Top 2008 Stories: Homesteading

The year 2008 delivered changes and insights for the homesteading 3000 community, but it would be easy to label the top homesteading stories as those from HP's brain trust. We'll get to the HP top actions tomorrow, but the major stories for those staying with the 3000 revolve around independence, adoption and initiative. A computer that just completed 35 years of service requires no less.

1. On the task of adoption, as well as independence, OpenMPE took on the duties of software keeper for MPE/iX, housing the Contributed Software Library as well as the binary files for HP 3000 programs and utilities which HP created over the past 15 years. With HP closing its Jazz Web server dedicated to HP 3000 education, white papers and software, a new resource is available at openmpe.org.

2. HP 3000 conferences continued with MPE-specific content at the Greater Houston RUG in March and at the CAMUS ERP conference in August. While neither group has plans for a 2009 in-person event, these organizations showed that people will continue to travel to learn about 3000 administration and strategy, albeit in ever-decreasing numbers.

3. The community completed its fifth year of life since HP ceased building and selling the 3000. By this month, HP 3000 customers — still thousands of them — have spent more time creating an independent infrastructure than the years the community took to adopt Internet and open source tools before HP's Nov. 2001 exit announcement.

4. Small supporters continued to fill out the independent support network for 3000 hardware and software. One-person firms and companies with more than a dozen seasoned 3000 technical experts on hand now serve the majority of HP 3000 sites. From Pivital to Allegro to GSA and beyond, several dozen companies want to help extend the life of the durable server.

5. OpenMPE prodded HP into answers for the end-game operations from the vendor. The group elected new board members in the springtime and spent the fall getting HP to craft policy on how to transfer intellectual assets and essential processes. The final messages will show more work from the OpenMPE advocates, all volunteers who've worked for almost seven years to educate HP about how to leave a marketplace.

6. Technical discussions started among the community about emulation, ranging from ways to adopt non-HP-RISC processors for MPE to moving the operating system's strengths on top of other environments such as Linux. Emulation efforts such as these — which can use volunteers as well as benefit from OpenMPE organization — extend the utility, potential and lifespan for the HP 3000.

A generation grows proud of its grey

    This month I went to a supper of congratulations to celebrate my advent of becoming a grandfather. My son Nick and his wife Elisha are expecting a baby in July, a mitzvah that will launch a new generation of Seybolds. When I first wrote in this 3000 market, Nick was just a baby of 2. Now he and his bride are having a baby of their own.

    I don’t feel like it’s time to get a new job. This one keeps changing enough to remain fascinating and entertaining and enlightening. Change is most of what I’ve reported in this decade. The world of our industry has changed so much since Nick’s birth marked a new generation, the Millennials. Now his world doesn't even marvel at the Web, a word I hear less today as our online lives meld more into real life.

    The transformation of communication has helped your community. This season saw an historic election aided by the influence of the Internet, technology that all of you helped to cement into the world of 2008. If not for your long nights over the ENK/ACK debugging, finding the X.25 cloud, planning the networking protocol stack and tuning those Ethernet LANs, I couldn’t check on the vote predictions (remarkably accurate) at fivethirtyeight.com.

    Over this weekend, the NewsWire's co-founder Abby helped me celebrate my mom's 83rd birthday. Ginny Seybold has spent about as much time living in Las Vegas as the HP 3000 has spent on HP's non-strategic list, between the system's doghouse status as a non-Windows, non-Unix solution and the Transition Era of more than seven years and counting. Mom tells us she never figured to have a good run well into her middle 80s. Everything ends, but the matter of when is rarely something we know for certain.

   

It seems like every month there’s a new toy to be launched in a browser, another word that feels more like a throwback to the nascent days of the Internet. After my grandchild arrives next summer, I’ll have old toys that I’ll be eager to share, some like curious slot-car sets and others as redoubtable as Dr. Suess and Goodnight Moon.

    Each time I share the news about becoming an expectant grandpa, people ask if it makes me feel old. The happy event has more of an impact of pride, accomplishment, and faith in the persistence and luck of parenthood. People may be asking if you’re feeling old now that HP’s given up on the 3000, a good run of 30-plus years. But HP cannot create the next generation of 3000 use, a time when the vendor will only stand by and watch what will be born.

   I believe in the Afterlife, as I call it in another article this month, only because of the Internet. Were it not for the magic of file servers archiving across the planet, free advice delivered in minutes with detail, and the adoption of this technical chariot by your community, you would have declared your 3000s dead long ago. As it is now, the system that proves your accomplishments will go on further than anyone could have imagined in that year of 1984, when Nick was a baby himself. I consider what comes after HP’s 3000 time in 2010 to be a new generation of users, the ones who will toddle and then walk on their own without Hewlett-Packard to hold their hands.

   Consider sites like Facebook and Linked In and even Connect’s myCommunity as your cradles in these times of growth — plus the older outposts of newsgroups and mailing lists, and yes, even focused blogs like ours. Out on Linked In, the HP 3000 Community Group is now more than 90 members strong, full of advice and experience and a link to making 3000 skills work in new opportunities. Being older doesn’t become an insult when you’re rebirthing the rules for elder-hood. You gotta grow to gain that grey.

HP to curtail Software Update Services

As part of its November advisory to the community, Hewlett-Packard announced that it's ending its Software Update Services program for MPE/iX core software and subsystems. Starting January 1, 2009, these materials will only be available through HP Support resources.

Patches will still be available to the 3000 community via the IT Response Center mechanism working today. HP says the General Release patches will be available through Dec. 31, 2015.

The HP 3000 group at Hewlett-Packard had been supplying engineering for PowerPatch updates, the 3000 operating system tapes and other software materials to HP's support customers. Next year that work shifts entirely to the company's support operations. HP warned customers that delivery times may be extended as a result of the shift.

"People who have a support contract with us today should be contacting HP now to get updated media, versus later," said e3000 business manager Jennie Hou. "In 2009 there will be a different process to do that. It will be easier to use the existing process if they need to get additional software media."

We are saying to the supported customers that if you want to order your updated media (7.5, PowerPatches, etc.) to which you are entitled through the Software Update Services (SUS), we recommend you place the order now.  You can still get them post-2008, it's just that the delivery time will vary, as the Software Update Manager (SUM) will no longer be available on the ITRC. For the other customers not signed up for SUM entitlement, the ordering process will remain the same

HP's Jazz lab server plays final notes

Launched in an era when the Internet was new, HP's Jazz lab server for HP 3000 training, technique and tools will go dark on December 31. Third party resources are rising up to replace the hosting point, but HP's has ended its contributed software efforts, the MPE/iX programs which will not find a new home inside HP.

Jazz was named after Jeri Ann Smith, an HP engineer whose contributions and enthusiasm for network tools supplied a spark to the 3000's nascent offerings. By the late 1990s, "It will be up on Jazz" had become a common refrain from HP software engineers when they reported on the location of new tools and technical papers. HP reported yesterday that the documents will be re-hosted on other HP support systems. But the downloadable programs — more than 80 projects created by HP as supported software, or by community members in volunteer efforts — must find a new home by year's end.

HP said that Jazz is going dark because its 3000 labs will end operations on Dec. 31. Since the server is maintained by HP's lab staff, halting the lab's engineering means unplugging the Series 900 HP 3000 which has been running for 12 years. Bootstrap development fundamentals such as the GNU Tools, the open source gcc compiler and utilities ported by independent developer Mark Klein, have had a home on Jazz for a decade. More than 80 other programs are hosted on the server, some with HP support and others ported and created by HP but unsupported.

Fortunately for the 3000 community, OpenMPE is already working on a new home for the treasures on Jazz.

HP reports that the staff-written technical white papers and presentation slide sets hosted on Jazz will be available in the vendor's support system after Dec. 31, although pointers to the new locations have not yet been revealed to the community. HP stressed that 3000 customers should begin downloading what they need from Jazz today.

"Most of the content will be preserved," said HP's Bill Cadier, an HP 3000 engineer who's been managing the server's contents. "After the end of the year Jazz will go away, and some content will remain on other HP internal servers. We're also exploring third parties picking up ownership of the Jazz role."

OpenMPE can make that exploration a quick expedition. "OpenMPE is in the process of making Jazz's contents available on our new server," said OpenMPE director Donna Hoffmeister. The advocacy group is already taking on the duties of hosting a public access development server, the former Invent3k project which is closing up at HP this Sunday night.

HP cannot move the downloadable programs "onto the ITRC servers, nor to doc.hp.com," Cadier said.

"Anything that people will need they should download before Dec. 31, 2008," said business manager Jennie Hou. "That's our recommendation."

A brief list of some of the programs available for downloading from Jazz:

Open source software produced/ported and "supported" by HP:
• Apache
• BIND
• Many command files
• dnscheck
• Porting Scanner
• Porting Wrappers
• Samba
• The System Inventory Utility
• Syslog
• WebWise

Open source software produced/ported as unsupported freeware by HP:
• JServ
• NTP
• OpenSSL
• Perl
• Sendmail

Open source software produced/ported by individuals:

• Analog
• autoconf
• bash
• gdbm
• Glimpse
• ht://Dig
• mmencode/sendmime
• MPE::CIvar
• MPE::IMAGE
• NetPBM
• OpenLDAP
• Ploticus
• Python
• SAURCS
• SLS
• texinfo
• Tidy
• TIFF library
• wget

Binary-only software produced/ported and "supported" by HP:

• CRYPT
• DBUTIL
• Firmware
• Java
• LDAP
• LineJet Utilities
• Patch/iX
• VERSION
• VT3K

Now playing, our November print issue

Last night we posted the pages for our November printed NewsWire issue online. It's a 20MB PDF file, so it may take a little while to download. But the issue contains five articles which we have not yet posted to the blog, so you can read them in advance. We will have them up here over the next week or two.

And if you'd like your own mailed copy of the November issue, send an e-mail with a postal address.

Don't forget to check back here early tomorrow for breaking news about the HP advisory,  concerning the vendor's end-game issues around its 3000 operations post-2010. It's the second of three communiques on how HP means to resolve what it likes to call "end of life" issues.

We also expect to have a brief report later today -- within a few hours after the markets close -- on the full release of HP's Q4 financials.

OpenMPE approaches Invent3k services

As Hewlett-Packard prunes back its HP 3000 operations, opportunities are blooming. OpenMPE will be re-planting the Invent3k public access server, a resource that HP will turn off by month's end. The project will represent the first benefit the advocacy group offers which all 3000 owners can enjoy.

Donna Hoffmeister, an OpenMPE director and part of the technical support team at Allegro Consultants, explained that the organization will do more than HP was doing with Invent3k, a 3000 where programmers and developers have been creating software for any use, public or private, since the summer of 2001.

OpenMPE has additional plans for the Invent3k that include hosting Telamon’s freeware collection as well as the [free] Contributed Software Library software [formerly hosted at Interex]. We will be working with HP to retain both the gnu and perl development environments that exist on the current Invent3k system. The third-party software vendors are invited to have accounts on the new Invent3k server just as before.

Third parties hosted copies of their software, to support development projects, on the public server while it lived its life as a Series 989 3000 at HP. Mark Bixby, who was managing the server while he worked at HP, said interest was strong when the resource went online in 2001. "A lot of the long-time porters have signed up," he said then, "because it’s a lot bigger machine than we’ve had access to in the past. It helps experienced porters do their work faster. There’s also been quite a lot of sign-ups of people who just lurk on 3000-L. It’s nice to know that lurking community is eager to get involved."

OpenMPE is answering questions via e-mail about the new life for this community Web resource.

The server will be moving to Matt Purdue's Hill Country Technologies labs, where "the new invent3k system is a 2-way N4000 and will have over half a terabyte of storage attached," Hoffmeister said. Perdue, alson an OpenMPE director, "owns the  system but has generously told OpenMPE that we may use it." Perdue demonstrated his eye for value on the 3000 hardware line last summer, when he purchased one of the largest systems in the 9x7 line for under $300.

3000 community members who have accounts on Invent3k today should contact OpenMPE to make sure their work moves to the new home of the server. OpenMPE's goal is to replicate HP's Invent3k as much as possible," Hoffmeister said. "People with existing Invent3k accounts have been notified to contact OpenMPE if they're interested in migrating to the new system."   

HP has also gotten on board to help Invent3k start up in Perdue's lab. "HP has been very cooperative in this effort, Hoffmeister said. "They've given us commitments of time and human resources to help migrate from one system to the other. OpenMPE is grateful to HP for their help in this project."

HP sets work, reports schedule into 2009

HP has confirmed that its second advisory to the 3000 community will be posted next week. These reports will address issues about the vendor's end-game for active 3000 operations. Support continues through 2010, but the 3000 labs, as well as nearly all operations unrelated to support or migration advice, go dark next month.

What's more, the dimming of lights will begin early in December, pretty much on the Winter Solstice. By the darkest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, HP will be off for the year-end holidays, not to return until the week of Jan. 5. The company notified employees last week it would extend its normal week-long shutdown for the holiday to two weeks, to "achieve significant operational savings." Employees can either use vacation time or take the days unpaid, but the company will shut down for the back half of December.

The shutdown may be playing a role in the timetable for what HP's e3000 business manager Jennie Hou has called the final communique on 3000 matters other than support. Hou targeted January as the date for the third of three advisories about HP's disposition of post-2010 issues. MPE/iX source code licensing remains un-addressed.

The HP 3000 advisories are being posted on Hewlett-Packard's HP e3000 Web page, and the vendor has also been known to include an e-mail to 3000 newsgroup readers around the world when the news breaks.

Migrating 3000 users will also want to track this news, since HP's decisions about operations and intellectual property will have an impact on unfinished migration project time-lines. Interim homesteading, a step for many 3000 sites on the move, may be affected by HP's policies. Homesteaders, of course, will be most interest in any developments on HP's release or licensing of 3000 materials.

HP's told us we'll have a briefing soon on this month's advisory, so check back on here to see our review of what the vendor has decided, once the news goes public.

Measure HP's relative value of 3000 models

There's nothing to be bought in the 3000 marketplace now but used systems. HP has not built or delivered a new HP 3000 since early in 2004, which makes every computer sale a transaction that can be negotiated and calculated. HP has a tool to help with the calculation, an official measure of the relative performance of every HP 3000 system ever made. It's a four-year old PDF file, but it reveals a lot more than any Web-based calculator.

The figures in HP's 2004 e3000 Business Servers Configuration Guide reveal some surprising comparisons in horsepower. HP has laid out the speed ratings in a matrix, a choice which simplifies judging the horsepower of the 9x9 Series against the newer and allegedly faster A-Class and N-Class servers. The figures show why the Series 9x9s are such a great value these days. There are many more of these available 9x9s in the marketplace than used N-Class servers, since HP only built the N-Class for a couple of years at most.

As for the A-Class, almost all of it is outstripped in performance by a wide range of 9x9s. Not to slag the A-Class 3000s, but buying one of these will be influenced in large part by the age of the hardware and its ability to take on newer disc.

For example, I didn't know that the N-Class single-processor 220MHz systems run at just about the speed of a Series 959. Finding that N-4000-220-100 might be the challenge, since it was the lowest end of the N-Class line. But laying your hands on a Series 959 is easy pickings. And HP's chart shows lots of blank spots where the 9x9 servers run faster than an N-Class. Even a three-processor, 440Mhz N-Class can be matched by a Series 989-650. You will get fewer options on peripherals and greater power consumption with the 9x9s, but availability and price are swell trade-offs.

Like many documents which HP continues to host about the 3000, the Configuration Guide is a little buried. We're putting it up here on the NewsWire's blog site because HP advises everybody to download what they need for 3000 documentation. (A great alternative to the HP data, laid out in chronological fashion, is the AICS Relative Performance page on that vendor's Web site. You might use them both to judge how much bang you're buying for your buck.)

Tomorrow marks a grave anniversary for this community, a date that will spark some memories as well as congratulations for surviving as a 3000 user — even for those who survive while they find their migration is taking longer than HP predicted back in that year. But then HP has been surprised by the 3000's value and durability over and over. Understanding that a large enough Series 997 — Emerald-class systems built in the middle '90s — can beat about half of the N-Class systems shows how surprising the future can be to a Hewlett-Packard which underestimated its potential to retain customers through forced migrations.

The vendor clocked back much of the N-Class 3000 line, or we wouldn't even be talking about how a 10-year computer can still outperform one built five years ago. When the older systems run faster than the new ones, the full measure of a 3000s worth jumps outside of accepted knowledge. This community knows more about a 3000's value than HP has believed since 2001, if not before.

CORE Webcast offers PowerHouse, Transact options

One week from today, CORE Migration is hosting a 30-minute Webcast on legacy migration from the HP 3000 to Windows. The company is offering a speedy migration plan: It will demonstrate how CORE migrates a PowerHouse application during the span of the Webcast. The Microsoft .NET platform is CORE's target.

CORE also has its sights set on the HP 3000 sites using Transact. This Hewlett-Packard language continues to run in some surprising places, although most of the surprise is that Transact is installed at all. The language introduced in the 1980s is a great example of a software solution that HP abandoned years ago, while its customers did not.

Whether the 3000 site is moving PowerHouse or Transact apps, CORE says that "lift and shift" is too low a goal to set for a migration. "The migrated solution must fulfill user expectations, address real needs and do more than just replace the existing solution," said the invitation to the Webcast set for 11 AM EST on Nov. 19. You can sign up for the WebEx presentation at the CORE site.

CORE will show off its president (Rolf Christensen), business development VP (Garry Whitworth), manager of delivery services (Stewart Melvin) and R&D manager (Chris Vanmaele) during the 30 minutes. The target audience is broad, from C-level executives down to business managers and project managers. CORE will take questions after the half-hour from attendees.

Migration success is hard to come by, according to CORE. Success is defined at the company as "Solutions that meet the stated needs of the clients and are adopted and embraced by their user base."

Keep the CALENDAR up to date

The year 2027 has been notable for customers who don't plan to leave the HP 3000. That's the year when timestamps stop being accurate, because the CALENDAR intrinsic in MPE/iX only uses 7 bits to store year information.

If your HP 3000 apps are using CALENDAR, HP advises that you use the newer HPCALENDAR. The newer intrinsic extends the 3000's date accuracy for more than 30 years beyond 2008. Yes, that's right; 2038 will be the last year to accurately store timestamps.

HP's advisory, which got referenced by its support and patch tracker today, explains the differences. At least in part:

The original MPE timestamp format was that used by the CALENDAR intrinsic, a 16 bit quantity allowing 9 bits for the day of the year and 7 bits for the year, added to 1900. Since the largest number represented by 7 bits is 127, this format is limited to accurately storing years up to 2027.

The newer HPCALENDAR intrinsic uses a 32 bit quantity, allowing 23 bits for the year, since 1900 and the same 9 bits for the day of the year. This format provides a significantly longer period of timestamp accuracy.

When HP began to talk about a Posix timestamp function that works on the 3000, the advice needed a bit of explanation from HP's 3000 lab engineer Bill Cadier.

Cadier reports

If, for example someone needs to store the maturity date for a 30 year mortgage started this month, neither the traditional CALENDAR format nor the time() format will work as they are only accurate to 31 December 2027 and 19 January 2038 respectively. The HPCALENDAR date format provides 23 bits to store the year added to 1900 — and since one can store 8,388,607 in those 23 bits, this format provides the best accuracy for storing future dates on the e3000.

The advisory, which you can read for yourself at the HP IT Response Center Web site, says in part

Certain POSIX applications may use the time() function as the basis for timestamps; and may therefore, store timestamps in the format used by time(), which is a 32 bit quantity representing the number of seconds from the epoch 1 January 1970. This format is limited to accurately storing timestamps up to 19 January 2038.

If your applications have a need to create and store future transaction timestamps, HP recommends using HPCALENDAR, HPDATECONVERT, HPDATEDIFF, HPDATEFORMAT or HPDATEOFFSET to ensure they are created correctly.

HP built MPE to an extraordinary level of durability. Not even Unix, which relies on the time() function, is going to be able to handle dates as long as MPE/iX, using the invented-in-HP HPCALENDAR intrinsic. This is a good example of why vendor engineering, beyond industry standards, gives "legacy" platforms a longer life — sometimes longer than even the vendor estimates.

OT = Outta There

The 3000 community has been knit together over the past 13 years through the threads of the Internet. I mean threads in a literal-technical sense, because a mailing list and newsgroup — 3000-L, or comp.sys.hp.mpe — has spanned those years and served thousands in your world with news and views.

There's too much of the latter of late. Much of the time, this communication channel has been overturned like a box of apples and used as a bully pulpit for half its traffic. If you've ever tried to find out something about the 3000 using this group, you'll be stepping around steaming piles of opinion and "facts" and unfettered banter about killing a newly elected President. (I kid you not.)

See, the Internet has no filters for such fetid stuff. But to see it rife in a reasonable community's channels is reason enough to set your own filters beyond stun. As in "Erase without reading," now that the US had an election and there's reason to complain. Generous community members who share skills also spare us no foam from rabid opinions. The lone bit of civility is to slap "OT" for Off Topic on their subject lines. Perhaps it's just me, but asking "So no comments about the price of fuel?" seems a waste of someone's time, unless this passes for social discourse.

Good and helpful and seasoned 3000 people have sworn off this channel over the years, some leaving the 3000, others leaving the rough trade of epithets, slurs and puffery. Few of these doing the posting would say the same things in your community at, say, a user group meeting, face to face. The Internet makes rebels of us all, hidden behind the safety of that screen.

The help from the 3000-L, in providing a communications channel, was a big factor in starting our newsletter in 1995 that expanded to this blog. I started getting these messages by e-mail, and 544 other people take in this chatter the same way. There's nothing harmful in any message without an OT, and much to be learned. But this week I'm setting my filter differently for the OT. On my system I already store more than 14,000 OT messages from 2001 onward, all of which are never backed up. Every one, for good or ill from the past and into the future, is getting flushed today. Unless your skin is thick, your time ample, your social network thin, or your sense of humor brooding and prone to insult, I'd advise that you shift all the OT to Outta There.

Of course, what else could we expect from subjects like "Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator" or the latest, "So who won the election?" The former pretends to humor while the latter has sparked a schoolyard mudfest. It makes me wonder who's paying for all these minutes of mayhem and the too-rare chuckle. Probably the independent 3000 veteran, one unfettered enough to suggest an assassination will happen, ought to before January 20 — and not have another human say, "What are you doing in there, hon? Promoting anarchy?"

See for yourself if you must, but this is the end of OT for me. So as of today, I'm setting my e-mail to "Direct to Trash" when any OT post comes in, so that I need never see the clever savagery of schooled minds. If I get a dose of insanity, I can always read this stuff on the group's newserver, still dutifully maintained by the saintly Jeff Kell of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Kell keeps out of the fray and should never be associated with this traffic; he's been maintaining an interstate route where highwaymen prowl. He's also among the doers of good, dispensing tested network lore. First Amendment rights extend to the Internet, of course, so no one should be deterred by this rant from posting their views, short of any capital crimes they wish would be committed.

Sad to say, reading through these howls of opinion has driven away help for this community, a greater loss than the undesired result of any election. People unsubscribe or stop reading altogether, then can no longer help on a 3000 problem, in a world losing its expertise already. You cannot ban OT. Yes, you can, however, stop reading it.

There's enough to do in this community in the coming two years without reading this stuff, even with an accidental glance. Luckily, the pile of OT messages on my disc, toxic as any nuke-you-lar waste, can be flushed with a single mouse drag and one key combination. Let the disintegration commence, while our 3000 Country creates wellness and health for our futures together.