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."

Investing in 9x7s could be part-ly wise

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New 3000, to Mitigate Risks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links to 3000 via Unix, Linux stay free

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

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

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

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

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

Fortune 500 beds down for 3000 use

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP 3000 Becomes a Copy Cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HMS host makes do with 3000 hosts for now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HP 3000 work still surfaces, on contract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

3000s can track time, even update with Unix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

IT pros prefer serving own software

In a spot poll we launched yesterday, a majority of IT pros who manage HP 3000s want to keep software close to their own infrastructure. Although Software as a Service (SaaS) is at the top of HP's new offerings, these computing clouds don't appear to be forming yet for many 3000 customers.

Some of the resistance might rise from a mismatch between the size of companies using the 3000 and the target for HP's cloud computing, says migration provider Birket Foster of MB Foster. Since IT staff is the most costly element of keeping software out of the services category, eventually companies will purchase software for use from the cloud.

"If you won't be able to afford to run an IT datacenter, you'll buy those services from a large provider," Foster said, a firm such as Bellsouth or an ISP. HP's messaging on clouds is aimed at these large companies, he added. 3000 customers who are processing cloud messages at events such as the HP Technology Forum "go because they want to understand how the framework operates."

For the moment, a small share of our poll respondents are considering clouds in their migration plan. But many still see outsourcing as the most compatible strategy to move computing infrastructure offsite. In the Ecometry e-commerce community, Cliff Hart of Shar Music said his firm evaluated "an ERP system that was basically SaaS. They have the servers offsite and you lease seats for your users."

Sharmusic.com sells string instruments through a Web site and catalog to schools, teachers and musicians around the world. The company, which was founded in 1962, was hopeful that the PCS (Profit Center) from Systemax could offer a migration solution to move servers out of Shar's IT operations.

"The concept seemed good," Hart said, "but they seemed to have some trouble getting their package off the ground. I know one Ecometry site migrated to it and had difficulty." Ultimately Shar migrated to the Ecometry Open Systems Windows/SQL application suite and retained software services onsite.

Distinguishing SaaS from outsourcing habits and strategies has been a slow embrace for 3000 customers. The community remembers similar old-school practices such as timesharing, as well as the offerings of the 1990s like Application Service Providers. Companies such as DST Health Solutions and the Support Group host servers for clients who don't need a 3000 onsite, or any other server, so long as able administrators can manage their computers on their behalf.

Migration service provider Speedware sees a trend for custom-app users to keep software inside a small company's infrastructure when they move off the 3000. Product marketing manager Nick Fortin said that some companies aim to replace custom-built apps with packaged apps are more open to consider cloud computing to serve their needs, but Speedware's migration solution customers aim at local resources.

"The tend to aim for low-risk, lift-and-shift migrations of their existing custom-built applications and related supporting environment," he said. "They usually purchase their own servers, software and own the infrastructure that powers them, so they don’t really opt for a cloud computing or software-as-a-service model since they host the apps locally."

Years of practices that keep data and services under company control are not rolling back quickly into clouds for career 3000 managers. "No such plans here, said Jeffrey Elmer, director of IS for Dairylea Cooperative. "We like to know where our data is and who has access to it."

But computing abilities handled by the HP 3000 continue to march out of localized datacenters. Many of these transitions move computer operations to another location, for another team of IT pros to manage via remote access. "They leave the servers in the datacenter -- these days they are normally talking to a lot of other boxes in there -- and push the operations and applications support out to be managed remotely by a third party," said ScreenJet's Alan Yeo. "We see this happening more and more."

The only downside, Yeo quipped, "is that after about a year -- when for some obscure reason someone actually tries to do something at the real console rather than the remote one -- you find that the keyboard has gone sticky through non-use, and you end up having to bang some of the keys to get them to work."

Locating the eldest running 3000

[Editor's Note: A few weeks back I started a search for the oldest HP 3000 still running in production mode in your community. We're still on the lookout for the winner of this contest. Don't be shy; share your story. As for Gilles' report below, HP built its last computer capable of running MPE/VE in 1989.]

By Gilles Schipper
Homesteading Editor

I got a call a few months ago from an HP 3000 user somewhere in the Los Angeles area, who had gotten my name from our good friends at Allegro, who were no longer supporting MPE/VE machines.

This customer had a major problem with their main application - some distribution software running on a Micro3000XE, with MPE OS version Platform 3P (I believe).

After first ascertaining a serious disk space shortage issue, I finally was able to circumvent that problem by performing a “recover lost disc space” exercise which I had almost completely forgotten about. (The real trick was how to get to that option with the “streamlined” menu choices that were available only on the Micro3000 hardware family. It could not be approached via the too-obvious “COOLSTART” choice, which offered no further human intervention to choose “recover lost disc space.” Rather, one had to choose the “boot from disc” option and then proceed from there.)

After then determining the problem was unrelated to lack of disc space, it was like peeling an onion, and each layer removed exposed another layer.

Spending over five hours (via VPN into customer’s PC, from which I ran Reflection over a serial ATP connection), I was finally able to fix the problem.

During that five-plus hours, I revisited many older versions of software (think pre-TurboImage IMAGE, KSAM, etc.) which seemed to resurrect brain cells I thought had long died -- not to mention going back to pre MPE/iX and pre MPE/XL days of the venerable MPE OS.

I was actually quite surprised and amazed that there still existed actual production HP 3000s that utilized “classic” HP3000 “mini-computers,” as they were then called.

I thought that my home/office with a 918, a 928 and various HP-UX boxes ranging from an F20 and G30 to an Itanium-based RX2602 could be mistaken for an  HP “mini-computer” museum -- until I experienced that adventure into the past with this California user.

The right tool for moving jobs?

Migration projects cover a lot more ground than replacing app functionality. The effort needs to replicate the full range of services an HP 3000 offers. One basic building block is job management, included with HP 3000s and sometimes not simple to replace in a new environment such as Windows.

"We have been slowly converting and migrating off our HP 3000," said IT manager Gordon Montgomery of Living Scriptures, Inc. "One of the many things I will miss about the HP is the way it handles jobs. Has anyone found an equivalant to the HP's job environment in the Windows world? You know, like nice job listings of what really goes on, etc. We've been trying to make do with plain batch files, and redirecting the output to a log file, but it is just not the same. And sometimes the batch file just quits and disappears for no apparent reason."

Making Windows batch files perform as elegantly as MPE's job controls is not simple, but it can be done. A familiar face to the 3000 community, Advant's "Captain Greb," posted a few notes on using the Windows scheduler to let batch files log themselves. But there are engineered third party solutions to do this and many more MPE replacements.

The Captain reported that "I created my own job logging for Windows. From the Windows scheduler, a job is started as “jobrun something.bat”. This jobrun program executes the specified bat file and logs the results (as part of a bigger logging scheme) with date/time, program name, messages."

The 3000 community is rich with do-it-yourself moxie, but creating a job scheduler out of stock Windows parts might be a bigger task than building command files, for example. Some of the challenge is the native intelligence of the Windows components. The Captain said that his jobrun.exe program is a Visual Basic 6 executable that is "not fancy; it does a createprocess(“cmd /c something.bat”). It uses pipes to read the process output, and sends the lines to a logging routine that handles the log file IO.  This is done in a loop with a 100ms delay (waitforsingleobject) so the output is written to the log file (and timestamped)  as its generated."

The resume of Captain Grebs is probably far ahead of most 3000 managers. He's been the technical lead for the programming that helps any PA-RISC server boot up MPE/iX, whether that server was destined to be a 3000 or not. The G in GREBS stands for generic server.

Alas, his jobrun.exe won't be in a contributed library for community use. But others in the community have polished more complete solutions for replicating 3000 job abilities. Speedware's Senior Solutions Architect Ken Robertson suggests that "We have found that Windows’ built-in scheduler is sometimes a little flaky, and you really will need a third-party job-scheduler to do serious production work. Speeware offers this scheduling in its AMXW suite. Those letters stand for "Automated Migration to Unix and Windows." Robertson explained:

AMXW runs on pretty much any Unix platform as well as Windows. The MPE job scheduler and JCL can happily run native  platform-specific code along with the MPE code. For example,

!JOB TESTJOB,MGR.FOOBY
!SHOWJOB > SJOUT
!grep “FOO” SJOUT > SJout2
!perl -f myscript.pl SJout2
!EOJ

We support true temporary files, and have an MPE-style SPOOLER, so  that, yep, your stdlists appear where you think they should!  The PAUSE ,JOB= works, too! Because we don’t depend upon cron in Unix, the priority and scheduling of the job works the way that it’s supposed to. Cron has issues with streaming more than one job per second, and on [IBM's] AIX, more than 60 jobs per minute. Cron also cannot guarantee job  execution order for jobs scheduled in the same minute!

With AMXW we can support multiple JOB queues, streaming from inside of code, MPE CI commands, global variables, some MPEX commands, etc. etc. All the things that you’d expect to find in MPE, just running on another  platform. There’s even a version of Suprtool-UX (from Robelle) that has been tuned to work with AMXW!

Mark Ranft, who's managing a large installation of HP 3000s as well as offering his services from his own Pro3k consultancy, reports that using the Windows/DOS batch tools was an exciting experience. In one payroll application, "the Time and Attendance portion had to run under DOS. I was scared to death that one of the DOS ‘job’ steps would die and I would not know where it was to restart the ‘job’. The .bat scripts I built were modular and standardized. The logging of individual executables was hit or miss -- depending on how the executable logged messages."

Just like so much in life, the job of replicating jobs for migrating 3000s looks like it has solutions worth every penny you pay for them. Choose the right tool for your stability needs.

3000 keeping its beat at daily newspaper

Even in the face of last month's layoffs in the newsroom of the St. Paul, Minn. Pioneer Press, an HP 3000 installed there keeps on reporting on revenues.

Although the newspaper business is embroiled in change this year, a leading daily paper for the Twin Cities is still using software developed for the HP 3000. An advertising system which was sold off-the-shelf by Collier-Jackson continues to track the paper's subscriptions and newsstand sales.

Linda Roatch, a former HP user group director, checked in and reported on the 3000's status. "We do have a 3000 in house that still runs our circulation system," Roatch said. "I'm the Advertising Systems Manager. I'm not involved with the 3000, but I believe it's the Collier-Jackson circulation system from long ago, one that we've highly customized and haven't upgraded in years."

Newspapers represented a healthy market for the HP 3000 in the decade that led to HP's exit announcement. Collier-Jackson was a newspaper software vendor once large enough to mount its own user group conference, a meeting of several days during that decade. Collier-Jackson was sold in 1994 from Compuserve to GEAC, a Canadian company which was acquired by ERP and business software vendor Infor. Infor has made acquiring legacy software a business mantra.

An application bought off the shelf and fine-tuned for a business's processes is a classic element in 3000 homesteading. ERP users operate in the same kind of shop, customizing apps such as MANMAN or MM II/eXegysys to adapt to business changes. Infor owns MANMAN as well as the Collier-Jackson assets.

Roatch did duty on the Interex user group board and worked as an independent consultant from her Minnesota base. She says she's moved on to working with Sun and Oracle in another section of the paper, which recently laid off nine more employees from its 138-person newsroom. It's a struggling business like so many other newspapers, but it's holding its own while it holds onto its HP 3000.

"I'm responsible for the project management, support and development of software used by Advertising," Roatch said. "I've not worked on the HP 3000 for almost four years. The software I support runs on Sun servers and an Oracle DB, and I'm pretty removed from the hardware and database support stuff."

Ecometry migration steps beyond HP-UX

Migration to HP-UX was only the first step in the Potpourri Group's exit from Ecometry on an N-Class HP 3000. A serious bottleneck in IO forced the catalog and online retailer to migrate in a second phase, settling on the Windows version of the e-commerce software, along with new hardware.

IT manager Bradley Rish said that inefficiencies of the Oracle database design in Ecometry create a performance bottleneck. Their study of IO traffic revealed six files whose performance creates a bottleneck. And the best-performing file of those six "was still 20 times slower than number 7," Rish said, adding that Ecometry's design needs an upgrade to push the Windows edition faster than the 3000's MPE/iX and IMAGE.

Potpourri, which is a holding company that serves 11 other catalog brands, processes 3 million customer transactions a year through phone sales and the Internet. But one half of that 3 million flows in during the high-season's fourth quarter. To handle this business load, the Ecometry installation at Potpourri needed a wide spread of 76 disk spindles and four DL580 servers configured in a cluster. That hardware arrived after Potpourri had already installed and then walked away from an HP-UX RP4400 and its disks.

"Ecometry is IO unfriendly under Oracle," said Rish, "but it's less unfriendly under Windows than HP-UX. It's still not as fast as the 3000. [Ecometry vendor] Escalate need to their act together on optimizing it."

Potpourri's board of directors put the migration in motion during 2005, after a couple of years of research by IT. The exit from the 3000 was based on HP's plans for the computer, not any inability to serve the 200-plus in-house users, plus Web transactions. The HP-UX version of the migration went live in 2007, while the Windows migration went into production mode last year.

Data migration required eight months, more than the IT pros at the company estimated. Rish said that two full-time pros, working the equivalent of one year each, were need to complete the migration to Windows.

Choosing those rack-mounted DL580s from HP got Potpourri to a wider selection of disk platforms. Reconfiguring the SAN environment cost $200,000 in disk hardware, he estimated. The entire project, including Ecometry's consulting, all software licenses and hardware, came in at $1.2-$1.5 million.

Potpourri has been live on Ecometry Windows for a year. Benefits Rish cites for moving away from HP-UX include more affordable Oracle licenses, improved horsepower (the DL580s use multiple 4-core Xeon processors), better options for cluster redundancy, and more in-house expertise. Potpoutrri went from a HP 3000-Windows experience to an all-Windows solution. Although the 3-CPU N-Class server had older disk technology, the Windows installation will need a database revision from Ecometry to meet the 3000-IMAGE performance.

Batch and job processing is an HP 3000 feature that migrating customers need to replace for Windows projects. Rish said Fluent Edge Technologies, which specializes in support of Ecometry sites both homesteading and migrating, suggested the Online Toolworks product SmartBatch.

Rish said that Potpourri is preparing a shift to a new PCI-compliant encryption solution. The company is targeting a May, 2010 go-live date for the new solution; the PCI compliance deadline is July, 2010.

He also said that the experience of migrating onto an Oracle solution has a personal benefit for any IT pro who makes the move. "It makes you much more marketable," he said, adding expertise in the widely-installed database. He added that Oracle's Linux solutions could extend career paths even further, since Oracle says that Linux is its leading development platform.

3000s to depart Longs after long life

Longs Drug, the Western US drug store chain which once ran as many as 450 HP 3000s in the world's biggest 3000 network, will be turning off its last system this fall. The migration away from the 3000 began nearly a decade ago when the retail chain started moving a everyday applications onto HP-UX. The systems were located in every store, housed in an enclosure so foolproof only a slot for backup tapes was needed for access. Now HP 3000 manager Jim Alexander reports the last machine will be switched off sometime in October.

Longs was such a large HP 3000 customer that the company had its own dedicated HP 3000 rep.The company's history with the platform goes back so far that its IT manager Bill Gates chaired the HP 3000 Users Group Planning Committee -- in 1975. The company's dedication to volunteer support for the 3000 community has been continued through the 1990s and this decade by Donna Garverick, who left Longs last year to join the support staff of Allegro Consultants. Garverick, who remarried and became Donna Hoffmeister while she was volunteering for OpenMPE, is best known for Internet messages typed in lowercase only, because of her dedication (at Longs) to Posix under MPE.

Alexander, who's losing his Longs job next month, said in a weekend posting that a third-party firm will be administering the last Longs HP 3000 until this fall. He added that system will be in familiar hands.

Longs operated only a handful of HP 3000s by the time HP 3000 migration became a common task for the community. But the company was thick with users of the 3000 mail system DeskManager through the 1990s, and also broke ground with virtual array use, clustering, performance thresholds and so much more. Alexander outlined the end-game for the system's departure from a drugstore chain acquired by CVS.

I will be laid off on July 10th after 11 years with Longs.  A well known company will be engaged to provide operations and administrative support ..The machines will be happy because in all likelihood, familiar fingers will be pressing the keys to do administrative tasks on these boxes, but I will let the audience figure out who that lower case loving person would be.  ;-)

I am transporting one of the remaining HP3000 servers for Longs / CVS to the pharmacy distribution warehouse in Ontario, California this weekend.  It will continue to operate for about four more months and then be shut down for good.  It will be the test and development server to the production box that has been in place for years. 

After about 30 years of HP3000s being at Longs drugs, with a high water mark of about 450 HP3000s, there will be no more HP3000 for Longs Drug Stores. Long live the HP3000.

Will PCI standards kick 3000s out of service?

The answer to the question is being researched by HP 3000 customers today. Those who accept credit cards for payments, and process more than 20,000 Visa sales a year, are preparing for new standards from merchant banks to meet the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).

All major credit card brands collectively adopted PCI DSS in 2006 as the requirement for organizations that process, store or transmit payment cardholder data. Ecometry's HP 3000 customers know their e-commerce software vendor will not be certifying HP 3000s for the 2010 standard. But it appears that Ecometry's owner Escalate isn't qualified to certify PCI compliance anyway.

The standard is broader than just software design, covering practices and processes as fundamental as whether and how to store cardholder data. (Don't, unless you must; encrypted plenty if you do.) Escalate wants to convert every Ecometry site to the Unix/Windows versions of the app, which Escalate will be glad to assure as PCI DSS compliant.

But security vendor Paul Taffel, who's just rolled out new features in IDent/3000, says Ecometry is far from the only place to have compliant standards implemented. A Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) can perform an audit to verify compliance — so 3000 sites can continue to process credit card transactions. Or so it appears. Merchant banks will decide.

The PCI Web site and associated white papers include a vast, 28-page listing of QSA providers. A PCI council certifies these providers. QSA is conferred by the PCI Security Standards Council to individuals who meet specific information security education requirements and have taken the appropriate training from the PCI Security Standards Council. They must also be employed by an Approved PCI Security and Auditing Firm. These assessors will be performing PCI compliance audits relating to the protection of cardholder data.

Third party solutions are available to get 3000 sites better credit card security. "The combination of Fluent Edge’s credit card encryption with IDent’s other features, and Vesoft’s Logon security, together provide a robust set of features that certainly fulfill the spirit of the PCI requirements," Taffel says.

The simple answer, for the Ecometry sites who rely completely on Escalate services, would be yes: HP 3000s won't pass the PCI DSS. But any Ecometry site which plans to remain on the HP 3000 after 2010 will be using a third-party solution anyway, since the Ecometry app loses support in that year. These Ecometry customers are leaving their vendor behind to continue to use an application which does the job without many problems. That no-fuss model is what made the 3000 an elegant and efficient business choice to begin with.

IBM, packaged app to replace 3000 system

Not many HP 3000 migration customers choose IBM's iSeries systems, but the platform notched a convert this month from a 25-year site. GNM Financial Services, a Culver City, California-based services firm, announced plans to replace its HP 3000 and applications with the S2K Enterprise for Distribution suite. The software runs on a low-end iSeries server, a Power 520.

The replacement software rolled in as a result of work by IBM reseller VAI, which released a Customer Relation Management (CRM) system last fall tuned to work with the i Series and its integrated database. IBM has promoted the iSeries as a logical next step for 3000 sites accustomed to the MPE/IMAGE database integration. But few converts have been announced since the IBM efforts began in 2002.

GNM's IT director Pam Tucker, who was a 3000 NewsWire subscriber for a few years after HP announced its 3000 exit, issued a statement for the VAI press release that said the company needed a newer solution with a more comprehensive future. She described their 3000 as "aging." The IBM press inflated that assessment to "archaic." But newer apps to replace aged 3000 software is an old story in this community.

The news in this report is the win for IBM. Sometimes a transfer to Big Blue's integrated business platform results from a selection of an application. Other cases are triggered by a trickle-down from a mother-ship IT shop. Tucker said GNM did a thorough search for replacement software. The reseller reports that GNM wanted a solution designed for the i Series.

"We understood that GNM and Mytel needed a technology solution to replace our aging HP 3000," Tucker said in her statement. The press release added that the new application promises to provide

... Access to the real-time information required to improve customer service and eliminate our outdated paper tracking system. S2K for Distribution has achieved this goal, placing key information literally at our fingertips. Specifically, VAI's CRM software, with its centralized database, allows us to see and understand all customer interactions in a way that was simply not possible before.

A modern CRM solution isn't available off the shelf for the HP 3000. Meanwhile, IBM has maintained its support for the i Series even in the face of an AS/400-Unix consolidation of the server line last year. (IBM calls the merged platform the IBM Power System, named after the core POWER chips at the heart of Unix and OS/400 solutions.) GNM describes itself as a supplier to small, independently owned office supply companies. The GNM services include "locating of merchandise; arranging for shipment of merchandise; invoice processing; financing of accounts receivable; collection of accounts receivable, and consumer assistance."

GNM must integrate data from an allied company, Mytel, one which didn't pop up in our NewsWire database. It's possible that IBM or the i Series is already installed at Mytel. We're waiting on a return call from Tucker to learn more about GNM's new migration project, and how the i Series became an important component of a replacement solution.

California aims at changes for offenders

HP 3000s track offenders in California prisons. Ever since he left HP's COBOL labs, OpenMPE director Walter Murray has worked in the Enterprise Information Services division of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. HP has announced a big contract to revamp the department's computing through the vendor's EDS subsidiary.

HP's press release says that the engagement "streamlines dozens of databases, record keeping processes and systems with a single integrated solution. The resulting highly-automated environment will include software, hardware and processes designed to transform paper-based adult and juvenile offender records into digital records."

The HP release calls this work "applications modernization services." Making applications more modern in the prison system probably won't eliminate their building block: COBOL.

The HP 3000s may now have an exit date set for them -- it looks like 2013, more than two years beyond HP's end of support deadline. But the language these systems use is likely to remain in Murray's toolset for the department, which he calls CDCR.

Yes, I’m very aware of the project to “modernize applications” at CDCR. Yes, SOMS -- the Strategic Offender Management System -- will involve replacing HP 3000s with something more modern.

However, speaking only for myself, I don’t think I’ve written my last line of COBOL just yet.

COBOL is another way to define a platform for customers' applications, especially apps created and cultivated in-house. Other platforms include databases (IMAGE vs. Eloquence vs. Oracle), vendors of systems, and complex, enterprise-sized packaged apps such as ERP systems. Migrating more than two of these platforms at once increases risk for anyone but the shops who can afford to hire outside expertise.

A CDCR release says that 40 systems will be consolidated in a project budgeted at almost a quarter-billion dollars. The four-year effort from EDS "will allow custody and programs staff to better manage the offender population, which should lead to a reduced recidivism rate."

Size up maximum drive capacity

Hewlett-Packard created a forward-looking feature for the HP 3000 before its lab retired. One of the biggest enhancements gave MPE/iX the ability to use drives sized up to 512GB. Getting this size of drive to work involves going outside of the 3000's foundation, both literally as well as strategically.

External disc drives supply storage beyond the 73GB devices which were fitted inside the HP 3000 chassis. This Hewlett-Packard part numbered A6727A was an off-the-cuff answer from Client Systems to the "how big" question. Client Systems built HP 3000s with this part installed while the company was North America's only 3000 distributor. But nothing bigger ever came off a factory line before HP stopped building 3000s in 2003.

Outside of HP's official channel, however, a drive twice as large is installed on a N-Class. Two, in fact. Matt Perdue reports that his Hill Country Technologies site boasts a N-Class with a pair of 146GB drives inside. The Seagate ST3146855LC spins at 15,000 RPM, too, a faster rate than anything HP ever put in a 3000. Perdue said he picked up his drives from online reseller CDW.com.

Older 3000s, however, need single-ended drives for internal use, according to Allegro Consulting's Donna Hofmeister. She says the 3000's drive size limit is controlled by two factors: internal versus external, and HP "blessed," or off-the-shelf specified.

Hofmeister, who joined Allegro's customer support operations after many years at Longs Drugs managing 3000s, said the Longs systems accessed disk clusters, called LUNs, of many hundreds of GB.

When I was at Longs, I was able to effortlessly mount a very large LUN on one of my systems. I wish I could remember how big it actually was, but I reckon it must have been several hundred GBs. The LUN would have been comprised of many physical mechanisms -- but the system never saw that level of detail.

The "blessed" question was debated from the late '90s onward between HP engineers and 3000 consultants and veterans. HP would only support disc devices that passed its extraordinary reliability tests. Nobody was surprised that only HP-branded discs ever got this blessing for the 3000. Once disk storage got inexpensive, drives from the same manufacturers who sourced to HP gained a following with the veterans.

"There’s the whole supported/blessed/holy aspect to the question," Hofmeister said. "[The Client Systems] answer is technically correct.  On the other hand, my current favorite MPE system to torture has a 400-plus GB drive attached to it, and it works great. I certainly wouldn’t classify this disc as falling into the supported/blessed/holy category."

HP released patches to MPE/iX 7.5 to make this possible. The project the vendor called "Large Disk" gives 3000 users "the ability to initialize an MPE/iX disk volume of up to 512 GB on SCSI-2 compliant disks. SCSI-2 Disks that are larger than 512GB will be truncated at the 512GB limit and the space beyond 512GB will not be usable by the MPE/iX Operating System or any user applications running under MPE."

HP started the engineering to release the patches for the 6.5 and 7.0 versions of MPE/iX, but never finished testing for those more common versions of MPE/iX. The 7.5 patches, available for download from HP's ITRC, are

MPEMXT1        FSCHECK.MPEXL.TELESUP
MPEMXT2        [ALT|LIST|NEW][ACCT|GROUP]
MPEMXT3        SCSI Disk Driver Update
MPEMXT4        SSM Optimization (>87GB)
MPEMXT7        DISCFREE.PUB.SYS
MPEMXU3        REPORT
MPEMXU6        CATALOG.PUB.SYS
MPEMXU7        CIERR.PUB.SYS, CICATERR.PUB.SYS

HP sells a disk of 300GB that might qualify for "blessing" if the labs had ever put the device through the 3000 tests. But the vendor has always erred on the side of caution about larger drives, even in an era when disk had become cheaper than $2 a GB. HP's Jim Hawkins offered a white paper on Large Disk that advised caution for using 3000 disks larger than 36GB.

MPE/iX transaction throughput increases when MPE is allowed to spread IO across disks. Even though newer disks are faster than older disks, there are limits to disk speed and bus speed which must be taken into account. Moving from, say, nine 2GB disks to one 18GB disk will often create a Disk IO bottleneck. For best performance we recommend that the number of MPE LDEVs never be reduced -- if one has nine 2GB disks then they should be replaced with nine 18GB disks to ensure no loss of throughput.

The other aspect of HP's blessing a larger disk is tied to HP's support of a 3000. But as of the end of next year, HP's support exit will eliminate that issue. HP never did support the full drive bus speed for the larger disks. 3000s get only Ultra-160 throughput, while HP-UX supports Ultra-320 on the very same devices.

Those larger disks offer a significant value over the blessed drives. CDW sells the 146GB device for $256. The HP drive with half that capacity sells for $273. It's important to order a parallel SCSI version (LC) when purchasing a drive. SAS drives are replacing the LC drives and cost much less.

Keep 3000-Mac emulation up to date

Macs aren't in wide use as HP 3000 clients, but the popular publishing and Web design computers do work for a number of 3000 community sites. One such is the US Cat Fancier's Association (CFA), where manager Connie Sellito needs an emulation program built for the Mac's modern-day OS X.

We do not have the  option of moving the Mac applications to a PC -- our publications (Web site and printed materials) department is firmly entrenched in the Mac camp. Makes for an interesting day!

The most straightforward solution comes from Minisoft. Its MS92 software, a longtime competitive solution to WRQ's Reflection, is designed and maintained for Macintoshes. Sellito's says that MS92 "is what we're using on the newer Macs. Excellent product."

But Reflection's scripting is entrenched at CFA. The emulator long ago lost its development team, in the same way that the WRQ brand name has disappeared into its new owner, Attachmate.

WRQ was once the largest supplier of HP 3000-related software, if you counted individual licenses on PCs. The company was acquired by Attachmate in 2005. Reflection lives on in a Windows version. The company also pointed to a Web-based solution that requires an intermediate server.

Melissa Liton, a PR rep for Attachmate, reports that "Reflection for HP is a Windows only product. However, Attachmate’s Reflection for the Web product — a Java-based “thin-client” that runs in the browser — does support Mac and is a great HP emulator."

The diagram at left shows the configuration needed to run Reflection for the Web. Adager's Alfredo Rego, one of the 3000+Mac advocates in the community, has also noted that running Reflection for HP is possible inside an emulator such as VMWare or Parallels. He's tested the latter, which recently proved to be more secured against a Windows malware exploit than its competitor. (That's right: Macs could get hit by a Windows virus with older versions of VMWare.)

No matter how you solve for giving Macs 3000 terminal access with Reflection, an in-between step adds complexity. When WRQ dropped Mac support late in the 1990s, the Mac was a niche solution in IT. Times have changed: A recent study showed that 68 percent of companies surveyed plan to add Macs to their IT mix. Minisoft has hung on long enough to see the world expand.

Economy presses 3000 vets out of work

Manufacturing firms are cutting through rough waters in 2009, rocked by the same waves that are sending bank stocks below $2 and removing clerks from retail stores in staff cutbacks. The Parker Hannifin Corp. in Cleveland, Ohio had to make cuts recently which sent 22-year veteran Edna Houston to the unemployment ranks. Most of us know someone who's been furloughed, laid off or some other term for less busy than they want to be day-to-day.

Houston took to her blog last week to talk about the steps that her employer, which has used HP 3000s for those two-plus decades, took before cutting staff:

They have explored every possibility to prevent layoffs. Temporary workers and part time staff have already been let go. Remaining personnel have been mandated to use their accrued vacation time down to below 100 hours. Last quarter we were required to take five days off unpaid. This next quarter we are required to take 10 days off unpaid. Merit increases have been postponed for 18 months. Now they have offered workers incentives if they will voluntarily retire or voluntarily quit. But make no mistake about it, layoffs are inevitable. The recession is just too deep.

There was a time not long ago when being idled was an HP 3000 expert's unique situation, unless they learned other skills. But the retreat from business expansion is pushing a much broader range of IT veteran onto the unemployment rolls. We only have fear itself to fear — but the first step toward fearing only fear is to look reality in the eye. The second step is to tell what has happened to you, and then network.

Learning something new and needed might be a third step. Just today my sister-in-law reported that she's passed her tests to become a Ohio State certified Nurse's Aid. The job couldn't be more different from her decade-plus in payables and receiveables. Her former employer was another manufacturing company in the Midwest taking a dip in its business.

Learning something new in the IT skill set is one of the ways to float upward in the downward undertow of today's business currents. This may not be news to some community members, but online training in complementary IT skills — something related to what you know but in a new area of opportunity — is one strategy to follow while you're looking. (No implicit endorsement in the link there to Skillsoft, but you get the idea.) Train from your home office (that's what we independents call it when we leave traditional employment) and put that broadband connection to good use.

Even as the Fed chairman predicts things will turn upward next year, consumer finance TV star Suze Orman thinks it will be another six years before the tide rises instead of ebbs. Nobody knows for sure. However, being unique in your skill set really can help in finding a place to land. The HP 3000 customers who aren't shedding jobs so quickly still rely on the system, even more so now that capital expenditures are being reduced. Add the fact that 3000 experience is becoming rare and you might have a formula for finding work. Houston's situation is new and she's begun a campaign of getting the word out without remorse or blame. Facebook, Linked In: Such resources help you build out a personal network, the asset that can turn the tide for employment future.

Washington colleges continue study of migration

This week's issue of the Olympic College's newspaper The Olympian includes news of the HP 3000. In specific, the paper reports about the fate of systems which support admissions, registration, financial aid and graduation tracking. This nearly-total range of college operations relies on an HP 3000 the college has been working to replace since 2003. In fact, more than 30 colleges continue to count on this 3000 that college IT directors like Jack Hanson say will be hard to maintain and find parts for after 2010.

Projects move more slowly in the academic world, a fact that could be even more true at the Bellingham,
Washington community college. Olympic College is part of the Washington Community College Consortium (WCCC), a group of schools which operated HP 3000s that were destined to become a single .NET server. Hewlett-Packard first earned the approval to do the migration, with Transoft to perform the work. In the fall of 2003 we reported:

The deal with the Washington colleges migrates 34 colleges' HP 3000s into a centralized data center to be run by the colleges’ Center for Information Systems (CIS). The applications written in COBOL II on the 3000s will become AcuCOBOL applications under Microsoft’s .NET, said Transoft CEO Paul Holland, after about 18 months of migration work between Transoft and HP Services.

The Olympian and the reports to the Washington State Student Services Commission & Councils tell the rest of the story. Plans for a move away from an in-house system failed, so HP had to back away from the engagement and settle up on what couldn't be finished. The colleges still intend to run on another platform by 2010, The Olympian reports, the end of HP's support. One bit of the delay might stem from what the colleges hoped to convert: reports written in Protos, a unique mix of COBOL and fourth generation language.

Sure enough, since the colleges are public entities with open reporting, you can locate online documents on the 2004 schedule of migration and progress report, the options assessment more than four years later (PDF file, see page 7), and now the news that the colleges want to move forward after "a $14 million rehosting project was cancelled last year." The project was big enough to involve services in Atlanta, London and India. Not to mention the oversight from Washington's colleges.

That migration's 2003 target platform, Windows, was influenced by nearby Microsoft (perhaps donating software) and HP Service's desire to put up a win for the .NET solution to show 3000 customers. Protos, however, can be a knotty piece of software to unravel into another language, since the vendor has closed down operations for many years now. Protos distinguished itself by compiling into COBOL, but the gap between its reports and .NET — the latter created 10 years after development ended on Protos — may have been too wide to span.

Then there's this bit of information from an early draft of the 2004 report: "HP's contractual obligation is to transfer 400 reports from the current systems. This leaves a great many reports needing to be developed by CIS and/or campus resources."

There's little to be gained by now in finding fingers to point, but something can be learned here. Understanding how to move code to a new platform requires an understanding of the 3000's aspects even more than expertise on the target, according to several migration services firms in the 3000 community. Even a vendor-assisted migration might require significant in-house resources to finish a mission-critical rehosting like the one at WCCC.

The migration could now carry the WCCC's 3000 apps anywhere, according to the latest report. Collegiate Project Services is contracted "to do an assessment of the needs of each college campus through a variety of questionnaires and one-on-one interviews," according to the Olympian's story. Colleges are having more input this time around than during what was called Re-hosting, but was actually rewriting. The effort is now called "Go Forward," to leave room for whatever solution seems best. One big difference this time around — the colleges are looking at replacement software. Rewriting is still on the table according to a resource manager at Olympic College. But keeping that Protos-type element in mind might make a strong case to try to replace.

In about a month, the assessment will be completed along with a recommendation, with the results distributed to all 34 colleges by May. This will all be in advance of the work to be done, like testing a replacement set of applications or plunging into another rewrite. WCCC figured to have HP's migration project complete by 2005. Considering that migrations take about 18 months on average to finish, the schools will only be five years behind their plans.

Missed deadlines and canceled projects are all routine steps in making a migration, even though there have been many sites which have skipped both of these snarls on the path away from the 3000. But the lessons to be taken away from these schools are fundamental to understanding the challenge of leaving the platform. The older the application's history, the more business logic must be moved, and the fewer IT developers will be on hand to help understand. Factor in key software that's not supported any longer and you get both a hurdle as well as a reason to make changes, like moving away from a language like Protos.

Since the Olympian's story is online, it's available for comments, and one HP 3000 veteran has already offered an alternative. John Ryrie of TAG Software in the UK said that maybe getting some inexpensive replacement 3000s, parts and non-HP MPE support might be a smarter course to follow.

Perhaps another option for IT to consider would be to look to companies who supply second-user equipment, especially given the current shortage of cash. In my opinion there will be HP 3000s around for a long time to come, as well as operating system support from companies other than Hewlett-Packard. If it works...

That's not exactly helpful for almost three dozen colleges who have already agreed on migration and financed their intention. But with N-Class servers on the market for as little as $4,000 these days, standby hardware and a good contract for third party support seem a small backup investment for these interim homesteaders.

Lufthansa flies off to SAP replacement

Many HP 3000 customers who migrate do so onto lower-priced alternatives. User reports are rife with stories of Eloquence replacing TurboIMAGE, or programs which are emulated with few rewrites onto Windows systems, using a tool like AMXW (deployed at financials giant ING) or Ordina's MPUX. But some 3000 sites have succeeded at making the SAP behemoth work in place of MPE/iX in-house-written apps.

That's the report from Lufthansa Technik Airmotive Ireland, where IT manager Joe Farrell has managed the last of the transitions away from the HP 3000. SAP has been the target platform for the aircraft manufacturing firm ever since HP announced it would exit the 3000 community. Now the last 3000 app is being transferred to work on Intel-based servers. Lufthansa uses servers from Hewlett-Packard, no less.

"Incidentally, we host SAP on an entirely Intel-based platform (originally NetServers, but more recently Proliants)," Farrell reported. "There’s HP loyalty for you!"

"We’ve replaced all but one of our HP 3000 applications," Farrell said. "The last remaining one, a custom application for Contract Billing/Invoicing, is being redeveloped onto a new platform."

Lufthansa turned to SAP's high-level Advanced Business Application Programming language to rewrite the billing/invoicing app. ABAP is positioned as SAP's tool for its Web Application Server, part of its NetWeaver platform for building business applications. ABAP, which harkens back to the German roots of SAP's designs, has a syntax that is said to be similar to COBOL. The German name for ABAP translates into "general report creation processor." Farrell reports of his final migrated 3000 app:

We developed it in-house over 17 years ago, mainly in PowerHouse, with a bit of COBOL for the more challenging processing. It also uses Fantasia for producing customer-friendly output. And, needless to say, it uses the trusty TurboIMAGE database for the data.

We have re-written it, again in-house, as a custom module for our SAP platform. It was developed using the ABAP language, and SAP-Script for formatting the output. This was the most logical (no pun intended) platform for it — as our ERP system, including Financials, are all SAP-based at this stage. So now the users will have a single front-end GUI, and the data is integrated in a single Oracle database.

Migration splits duties of dropping, testing

    In what’s becoming a proven strategy for large migrations, Speedware and ING Australia split the work between revising applications, known as “code drops,” and creating and managing the test suites and testing of the re-hosted software. The large-scale project was completed in 2008.

    “It was a pretty substantive project,” said Andrea McCarley, the deployment manager for the migration project ING called Chrysalis. “We had six streams going at one point, with 20-30 in-house staff and other third party vendors involved as well.” Even at that size of staffing, the project was occupying only about 10-15 percent of ING’s IT staff, which at the time was more than 300 professionals.

    Speedware’s marketing director Chris Koppe said another motivation for ING was to reduce the number of third party applications needed for a production system. While some new vendors have been introduced to make Chrysalis a reality, the third-party elements were reduced from more than 40 to less than 20, he said.

    ING counted on some Unix expertise among its IT staff at the time of choosing HP-UX, but not a lot. McCarley said Speedware employed its AMXW migration tool, “but HP-UX was definitely a new environment to us, and particularly AMXW, which is proprietary to Speedware. But it provides a lot of functionality for us — it’s kind of the grease between the operating system and the application code, so we didn’t have to rewrite specific utilities.”

    The time difference between Speedware’s Montreal labs and the ING operations is more than a business day, but having Speedware staff onsite in Australia helped. Some Speedware calls had to be made at midnight Eastern time to catch ING before the end of its business day. The two companies found a way to make the clock work for them.

    “In some ways you got a 24-hour cycle, because people could work on things here and then hand it off to [Speedware],” McCarley said, and then Montreal would work on the fixes overnight, so we’d get them pretty quickly.”

   The project was the largest that ING had undertaken, even if the end result was the same applications moved to another HP platform. “You were lifting up the hood and swapping out all the pieces, so at the end of the day you had the same car doing the same thing, but almost every component was changed,” McCarley said. The challenge was in the technology changes, since the objective was to make the user experience seamless.

    The tech changes occurred against the history of reliability and comfort with HP 3000s. “But everyone knew they couldn’t go forward in an unsupported environment,” McCarley said, “so we had to step and get acclimated to the new technology and the new platform. If HP was willing to support it indefinitely, no one would be willing to undertake this large a migration project.”

    Evolving, everyday-use business logic was making the migration during the project, rather than static systems. An analysis revealed programs and menus no longer used, streamlining away elements that didn’t need to be shifted onto the HP-UX system. “There was no point in paying for migrating something that was no longer being used,” McCarley said.

    After functionality testing took place in Montreal, the full environment was actively tested in Australia. A unique number of interfaces connected the systems, McCarley said, so complete testing had to take place at the customer site, including integration testing, user acceptance testing, operability testing, performance testing, and “a whole phase just around batch processing, to get it right for our environment.”

    Speedware’s staffers “were committed to the project and definitely there when you picked up the phone,” McCarley said. “When you’re working out an issue in the code, you don’t always know if it’s in the code or in the environment. So there was a lot of collaboration to figure out what root causes were the issue. Then either they would fix it, or we would fix it.”

    Stepping away from TurboIMAGE gave ING a chance to embrace Eloquence as the new database for the production environment. “It certainly made the data migration straightforward,” McCarley said. Eloquence indexing will enable ING to move away from Omnidex in the HP-UX environment, removing another third party element.

    ING was pleased with the results of its project, praising Speedware’s partnership model. Kulakowski said the ING project is “evidence that large organizations can undertake a well-planned and automated modernization project to migrate to a new, stable platform, providing increased business agility and significant cost savings.”

Financial site shifts apps to new host

    Following a mandate from its computer vendor, assets and insurance management firm ING Australia Ltd. completed a “lift and shift” migration away from HP 3000 systems during 2008. The company said it chose to re-host rather than rewrite to reduce risk and cut the cost of the migration.

   Speedware’s professional services group worked for months on the ING project, deploying resources on the behalf of the financial firm such as onsite consulting and application code revisions. CIO Greg Booker said the project, which spanned more than 19 months including breaks, gave ING a large return from its large project. But the company had first begun to rewrite its applications before it changed strategy.

   “In the end, the project turned out to be very cost-effective,” Booker said. “We calculated that the cost of the re-hosting project, combined with the resulting maintenance costs over the next 10 years, would be four to five times less expensive than if we had continued with our rewriting project. That translates into a lot more money that can be invested into innovative projects focused on helping to grow our business.”

    Booker said “Speedware worked closely with our team, driving for absolute reliability and low risk.” ING’s financial and insurance applications handle investments and superannuation — in essence, a type of 401K product — for companies in Australia.

     Speedware’s general manager Andy Kulakowski said that when large companies look at migration, a good plan makes them most likely to achieve the greatest gains. Speedware calls the process “modernization,” a multiple-step approach that starts with shifting 3000 apps onto a vendor-supported platform. Enhancement then follows the shift.

    “Our recent success in this area shows that, with proper planning and analysis, larger companies have the most to gain from modernization,” Kulakowski said.

   Andrea McCarley, the deployment manager for the migration project ING called Chrysalis, said that HP’s exit from 3000 support sparked the migration onto HP-UX.

    “There’s a constant evaluation of your environment and the resources you’re spending to support it,” she said, “but I think the compelling driver is the end-of-life issue — and to what extent HP would be able to support the [3000] going forward.”

   ING assessed that a dozen patches were applied to the 3000 in the 12 months prior to the migration project. The company said that the news that HP would curtail patch creation for the 3000 at the close of 2008 added to the business risk of continuing to run on the platform.

   The third-party support landscape in Australia does not offer a large company that is stepping in for HP, she added. “You have an issue of whether you could even get parts, whether it’s hardware or the operating system patches. There wasn’t an obvious candidate that could provide the level of comfort and service you would want for a production system.”

Tibbenham joins OpenMPE advocacy

Tony Tibbenham, an IT manager based in the UK, is joining the OpenMPE board of directors. The freshest face on the seven-year-old organization's team, Tibbenham has already migrated from the HP 3000, making him one of the most unique members of the group. Nearly all other members either were active 3000 users or represented companies serving the 3000 customer community.

Tibbenham believes the 3000 world deserves a representative from Europe. "I remain keen to see MPE remain available and provide a European voice on the Open MPE board," he says in his OpenMPE candidate biography. Plus he's got a new perspective in being a former user. He's an advocate for the server that his company was forced to shuffle to the low-profile duty of historical lookups. "We have no plans to drop the power to the server for several years," he says.

He also shared testimony on the 3000's durability. When he first arrive, the hardware at his company was spinning along in a room where the temperature was beyond 90 degrees. "A couple of weeks later I joined the company, got the air conditioning in the computer room repaired, and dropped the temperature to a more reasonable 19C (66F). The little box just kept spinning."

Even though Tibbenham has spent the bulk of his 26-year career using systems other than the 3000 (most notably HP-UX), he's been impressed with the HP 3000 during the two years he's guided his company's migration away from the system.

The only outages have been due to lack of power. The box has restarted each time. This box has been running business critical apps for 15 years with minimal expertise on site and no applications support for the last five. It just kept going! I was so nervous that the box was critical yet unsupported that I resorted to buying a little box at auction that was, it transpired, even older: It was a 917RX running MPE 5.5!

Two years in, I have developed a lot of respect for this little server, have seen great support on the HP3000-L mailing list and want to keep my 3000s doing something useful.

Circuit City connects to 3000s to the end

Few companies are weathering a demise as public as Circuit City's. The consumer electronics retail outlet is closing its doors this spring, doors which have seen millions of people pass through looking for closeout deals. Also on the shutdown list are four HP 3000s which have run at the retailer since the 1980s, operating in-house applications.

The apps continue to operate, perhaps right up to the end of the company's computing. Bill Cooksey, who once worked with the 3000s and now has duties elsewhere in the firm's IT ops, said "the 3000s play a key role in transaction logging for our stores, and other sales functions, so as long as log records are generated we'll need to keep them up. Once they're down, nothing will replace them because everything will be shut down in time."

These systems are going offline the same way many computers go dark: the company folds its tent. The bankruptcy of Circuit City will accomplish what the company tried to do at least four times in the past: put another computer in place of the 3000s which was just as reliable.

Connie Boyer of the company said

They had tried at least four times, maybe more, to replace the sales logging function that is on one of the 3000s but never succeeded. It’s just too darn reliable!

I developed the first point of sale system for Circuit City on an HP 3000 Series III. We had a good 350 terminals hooked up to that baby! I wrote the order entry application that all the cashiers used in the stores. It was written in SPL. We started with a POS shell that Nick Demos wrote for W. Bell and Co., but the cashier app was written from scratch.

Boyer added that the 3000s will be needed until the May 1 closing of the stores. The systems may work to the very end of Circuit City operations and accounting shutdowns, she said.

I’m sure all the computers, including the 3000s, will be sold to satisfy creditors. They said it will take two years to close the accounting books. So it could be they will keep the 3000s around until they close the books, since every sales ticket goes through a 3000. In addition, service repair goes through the other big 3000 so they may keep it around as well, until all the accounting books have been closed for repair orders.

Migration launching advice grows wiser

Even now, in 2009, 3000 users are just starting migrations. Set aside for a moment the fact that HP miscalculated the migration span so badly for the 3000. Companies are learning Unix in a new era than in 2003. The good fortune of starting this year is there's a richer range of materials to study, some online, some on paper.

Texas Iron Works (TIW), a 90-year-old company supporting oil and gas exploration, "is in the beginning stages of migrating from MPE to HP-UX," said system admin Bobby Brogdon. He was looking for a cross reference guide between the two environments. HP just pulled down one of the best such resources when it shut off the Jazz server. While the community awaits the resurrection of the HP guide at places like Speedware and OpenMPE, there's other guidance.

Roy Brown pointed to the Robelle white paper on the Web that covers the subject. And in an example of the everlasting gift of the Web, a posting from the late Wirt Atmar still recommends a book about Linux.

The reference that I've found most helpful is O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell book. There are only two rules associated with computers: The first is that all computers are alike. The second is that all computers are different.

The Linux book delivers information relevant to HP's Unix, since as Wirt says, all computers are alike. The paper guide has earned a spot on a dozen desktops at the company founded by Wirt and his partner Valerie, AICS Research.

It’s the second rule that seems to bamboozle most people, but it shouldn’t if  you remember the first. Most of Unix/Linux’s problems for a new user lie in the  godawful command names that people chose for Unix, but otherwise Unix is a  simpler operating system than MPE and quite nice once you get used to it.

The advantage of the Linux in a Nutshell book is that the index at the back  of the book is in plain English. It is a listing of all of the kinds of things that  you want to do on any computer, print, copy files, etc., and quickly points you  to often suprisingly oddly-named Unix command.

I still haven’t memorized all of the names of commands that I use, which is only a fraction of those available. To compensate, we’ve purchased about of  dozen copies of the O’Reilly book so that they’re on every desk for quick reference and never more than an arm’s length away.

Shawn Gordon, the former 3000 NewsWire columnist and developer of 3000 utilities, reminded Brogdon that he wrote a paper which compared commands between MPE and Unix, and he even threw in MPEX. David Waroff cast a vote for Learning the Unix Operating System which he said is "a short, pragmatic introduction to Unix."

Finally, for anyone who's leaving the 3000 in a forced march and wants to know what to watch out for in the new world of Unix, Mark Landin reminded 3000 migrators of the ubiquitous and funny "Unix Hater's Handbook." It's such an icon that it can be read online as a PDF file; it's gone out of print.

Security issue surrounds IPv6

HP's Unix endures much of the same onslaught of hacker vulnerabilities as other Unixes. A Security Bulletin from this week, one of the steady string of reports which keeps up with needed patches for HP-UX, illustrates how new Internet features expose new breeches in the OS that HP prefers for replacing migrating HP 3000s.

The latest bulletin warns users of HP-UX v11 that the IPv6 capabilities of the OS can provide a back door to Denial of Service attacks. HP devised a patch to close the DoS vulnerability before it warned customers about the exploit. In contrast, last week HP simply advised HP 3000 sites to stop using a compromised part of MPE/iX, the seldom-employed BIND/iX DNS module.

BIND/iX seemed like a good idea at the time, to give the 3000 a full complement of Internet tool and enable intranets. It never caught on. "I never did understand why it was released," said 3000 consultant Joe Horrigan. A cheap white box [PC] can do the same function using Linux or Windows. Not a good use for a 3000 system costing $100,000."

For customers who have access to the HP IT Response Center Knowledge Base, the IPv6 bulletin can be read online at the HP site. HP never put IPv6 into MPE/iX, so the 3000's OS already has its usual patch: security through differences with the rest of the world's Unix users. In this case, the security has been provided by HP's lack of protocol support. Call it Security Through Omission, if you want.

If you're keeping score over the past week on Security Bulletins, the resolutions are tied: HP-UX 1, MPE/iX 1.

An HP-UX Security Bulletin is not a rare creature at all. Here's one from this morning, even more wide-ranging:

Potential security vulnerabilities have been identified with HP-UX running Apache-based Web Server or Tomcat-based Servelet Engine. The vulnerabilities could be exploited remotely to cause a Denial of Service (DoS), cross-site scripting (XSS), execution of arbitrary code, or cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Apache-based Web Server and the Tomcat-based Servelet Engine are contained in the Apache Web Server Suite.

To resolve the IPv6 problem, HP gives the HP-UX customer any of three patches needed for versions 11.11, 11.23 and 11.31, which pretty much covers the v11 installed base. HP's Unix users don't have to apply the patches manually. These days the OS employs HP-UX Software Assistant, "an enhanced application that replaces HP-UX Security Patch Check. It analyzes all Security Bulletins issued by HP and lists recommended actions that may apply to a specific HP-UX system."

Software Assistant downloads patches and creates a depot for a customer site on a local server. Apple's OS X now does much the same thing, downloading patches to the Mac's variant of Unix and then prompting administrators to restart, if they want to accept a patch, to install it into the OS.

It might be something of a comment on the new world of Security Bulletins than an OS needs something like Software Assistant to check often for vulnerabilities. MPE/iX never needed that, so rare are its compromises. But at least HP has engineered an automated way to protect its Unix customers. You can learn more about Software Assistant at the HP Web site.

As for a full resolution of BIND/iX vulnerability on a 3000, Horrigan checked out the new generation of BIND, which is an open source tool. It's a project that, considering its security implications, might not find a lot of volunteers.

I did some quick research and BIND 9.6 is a complete re-write, that along with other features allows for randomized port assignments which makes it hard (if not impossible) for poisoning the DNS cache. Since I'm sure no one wants to redo the MPE/iX port, it might  be dangerous to expose an MPE/iX DNS server to the world [using the current BIND in the OS].

Why Emulation Doesn't Compute For Us

[Ed. Note: We asked the 3000 community to tell us if a 3000 hardware emulator, powered by the last release of MPE/iX, would be of any use in the years to come. Many said yes, or perhaps. But one 3000 customer from a Canadian shipping brokerage makes reasoned points for why strapping MPE onto new, faster silicon, plus carrying MPE-based solutions along, is a poor fit. We'll have more emulator responses in our February print edition, and on the blog afterward.]

By James Byrne

Here at Harte Lyne we have two HP 3000 918LX systems, primary and a hot spare at our off-site location. I have read the articles and commentary of last week and, even allowing for my profound dissatisfaction with HP, my reaction to them is “more of the same old-same old... divert, deceive and delay.” We are not considering using an emulator for our HP 3000. This decision is based on three considerations:

One, as pointed out, there is no such emulator. It is more than seven years since the EOL announcement for the HP 3000. If an emulator was going to appear then one reasonably expects that one would be produced by now. Two, HP has demonstrated an intractable institutional resistance to admitting that the HP 3000 was a viable platform despite their own 2001 assessment to the contrary. This has had, and 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.

Three, emulation is not enough. The world has moved on considerably since 2001, while MPE/iX has not. Basic FTP and Telnet are inherently insecure and increasingly discarded methods of data transfer. SSL with SHA2 or SHA512 encryption is a de facto, and in many instances a de jure, requirement for business data communication between hosts and even for inter-process communication on unsealed servers. Compiler-driven languages are all but completely replaced in new business application development by interpretive, and processor intensive, virtual machines (IVM) such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and so forth.

An MPE/iX emulator, given the OS’s dated capabilities, would be a hard sell for most company’s IT departments, even if it and the license transfer were free. Having to pay for either, and no doubt facing considerable third party fees to transfer licenses like Cognos and such, makes this path a non-starter in all but what can only be a very few extreme cases.

Consider the device that I am using to compose this message, in a browser window. The host I am using has multiple CoreDuo2 64 bit processors with 4 MB of L2 cache and FSB. It has 16 GB of 64-bit memory, 1 TB of disk storage and a DVD RW-RAM multidrive. It is a generic Intel “whitebox” and its total cost was $800 CAD.

It is running a Linux OS, CentOS-5.2, which is FREE. On this device, which also acts as my desktop PC, I am developing the application software that will enable the last of our business systems to migrate off the HP 3000. This project uses PostgreSQL as the DBMS (FREE), NginX high performance httpd (FREE) as the service interface, together with the Ruby programming language (FREE) and the Ruby On Rails ORM framework (FREE) for the application software. We are also using Redmine project management software (FREE) and GiT distributed version control system (FREE) to control and document this project. When deployed it will use the Firefox browser with the xforms plugin as the client software (both FREE).

What would the equivalents of these products cost on an HP 3000? Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand of dollars? For each separate host? Will any MPE/iX emulator be permitted by HP to run on an open source OS and commodity hardware? Or, will it be constrained to HP-UX on HP 9000s, with commensurate licensing fees for that OS and inflated prices for the hardware to run it?

How can an emulator of an operating system whose entire support structure is rooted in an outdated, and increasingly irrelevant, price per incremental feature marketing philosophy compete with the reality of commodity-priced hardware and open source free software? Whatever its value might have been five or six years ago, in my opinion desire for an MPE/iX emulator is principally driven by sentiment at this point. Sentiment is not a sound basis for making decisions.

I do not agree with HP’s decision to terminate the HP 3000. That said, without a revolutionary overhaul of HP’s marketing, product positioning and pricing with respect to this technology, then the outcome nonetheless would have been the same, the demise of the HP 3000, as will happen to HP-UX and the HP 9000 eventually.

Such a revolution had no chance of happening inside HP. For years, decades, prior to 2001, HP was advised by many, far more knowledgeable and influential than myself, that it was HP’s own internal policies that were strangling the HP 3000. As the song goes, “They would not listen / they’re not listening still / perhaps they never will.”

We no longer employ HP products, save for equipment that we already owned prior to November 2001. HP has taken its own path and we no longer travel in company with it. It is rather doubtful that they will ever notice.

Time for inauguration, independence and changes

In the US we're making history today by inaugurating a black President. History has become a major part of your community by now — HP has shuffled all non-support 3000 operations to its history books, customers manage 3000s used only for historic look ups, and volunteers work on a historic transfer of information.

Today might be a good day to rededicate your strategy for HP 3000 ownership. The companies who have migrated still face the enhancement phase of their transition. Moving away from a working, stable platform was sparked by HP and its exit from the market. Asset mangement firm ING Australia moved off its two HP 3000s because of HP's termination of support. ING wants to get more from its suite of applications than a new platform, though.

Homesteaders can be working on aging infrastructure, just as the US needs to do starting today. There are more companies still running HP 3000s than you might imagine. "Many dozens if not hundreds of clients are still on the platform seven years later," reports James Mulcahy, formerly of Ecometry/Escalate, suppliers of e-commerce and retail apps. "They have not made the migration to Windows-based systems."

Meanwhile, the thousands of files of programs, reports and instruction that were hosted on HP's Jazz server are working their way to an independent home at OpenMPE. The free public development server Invent3k is making a transition, too. "OpenMPE is working on making our own Invent3k available," said director Donna Hofmeister this morning.  "Much of Jazz's contents will be available via this system."

Independence is easy to spot in your community. One consultant reported that he downloaded 1.3 GB of programs and information on his own from Jazz before HP switched off its server Dec. 31. HP advised customers to take this kind of independent action when it announced Jazz was going dark.

It's a bright day this morning in Washington, DC, but it's a cold one, too. If it feels chilling to wake up today in the minority of 3000 owners — HP claimed in 2008 that most customers are already migrated — you might take some warmth from the close shoulders of remaining Ecometry customers using 3000s.

"Examples of clients still on the HP 3000 are Northern Safety, American Musical Supply, Galls, Casual Male, and Overton's," said Mulcahy. Some clients that have migrated to Windows, both using Fujitsu NetCOBOL, are Brookstone (using Oracle) and Suresource (using SQL Server).

HP seems to be offering a more stable target for these migrating customers, Mulcahy observes. But Windows still dominates as the destination for new system administration.

"Among the clients that migrated to other platforms while I was still at Ecometry (through 2005), most were moving to Windows," he said. "I can only think of one that went the HP-UX route, Ross-Simons. In fact, [leather goods retailer] Coach was moving to Windows at the same time as Ross-Simons was moving to HP-UX. I was in R&D at the time and specialized in porting between the platforms. Windows systems were the nightmares. The HP-UX rendition [of Ecometry] was remarkably more stable."

We'll have more tomorrow on the latest motivations to migrate away from 3000-based Ecometry, even as these dozens-to-hundreds of companies remain tight and stable running MPE/iX. 2009 is a year for serious, crucial and critical work for your community. Changes have already arrived, and more are on the way. Inaugurate a year of sustaining or migrating action, if you have not already, starting today.

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.

Programming Made Easier

Historic facts can expire, their sell-by dates causing what we know to become untrue. Take the history of the HP 3000's advances. In 2000, HP's pledge to take MPE/iX onto the Itanium architecture was already history, since the vendor made the promise several years earlier. Then in late 2001, well, that history became invalid, and to some customers, simply untrue. But some artifacts of history hold facts that remain true no matter what their date, especially if you own or operate a 3000 of any vintage.

Durable truth is hard to come by in the computer industry. So much is paved over every year that knowledge becomes arcane quickly in the name of advances. But consistency is also a value worth preserving, and so a good share of the 3000 community is still using the system HP built, then dropped from its 21st Century sales plans.

That constant use is what makes a recent addition to our archives more than a relic. Today we received a copy of the Using The HP 3000 "an introduction to interactive programming," circa early 1979. (Thanks to Roger Smith, IS Director of Tulare County Office of Education, for the addition; click on any photo here for a larger version.) In that springtime of 1979, the HP 3000 had two means of interactive access: the 2645A terminal and a hardcopy-only cousin, the 2635. But the commands from that MPE III version of the OS still run today, nearly 30 years later.

That's more than historic. It borders on legendary — but it's also why HP had to admit the 3000 business was too big for it to maintain. Too large in time-span, anyway.

HP wrote this book for the "professional computer programmer" as well as "someone who has never seen a computer before. And we know from experience that both categories are well represented in the HP 3000 user base."

To be sure, the last part of that sentence will be viewed as history. You may not be able to find someone who has never seen a computer before. However, it's not that hard to find someone who has never seen a business server before, and that's what kind of computer the HP 3000 remains today.

The manual is fun, and full of reminders of how much easier programming has become in 29 years' time. The sections on how to delete a line or characters within a line make me wonder how anyone had time to compete a project. But then projects deadlines were measured in months instead of weeks for most customers. Plus, completing a project on the first attempt was a genuine measure of success. Still, all that control-X and control-H had to slow down the creative process. Maybe it was like learning to finger the keys before you compose the concerto.

This document had some unfortunate choices of layout, the worst being the use of yellow type to indicate the HP 3000 responses to commands. Like everybody in 1979, HP was learning how to teach its customers about the use of this new tool. Interactive computing was the reason that the HP 3000 took off in an era dominated by IBM mainframes, and HP probably wanted to show how lively the interactive experience could appear. Later on, you could actually see yellow letters in HP responses, on certain types of terminals.

Each year from 1979 to the present, HP has worked to ensure the largest number of HP 3000s could run the programs crafted with the help of this manual and successors. That makes the 3000-using universe unparalleled among any computer launched in the 1970s. Rogers said that the software written in the 1980s ran during this century.

When I started here 1985 we had a Series III and a Series 44. We then upgraded the 44 to a 48 and changed the III to a Series 70. The next step was changing both to a 960. The last one we got was the 969KS/200.

We still had software we wrote on the Series III that was still running on the 969.  Amazing.

When it adopted a go-go grow business mantra in the 21st Century, HP couldn't find the motivation to keep up anymore with its 3000 legend. Perhaps a dedicated base of users, full of expertise and experience, can carry on into a fresh decade of the 21st, starting in 2010. Whether it's a manual for an HP storage device, or a programming aid written before Ronald Reagan took office, nothing seems to expire altogether in your community. How many others can claim that kind of history?

How many 3000s, how long: why care?

I have answered one question over and over during the 24 years I've covered the HP 3000 marketplace: How many HP 3000s are out there? The answer has varied from decade to decade, but the query has also changed, too. The tone of the question has gone from proud (the 80s) to curious (the 90s), to dismissive (2002-2004) and more recently, hopeful.

David Evans Jr., Chief Systems Security Officer at the San Bernadino schools' Superintendent's Office, asked the question again last week, and with good reason from a 3000 shop making its migration. I answered,

Steve Cooper of Allegro, who's been in the biz forever, said at this summer's Computer History Museum symposium that he thought a minimum of 10,000 systems are now in use, perhaps up to 20,000. At its peak, the installed base was at least 100,000 — that point being before Windows had released a truly-working version.

I agree with both of his numbers and defer to his perspective, since I've only been in the market since 1984. Steve pre-dates me by 10 years.

Evans was researching the question to get data on the support viability of the HP 3000 in the years beyond 2010. HP's already said it will shut down its lab operations in 14 weeks from now. Evans explained

We know HP has posted the December, 2010 date. [Our organization] doesn’t think our migration from the HP3000 to a .NET application is going to be done by then. Our application is a home grown financial/HR and there really is no off the shelf solution that will work for a County Office of Education’s needs. Off the shelf would get us maybe 70 percent, and we’d still have to write the other 30 and make it integrate. Plus the cost factor.

So my boss was asking how many HP 3000s are still in use. Ideal is our hardware support vendor and they are saying they can support our hardware until 2015. I would think that their source of replacement parts is going to be surplus HP3000s. So how many more are their left, and at what rate will they be consumed, is the concern. And I would think the other HP 3000 support vendors, are scouring the landscape to find HP 3000s to acquire for their needs.

Shops like the ones where Evans works are commonplace, not rare holdovers. Much of this 3000 community has in-house apps doing the work of IT, and moving to off the shelf is a disappointing choice for a migration shop. Moving an app takes time to do it right, whether it's a Windows migration like the one at the San Bernadino schools or a Unix target. The HP 3000 will hold its value for these companies even as they invest in the tools and expertise to leave the platform.

At this point there's no clue about whether HP's 2010 exit deadline will be moved. But if shops like this California customer are still out there, it's easy to predict that HP will continue to write contracts which are very private in nature. These same circumstances — keeping customers mum with Confidential Disclosure Agreements while extending support beyond deadlines — were used by HP during 2005.

How 45 grand can create HP rogues

HP 3000 owners want to honor license agreements, but the current state of the 3000 community can make pirates of anyone with a corporate mandate to keep relying on the system. For some customers, HP's two-year-old upgrade pricing on beefing up 3000 systems — the Right To Use license fees — might be a roadblock, something to encourage off-the-books modifications to HP 3000s.

That RTU cost is an unfortunate fact of life for a 3000 customer who cannot afford to migrate, either today or anytime soon. But there's even more cost, also in the realm of usury, which a 3000 homesteader must weather — or navigate around. Creating a licensed new system as a hot spare in a disaster recovery site, complete with third party licenses to match a production box, will trigger a license fee from Cognos (for PowerHouse). The Cognos cost can be as high as $45,000 for a low-end 9x7 server.

That's the opening bid from Cognos, anyway. There's been a court of corporate appeal, as it were, inside the Cognos (now IBM) management. Charlie Maloney has taken ownership of these kinds of negotiations, sometimes injecting a dose of reality into a vendor price list that seems frozen in 1999. But if there's 45 grand in the way of a hot spare, customers who lose in the court of appeal will do their jobs to keep a 3000 always available. That's the fork in the road where a customer enters rogue status, duplicating HP model strings to enable their spare system to be a hot, plug-and-go 3000.

More than two years ago the 3000 community first heard about a program to enable this kind of 3000 modification. We say modification because that's how HP describes the process and its policy, as in "a customer cannot modify any information in HP 3000 stable storage. That's only HP's job."

Nevertheless, the 3000 is not a magic box which can keep changing its technology. The ss_update program inside PA-RISC servers of recent vintage is now in change of such changes, and earlier this year Steve Pirie and his partners opened up business to enable such modifications for support emergencies where HP doesn't support the 3000.

The magic codes inside of ss_update may or may not have changed. We don't find it easy to discover this kind of information, but back in 2006 we heard of examples which we documented once they were offered as proof. Earlier this year, we got an update on the gateway to this kind of process. We don't condone violating a license agreement. On the other hand, as a journalist I just report what I see and hear. This kind of thing has got to be expected in a market where the vendor is heading for the door in a hurry, and the third parties still want to cash in on customers struggling to keep computers online.

People can make judgment and adhere to their principles in situations like this, if they have the room in budget and understanding from their management. Obviously, HP has a solution: abandon the homestead notion and invest in a new HP system (a task not accomplished overnight, or even in a year for most 3000 owners.) However, some companies face $45,000 of new expenses for a system which they can purchase at eBay this month for $2,000. An injection of common sense pricing into the 3000 marketplace, from both system and some software vendors, could reduce a need to turn onto the road of rogues.