implements security on database files at the system level). An excellent command-file shell that can be used online or in batch to link process steps together, (as well as a Posix shell and C compiler). A simple but effective screen handling system VPlus allows quick deployment for data entry, and integration with COBOL (or your language of preference) through intrinsic calls. The 3000 was (and is) a valuable component of many data processing centers around the world. (And will be missed in some.)

Feel free to call on me about any of these features, I’ll try and point you in the right direction too.

What's Not So Hot with Java

HP 3000 owners are now considering what a 2009 without HP's resources will look like, since the vendor is closing off its MPE/iX labs at year's end. The demise of HP's 3000 lab efforts already has a precedent: the vendor's abandonment of Java on the 3000. The strategy could play directly into HP's migration desires, leaving MPE/iX software frozen while HP hangs on to the code which others could improve to satisfy 3000 sites. The biggest irony might be that Java is the most prevalent open source product in the world, but it needs HP to release its source to gain freedom again for 3000 sites.

This language promised a "write once, run anywhere" future when Sun first introduced Java in the middle '90s, a portable programming platform to deliver on the dream of "open systems." Even though open systems needed to wait until Linux and ubiquitous Intel hardware established the concept, HP leaped in by 1997 with a Java/iX implementation, and in later years touted a small number of 3000 customers making use of the language.

But once HP 3000 companies didn't swarm toward the solution, the vendor's diminishing lab staff had to turn away from the language as well as needed updates. Java/iX has been frozen by HP at version 1.3 for more than five years, a version which becomes less useful with every month HP hasn't touched it. Of course, that will mirror the hands-off future defined for HP's 3000 labs, a group of wizard-like MPE/iX engineers being put to work on other operating environments.

We wrote about this issue this spring, interviewing the last HP staffer to add something to Java/iX, Mike Yawn. At the time that Yawn "owned" Java/iX, he was passionate about reporting from the annual JavaOne conference, as well as presenting in 1998 the prospects of graphical interfaces on the cutting edge for the language.

Java, as it turns out, was one of the first projects which the OpenMPE advocacy group identified as a way for an outside lab to help 3000 owners. The language has a lot of momentum in the IT world. Today Charles Finley of Transformix, a migration company working to move 3000 shops to other platforms, said Java has become a lot better than what HP left on the 3000 years ago.

What Java is missing might not ever be recovered for the HP 3000 community, simply because the vendor did its own, proprietary work to create the Java Virtual Machine for MPE/iX. JVM is indispensible in getting Java to serve as an engine of commerce and transactions. Finley said

There are some native pieces to Java that are proprietary to HP.  It does not seem to be possible to port a newer version to the HP 3000 without access to those sources, and when it was last discussed in my presence, HP was unwilling to give anyone access to the code.

On that last point there may still be hope; HP might offer access to the proprietary Java modules as part of a third party licensing arrangement. But Finley's company has had engagements with migrating customers that show how far Java has slipped under HP's 3000 stewardship.

"There was never a decent version of X development tools available on the HP 3000, so the graphical tools are not available on the HP 3000," Finley said. HP tried to introduce Swing, a graphical interface tool, for the 3000 — but once again, in the late 1990s, HP 3000 sites were far more interested in getting code Y2K-ready than creating code in an emerging language. It's not as if Java is now useless on the 3000, but comparing it to any other version shows why HP discontinued support of Java/iX during 2007, even though the language is still included in releases of the operating system. Finley reported today on the relative utility:

We have used Java on the HP 3000 to do a few little tasks and the version that is there is still useful to an extent. That said, we use Java on Windows, Linux, HP-UX, etc. and there are many things one is able to do with Java that are not possible with Java on the HP 3000

Other issues Finley mentioned about Java, like being a resource hog on the 3000, or having still-Spartan documentation, or being removed the bounty of free applications that could "run anywhere," could be resolved with 1. A 3000 emulator running faster than any current HP 3000; 2. Giving the documentation over to a third party like OpenMPE; 3. Making Java/iX current with the world's release by releasing the source code.

Keeping an open source solution proprietary does appear to contradict the concept of open source, even if the reason for HP's decision is a disappearing 3000 lab. Perhaps Java/iX can become the test case for how HP will license for open development a piece of the 3000's Fundamental Operating System.

Choose Windows, or Unix, or both

Migrating 3000 sites search for serious reasons to adopt a particular new platform. The solutions often revolve around an application, rather than choosing an operating environment. We examine this question often in our community, in part because the operating environment is what always set the HP 3000 apart, distinguished a company's initial enterprise choice.

But for a company that's moving its application, instead of trying to replace it, the environment itself becomes the major deciding point. Customers examine available expertise and existing environments in allied operations. Some of them recall a vendor's end-game when beginning another path toward enterprise excellence.

Windows is the leading choice of migrating sites, while others are picking up on Linux as a foundation for a migrated application. Paul Edwards, who worked for years until just recently on a customer's 3000 migration in the Atlanta area, said costs and history led the customer away from HP's Unix.

"[My customer] and others I know about choose Windows or Linux over HP-UX because of the lower cost of software and hardware, plus the friendly user interface," he said. "There is still a lot of animosity against HP for the way they badly bungled the end of the HP 3000 sales and support. Plus, there are a lot more applications on these platforms to choose from for the SMB HP 3000 user community."

HP won't make you choose between these environments if you have an appetite for a full buffet of operating systems. Putting Windows, Linux and HP-UX to work all at once, in a single server, is no big deal anymore. It's been offered ever since HP rolled out Superdome servers which could host multiple OS instances. By now an Integrity server from HP, a far less costly investment, can host all of these environments at once.

This month HP released version 4.0 of HP Integrity Virtual Machines, software which enables this multiple hosting on HP hardware as affordable as bladed servers. The latest version runs on HP-UX 11i v3, supports eight virtual CPUs, capped CPU allocation (in addition to CPU entitlement as in previous releases), additional support for accelerated virtual IO (AVIO), and a new VM performance analysis tool.

The Red Hat and SUSE flavors of Linux are supported by the latest Virtual Machine, as well as Windows Server 2003. OpenVMS customers are in line for support next year.

IBM also has a solution, in its Series i and Series p servers, which hosts multiple operating environments. Christian Schneider of PIR Group says that the company's new sports social networking application, www.playerreputation.com, "has a Linux partition on our iSeries [using the AS/400 environment], and the Windows server is running on a separate card plugged into the backbone. We didn’t need [IBM's Unix] AIX, but you can have it running in a partition if you want."

Oracle partnered with HP last week to release a "Database Machine" that didn't need any HP Unix to boost speeds up to 10 times faster, according to the unbiased Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. The situation says much about HP and its enterprise solutions. HP strategy does not poke one solution above others for its customers. This is one reason why so many HP 3000 customers are choosing Windows, rather than HP-UX, to replace their in-house applications. HP has always said that apps determine platform choice.

And that is true. But if you make no new choice of app on migration, then it must be the platform itself — and HP's track record of support — which has an effect on choosing Windows over Unix. This also has an effect on the growth of the HP Unix community in the years to come. When your vendor follows the marketplace's desires, it can lead away from vendor-centric solutions like HP-UX.

Linking Up to the Community

The community count is nearing 70 experts and veterans at the Linked In group that covers HP 3000 expertise and background. Some of the members go back to the fundamental days of the MPE/iX environment with their experience, while others are telling members in the free and open group about migration choices.

While Nancy Missildine joined up, she checked in with stories of integrating and testing MPE/XL 20 years ago at HP. Meanwhile Mark Ranft has been reporting on choices being made by his Pro 3k consultancy to move airline transaction processor Navitaire off a farm of more than 30 HP 3000s, carefully and with precision.

Asked why Windows and .NET is a suitable replacement for these MPE/iX operations that serve major airlines, Ranft said that Windows, like MPE or Linux or HP-UX, is "just a tool. The enterprise architect must understand the strengths and the weaknesses of the platform and design the application around them. Sometimes this may mean you have large pools of mid-tier systems/application servers to make up for the lack of resiliency in the operating system. This could be compared to using the RAID concept for disk arrays. However, I fear that most enterprises will find the licenses, care and feeding of the numerous mid-term systems needed is far from being inexpensive. Keep in mind that MPE was never exactly cheap."

Joining Linked In — a social network free of charge and important enough to warrant the Connect user group's participation — is as simple as browsing to its linkedin.com opening page. Once you're signed on, look for the "HP 3000 Community" group on the site and make a quick request to join. Then pose a question to the experts, or share what you've learned by answering those already online.

The group has attracted experts retired from HP like Missildine and Mike Paivinen, the latter having taking HP's early retirement package in 2007 after five years of liaison with the OpenMPE and 3000 advocacy community — and a legacy of MPE/iX engineering. Paivinen asked what we planned to do with the Community.

Frankly, that's up to its members more than me, even if I did create it with the new Groups software on Linked In. But I answered Paivinen by saying I hope the group "is up and running after I found several hundred HP 3000 users, owners and experts on Linked In. There's practically nobody like that in the Connect/Encompass user group. With some luck and prodding, perhaps these 3000 people on Linked In can connect for jobs and advice.

Linked In has a different membership than the HP 3000 newsgroup, for the most part, although what the newsgroup survivors call "The -L" still brims with answered questions about technical challenges. Exploring the membership on a network basis, with connections that can lead to new colleagues, is the advantage of a social networking outlet. I hope to see you linked up to the HP 3000 Community on Linked In.