If you have a little more than five minutes, listen to our first 3000 NewsWire podcast. (It's an MP3 file served up from ronseybold.com) We wanted to roll this small show off our Macintosh and onto your music players or PCs before the month ran out. Like any good radio, it hopes to entertain a bit while it informs. No, you don't need an iPod to listen to it, but HP would like you have one anyway.

Featured players in our 'cast include HP VP Nora Denzel, the executive who looks like the only person podcasting on the HP corporate site. Denzel's been explaining and promoting the company's Adaptive Enterprise quite awhile, so we're passing along some of her "Agility Radio" audio to help show the level of HP's big-vendor podcasts. Adaptive Enterprise is something migrating customers might want to believe in, even though some of the players Denzel mentions have recently changed name badges. We also get some testimony from the exhibitor community which is not going to show up like they'd planned at next month's HP World conference — and the possible costs to Interex to settle up with them. The world of podcasts has room for vendor speeches like Denzel's and news clips, too. Let us try to make you grin a little, so you can tell us what you think.

HP has taken the wraps off of its networked printing enhancement for the HP 3000 this week. A patch that extends the scope of printers available to HP3000 networks is out on the HP IT Response Center Web site, according to HP vCSY engineer Jeff Vance. He also noted that the results of the recent HP patch survey showed most people using the 6.5 and 7.0 releases of MPE/iX are willing to apply a patch to their systems.

The SIB '04 Network Printing patch, MPEMXU1, is now available for beta testing (BT) on 6.5 and 7.0, in addition to our initial 7.5 version.

You need an HP Support handle to get the BT version of this patch.

75% of you on 6.5 and 67% of you on 7.0 who filled out the recent MPE patching survey indicated you would apply a SIB patch on your respective systems. I realize that you didn't say you would apply non-GR patches, but still, I am hoping many of you will participate in this beta test effort so we can get this patch to General Release soon!

Of course, customers saying they're willing to patch and actually applying the patch are two different levels of commitment. HP is likely to be watching what happens to this No. 1 enhancement request as it creeps into beta testing. The vendor might figure that if customers can't sign on to test their most popular patch, well, there might be little motivation to complete other patch projects.

Getting this patch out of beta and into release could open the door for other enhancement work inside HP — at least what's possible in the 17 months until HP shuts down its 3000 development. A newfound set of customers willing to patch could come from Series 9x7 server customers. But HP has to enable its 7.0 release for those customers, if they are to join the patch party HP is throwing over the next year-plus.

Both sides have something they can do to help. Customers need to patch, at least enough to get enhancements out of beta test. HP needs to extend its OS reach for 7.0. Life goes on for those who intend to use MPE/iX through the end of this decade.

But even the HP-supplied network print enhancement has its limitations. Our June Q&A subject Rich Corn, who's built up his RAC Consulting firm on a third-party printing solution, explained the benefits and shortfalls of the HP patch.

3000 customers using MANMAN win the prize for fastest replacement of Interex resources. The MANMAN-L list that was hosted on Interex servers has been moved to the CAMUS user group servers successfully. A raft of messages trickled through to the NewsWire's e-mail filters yesterday, including discussion of how to renegotiate support contracts from MANMAN vendor SSA Global Technology. More on that in a minute.

Any ERP customer can sign up for the CAMUS/MANMAN mailing list at the user group's Web site. CAMUS director Jeff Milde wants the Interex refugees to consider its conference Oct. 24 in Chicago, as well as the benefits of joining the SSA combined user group:

We encourage you to explore the benefits and service offerings of the SSA user group. It is our hope that you and your company will continue to appreciate the value of being supported by a community of users and service providers. CAMUS will not compete with this user group.  If your company has not made the commitment to migrate to SSA ERP LN, and you need support for your legacy system, please know that CAMUS will be there to support you. Remember that among the many benefits to our members, the most important is USERS HELPING USERS.

Just about the same time the MANMAN list moved over, we got word of the new elections for the CAMUS user group board of directors. Two longtime HP 3000 veterans are running for the CAMUS board for the first time. Terry Floyd of the Support Group has tossed his hat into the ring, alongside Terry Simpkins of Measurement Specialties. Both men have spent their careers educating and helping HP 3000 customers.

Floyd founded his company to provide third-party support options to ERP customers using MANMAN, or moving to an alternative. IT Director Simpkins has testified to the value of using the HP 3000 for many years, both in MANMAN ads as well as earlier for HP. He's also been  on the cutting edge of SOX compliance, posting helpful reports to the MANMAN mailing list.

Earlier this morning out on the 3000-L mailing list, a customer asked if the book The MPE/iX System Administration Handbook was worth owning. Bill Brandt admitted that "When we got our used 917, my collection of HP publications is a bit hit and miss."  This book by Jon Diercks is a hit, something of a marvel when you consider its publication date of summer, 2001. HP hadn't scrubbed its 3000 program by that summer, but the 3000 was still a highly specialized, boutique server with a loyal following. Diercks' book was a breath of well-researched intelligence. You can still buy it today at Amazon and other outlets.

We reviewed the book in the NewsWire when it first surfaced. Paper books and manuals might be fading from the first rank of tech resources, but there's been a good history of ink on paper to help 3000 customers. One of our readers, Wayne Burke, offered a few of these kinds of resources for free recently:

I used to work on an HP3000 and have some old text manuals (in excellent condition) to give to anyone that might want it, if you could pass this on.

Image 3000 Handbook.
HP3000 bible.
Vesoft - Thoughts and Discourses on the  HP3000 software, by Eugene Volokh (Red, green and black versions)

I was a Eugene (Volokh) fan, not so much for what the books actually said, but how they caused me to think differently. Anyway, I can ship in any manner anyone wishes. I'm not trying to make a cent off this stuff at all, and I'd rather give it to someone instead of just recycling. Now I'm straight UNIX for the last 10 years. What a pile — well not really, but for a business platform nothing touches MPE.

You can ask Wayne for your free book by e-mailing him. Or just reach out and get your own copy of the Diercks handbook. More than 80 percent of all HP 3000s out there can make use of the Diercks book, since HP didn't sell many servers beyond the 2001 vintage.

Some HP 3000 customers and vendors now are stuck with transportation plans that will land them in San Francisco in about three weeks, even though there's no HP World to attend. Bay Area residents in the 3000 community want to mount a 3000 briefing in SF anyway, an OpenMPE meeting that could include HP's vCSY managers, who are still deciding what the vendor will do for the 3000's afterlife. It will dovetail with MB Foster's plans to hold a migration seminar up in SF.

The 3000 managers in HP have long used HP World to talk to the community in person. The OpenMPE meeting that was arranged in meeting with vCSY on July 22 could let HP keep up its habit.

Donna Garverick, the OpenMPE board director who works for 3000 customer Long's Drug headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif., put out the word over the weekend about the prospective meeting. All that's needed is a place to meet and some interest from the community:

To demonstrate that OpenMPE is actually alive and kicking, I would like to ask people to attend — either in-person or virtually — an MPE update meeting on August 18th.

This will be an HP update meeting you can attend without booking airfare or driving to a conference room, Garverick said:

The board met July 22 with HP and presented this idea to them. Since many people will already be in the SF Bay area (gotta do something with those plane tickets), we’d like to have a meeting for both HP and OpenMPE to provide updates to the community. We also want to provide a way for people to attend over the Internet. The board proposed using HP’s virtual classroom technology to host the on-line connectivity.

At this point, we simply cannot afford to lose any opportunity to find out what’s happening and have a forum for asking questions. Both HP and the OpenMPE board of directors want to know what you think of this idea.  We need your feedback to help us plan the meeting.

Contact Garverick by e-mail to let her know if this virtual meeting in August piques your interest.

Legislation in the US will soon be signed to expand the scope of Daylight Savings Time, the twice-a-year event that forces HP 3000 owners to adjust their system clocks. The new law will push the DST switchback one week later in this year, as well as start DST three weeks earlier next year. All those programs you had worked out to slowly change the 3000's clocks in October and April will have to be revised for November and March. You can get a good start with this article by John Burke from our net.digest archives.

While you're working at that, you may find yourself looking over your HP 3000's date routines. HP's got a DATECONVERT intrinsic to get the date format of Julian or Gregorian. Kathleen Mc Rae of HP pointed a user to sample code recently for using DATECONVERT. The HP IT Response Center has the sample in the document KBRC00015373.

There's also a way to extract the current date in Julian format using the functions INTEGER-OF-DATE and DATE-OF-INTEGER. Mc Rae recently explained how to use these functions with a COBOL sample up on the 3000-L newsgroup.

When a corporation like Interex — multi-million-dollars strong and carrying a 30-year history through an industry with an attention span of six months — when that kind of resource goes belly-up seemingly overnight, it's easy to call it a death. Many HP 3000 community members point to the user group's performance for the 3000 as a symptom of its mortal wounds.

But even as Encompass readies to reach out to the stranded Interex members, another member of the 3000 community suggests Interex hasn't died off, but simply retired. Doug Mecham, the founder of the group, shared his observations with us for the August printed edition of the NewsWire this week. But he just added this postscript, which we share here until his Q&A interview appears next month.

Rather than any negative or derogatory term used to describe the situation, perhaps we should just refer to the “change” as “RETIREMENT” of Interex as we would an old friend. This situation does open up possibilities – opportunities for new lives in different directions, each person taking the spirit and success knowledge elsewhere in the World.  Interex will not long be forgotten, for it represented an organization of professionals that made a mark in the computer world, second to none. I doubt if very many can say they did not grow personally (I know I did) and gain good value for their involvement with Interex; it was a “family” of many passionate people working on a common theme of collaboration and growth for all.

Doug Mecham
Proud Founder of Interex

Encompass president Kristi Browder wanted her members to know that the departure of Interex was no barometer, in her opinion, of the user group concept. A letter from Browder said in part:

...We express our deep regret to the members and community of Interex during this difficult time. As a former partner and colleague of Encompass in serving HP technology users, Interex has shared similar goals, passions and dedication to the HP user base. There are many things being written and I’m sure there will be even more articles published this week. I want you as an Encompass community member to know that this is no indication of the downturn in the value of Encompass or user groups in general.

Our quick check of the Bay Area US District Court showed no bankruptcy papers had been filed by Wednesday afternoon for any company called Interex. We didn't search online, but used technology from the era of 1984 — the year the user group started to call itself Interex — to call up the courthouse. I didn't think to ask the clerk to check for "The International Association of Hewlett-Packard Computer Professionals." But it seems plain that if the user group will file bankruptcy — it pulled all of its Web pages off the Web yesterday, save one  — that filing would have to be a Chapter 7. That's the permanent retirement, in financial terms, despite a lively discussion of a "Virtual Interex" over the last two days on the 3000-L mailing list.

Interex has brokered a deal with HP to let the vendor make good on the user group's conference promises. A notice posted Tuesday on the Interex Web site front page offers a free registration to the HP Technical Forum conference for anyone who's left holding the bag on a paid registration to HP World. (Tip of the hat to Gavin Scott for pointing out this development.)

What's more, HP will offer discounted booth space to the HP World exhibitors who got caught holding worthless receipts for booth space at the now-defunct Interex show.

HP will offer a complimentary, comparable registration to the 2005 HP Technology Forum for paid, registered attendees of HP World 2005. Additionally, HP will offer discounted exhibition space at the 2005 HP Technology Forum to non-HP competitors exhibiting at or sponsoring HP World 2005. HP World participants can get obtain additional information by calling (877) 216-5400, email [email protected], or by visiting www.HPWorldParticipants.com.

HP's show is scheduled for Sept. 12-15 in New Orleans.

The above Web page gives registrants and exhibitors the details on how to redeem their Interex booth space and conference registrations. HP is looking a tiny bit more noble in offering to help Interex with its disgruntled customers. Still, you gotta wonder if Interex would even be closing its doors if HP had not scheduled its own new technical show one month after HP World.

This morning HP announced its plan to shed 10 percent of its employees from its cubicles around the world. Summertime has become the season for HP to do this housecleaning, a coarse word to describe one of the sharpest of events in someone's life: being laid off. A few years back in 2002 HP did this just at the cusp of an HP World conference, leaving professionals searching their voicemail for a notice they didn't need to worry about what was going undone back at their HP cubicles while they were away.

Of course, with the sudden demise of HP World, there's no chance that scenario will replay itself. HP gave its side of the story in a press release issued this morning. It's not been shy about this year's layoffs. The notice was on the front page of the HP Web site. Now, after Interex shut itself off yesterday, the 3000 market gets to see if this is the second straight day in which part of its ecosystem dies off.

The 14,500 HP layoffs are necessary to focus the company on its priorities, HP says. This sounds like an invitation to watch where the cuts take place. Enterprise Storage and Servers, the HP unit that creates HP's 3000 alternatives such as HP-UX and Windows servers, has been under pressure in the past few quarters to maintain a profit. HP insists this round of layoffs is not about profitability or shedding expenses, though. If its Enterprise unit sees a lot of layoffs, a customer might conclude that the printer, camera and home PC business is finally ruling the roost at the company.

How to find out where the cuts are landing? Send an e-mail to everyone in HP you know and trust. Watch to see how many get bounced this week. The answers will help you see if the planning for HP's 3000 end-game is going to get a boost or a jolt today.

There's been a lot of work done for the 3000 customer, in the form of promises and intentions and even HP plans, by people working in what's been called Virtual CSY (vCSY), the HP group caretaking the remains of its 3000 business. A round of layoffs that ripples through vCSY could wash out many of those intentions, or reinforce business decisions that can still make a difference to the 3000 customer.

Everybody's been speculating on the announcement this morning, which HP made before the stock market opened. But the advance betting by the market analysts doesn't give good odds for the  HP Enterprise business to escape intact.

HP users group Interex officially pulled the plug on all of its operations today, posting the following notice on its home page of its interex.org Web site:

Dear members:

It is with great sadness, that after 31 years, we have found it financially necessary to close the doors at Interex. Unfortunately our publications, newsletters, services and conference (HPWorld 2005) will be terminated immediately. We are grateful to the 100,000 members and volunteers of Interex for their contributions, advocacy and support. We dearly wish that we could have continued supporting your needs but it was unavoidable.

Interex

The user group had struggled to maintain a financial balance in the years following the Y2K ramp-up for IT, according to one of its directors, an era when attendance at the group's annual HP World shows fell steadily. Membership figures for the group, inflated to six figures in press releases during 2004, included a very broad definition of members, such as anyone who'd requested an Interex publication.

Phone calls to the Interex offices were going unreturned today; requesting a link to the company operator on the voicemail tree gave no reply as of Monday morning. Advertiser and sponsor Acucorp had the news of the HP World cancellation confirmed by Interex ad rep Tara Stafford, according to Acucorp's Marketing Communications Manager Kendra Brunje. Brunje added that the Interex employee said the Interex staff "was led to the door" on Friday. User conference speakers were also notified of the conference cancellation by e-mail.

Unresolved issues around the closing were still numerous today. Conference attendees who'd paid for show admission wondered about refunds on the 3000-L mailing list. Sponsors such as Acucorp have sent deposits on booth space for the show, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Speakers are holding non-refundable tickets to the San Francisco event, and some are talking of alternative meeting plans in the city during that week.

There's more. Interex operates mail list servers that host groups such as the MANMAN ERP mailing list, which was discussing how to continue its communications on alternative servers once the Interex systems go dark. And technical experts in the 3000 community were wondering how much of the user group's technical archives and resources would survive in the wake of such a sudden closing.

The HP 3000 is going to outlive the HP user group that was founded to serve it.

Interex, the HP user group that began its life serving HP 3000 customers in 1974, is apparently ending its existence before HP stops servicing the system. What's more, the organization is cancelling its HP World conference less than four weeks before the expo was set to open in San Francisco at the Moscone Center on Aug. 16.

Reports from two sources in the Interex volunteer management confirmed over the weekend the user group will be going out of business. Greg Cagle, a volunteer co-chair of the HP World program committee, confirmed in an Internet message to the 3000-L newsgroup that this year's conference had been cancelled. The HP World conference has always been the financial keystone of the user group, which saw HP scale back its sponsorship last year of the group's annual North American event.

In a bit of odd coincidence, the group's final conference, last year in Chicago, was held in the same city where its first conference took place in 1974. Many HP 3000 community members said their attendance at 2004's HP World would be their last.

"I think the HP conference drove the final nail in the coffin," said former Interex boardmember Paul Edwards who operates HP 3000/9000 consultancy Paul Edwards & Associates.

HP's 2004 move to establish its own show wasn't supposed to contribute to any instability for the user group. User group officials and HP both believed the HP technical conference wouldn't pull down the Interex expo. The user group relied on an operating reserve which it built up during its more profitable years, then spent down in tougher seasons, all funded from HP World booth sales and sponsorships. HP announced its own HP technical conference last summer, one to be held this September in New Orleans. Interex had licensed the name HP World for its conference from the vendor in 1996. The conference had been offered to HP 3000 customers, and then to the HP computing community at large for 30 years.

But the group's top management wondered as early as 2000 what the role of a vendor-specific user group would become in a commodity computing, heterogeneous IT world. HP took a hard tack away from specialized computing products when it embraced Unix and Windows environments and pushed its PC and printer businesses harder than enterprise systems like the HP 3000 and HP 9000. More common platforms meant HP was focusing less on Interex's heartland: SMB customers using specialized environments such as MPE/iX and HP-UX.

"The proliferation of platforms — 75 percent of our members have multiple platforms — means that they have less time to focus specifically on HP or any other vendor," said executive Director Chuck Piercey in 2000. "They don’t have the luxury of focusing on the HP 3000 like they did 10 years ago. We have less mindshare, and have to be more effective with the mindshare we do have. It squeezes the value proposition: you have to deliver more value cheaper and faster."

OpenMPE, the volunteer advocacy group that's still working with HP on 3000-related issues and concerns, now emerges as a prospective focus point for the 3000 community's communication with the vendor. HP had planned to address several concerns about the vendor's end-game for its support at this year's HP World.

Interex looked sound this year to many in the HP 3000 community, especially those suppliers offering migration services for the platform's owners. Many of the HP 3000-related companies which had booked HP World booth space as of Friday were promoting products and services built around migration. A multi-company booth at the front of the show floor included two HP e3000 Platinum migration partners. About one third of the booths on the last week's show map were listed as either unsold or on hold, although the largest booth areas had been sold.

Rumors still unconfirmed as of this morning in the 3000 community included news that Interex had already filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and that the user group had laid off its staff on Friday, July 15.

The HP 3000 community has a rich heritage of free help, volunteering that preceded the open source movement by many years. Interex, the HP user group, did a good job of soliciting and distributing user-written utilities and some applications years ago. But these programs, which are a membership benefit of belonging to Interex, are also available in other places. (We do think that user group support is important, and we'd like to see Interex continue to serve the HP 3000 community.)

That said, you might have a problem like the question posed to the community a few months ago:

Does anyone have a COBOL/C program that can be used in any MPE application such that it runs as a background process in MPE Operating System? The program should be able to calculate the system idle time and the application should exit itself automatically if the system is idle for specific time, say 30 minutes, without any key-in by the user.

Jeff Kell, the curator of the 3000 newsgroup where the question appeared, suggested the Contributed Software Library (CSL) program BOUNCER to do the job. It's not as hidden as it might appear behind the Interex membership gateway. BOUNCER is available from 3k.com's Web site, along with other contributed software.

We're tracking the progress of HP's repairs to LargeFile datasets (LFDS), the greater-than-4GB containers for IMAGE data. The feature has had its problems since its release, but it looks like a new patch has entered testing outside of HP's database labs. Liz Glogowski of HP told us:

We have passed all our in-house unit and regression testing on the LFDS, and have passed the files to a database tools provider to start their internal testing.

We're keeping an eye on this, and we'll have more to say about it in next week's FlashPaper, available online at our www.3000newswire.com/flashpaper. (Each month we also make a PDF version of the FlashPaper available as a download, too; here's June's.) But we can say this much about this repair: testing it will take longer than lots of other repairs to HP 3000 bugs. LFDS by their nature are really big, and it wouldn't be unusual for a single run of a test suite to take 90 hours. It's the kind of test that an N-Class server could speed up, but being in a hurry about the testing probably isn't the best strategy. It's taken more than a year to get a patch out of HP's database labs, another testament to the complexity of making something very big very fast, too. Stay tuned.

Accepted wisdom about the HP 3000 has the latest release of MPE/iX getting the most attention from HP in the months remaining until the vendor's exit from the market. But other versions of the OS are getting their due, too. When I tried out that accepted wisdom on support provider Gilles Schippper of GSA during our Q&A for the July printed edition of the NewsWire, he gave the companies not using the latest MPE/iX some hope:

Q. It seems that 7.5 is, for the moment, the only MPE release certain to get the latest bug fixes and enhancements.

A. Well, I don’t know about that; the three supported releases right now are 6.5, 7.0 and 7.5. HP’s announced it will be supporting all three until the end of 2006. The latest release of a PowerPatch was for 6.5, PowerPatch 4, just a few months ago. In May HP released PowerPatch 3 for 7.0, and they’re talking about PowerPatch 3 for 7.5 in early 2006. I think all three operating systems are actively being supported and enhanced.

HP, of course, will be pointing out this work in its communication with users next month at HP World. Whether there's time for any more patch work on 6.5, probably the most widely-installed version of the OS out there, remains to be seen. But don't overlook taking on one of these PowerPatches — nicely-bundled up collections of HP's patches for MPE — if you're on HP Support. So long as you're still paying HP its monthly fee for support, you might as well get something tangible out of it, even if your 3000 rarely requires a support trouble call.

This year's HP World conference will have its first independent roundtable on migration issues. The 3000 NewsWire has been asked to moderate the panel in San Francisco, and we'd like to get your questions to take to the conference next month.

Take a minute and post a comment here to ask a question about your migration dilemmas, or just inquire about what seems to be working already. The HP World panel is full of consultants and vendors who have migration experience already. In the great tradition of roundtables at Interex conferences, I'd like to have a healthy list of pre-submitted questions to carry to the podium next month. If you'd like to e-mail yours instead of commenting here, because you're like to remain anonymous, just contact me at [email protected]

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is putting HP 3000 shops through their paces this year, but the law that is making IT shops clean up procedures might have a silver lining for the 3000 customer. HP needs motivation — the fabled "business case" — to justify work on the platform for its customers. Federal legislation seems to be a great business case, according to Donna Garverick at Longs Drug Stores. In a posting to the 3000 newsgroup last month, Garverick said that "a certain drug store company" has a service request (SR) filed with HP to finish the port of OpenSSH, secure file transfer software that will satisfy SOX requirements.

The HP 3000 community has made a start at bringing OpenSSH to the 3000. Ken Hirsch has a working port posted at the invent3k public access server, but it needs more engineering time to become worthy of meeting SOX requirements. Garverick said OpenSSH will let Longs transfer its data from the 3000 securely, and suggests that users who are also trying to meet SOX requirements should ask HP to clean up the port on HP's invent3k server.

At this summer's HP World, the Special Interest Group for Itanium (SIG-Itanium) will be holding its third annual meeting in San Francisco. The processor has been real enough long enough to have shipped working releases through more than three years. Itanium also represent's HP's future for HP-UX servers, the system the vendor has recommended most often to replace HP 3000s.

We're part of the leadership for the SIG-Itanium, and we'd like to hear questions from HP 3000 customers and partners about the chip. The questions you pass on here will be asked at the August meeting in San Francisco. E-mail them to me at [email protected], or just post a comment below. I am helping to chair the meeting, and so I'll do my best to get the answers to questions for those of you who can't be in SF.

HP announced at the end of May that it has shipped out its last version of PA-RISC processors, the CPUs that drive the HP 3000 line and much of the installed HP 9000 lineup. These are the 9000s that have replaced some 3000s, although Windows/Intel systems are being picked by the biggest group of migrating 3000 sites. By some estimates HP will have only another five years of support life left for PA-RISC, so the future of its enterprise lineup for Unix lies squarely with Itanium. A poll we conducted last fall couldn't turn up much interest at that time from HP 3000 sites in the Itanium systems HP was offering. Maybe the nine months since then have changed things. We'd like to know.

Even though fewer HP 3000 customers are participating, the Systems Improvement Ballot process to enhance the 3000 received a lot of requests this year. In our printed edition, we recently published a list of HP's responses to the top 11 SIB requests; the vendor regrets to inform its customers that many of the ideas to make the 3000 better are "not a good candidate." This isn't a surprise, when you consider what HP's position is on the 3000: a good computer the vendor recommends leaving behind.

For those who need to stay, however, the list of requested enhancements which follows runs longer than those which had an official HP response from the engineering manager. This more complete list shows the customers who rely on the system are still thinking about how it could be an even more efficient tool. This list also chronicles the maturity of MPE/iX, the 3000's operating environment. Not everyone knows how much the 3000 can do, but those who contributed these requests are aware of the system's potential.

By Gilles Schipper
GSA

It’s nice to be back with Ron Seybold’s 3000 NewsWire to offer some of my experiences with the HP3000, after contributing way back in the days when he edited The HP Chronicle.

When Ron called to interview me, one of his questions was “Other than finding a new machine, what's the best thing a customer can do to improve performance and reliability of their 3000 systems today?”

To me, there was a single and obvious answer – improve I/O performance.

Obvious for two reasons – because many, if not most, HP3000 systems are I/O bound (ie, I/O is the major resource bottleneck), and secondly because enhancing that resource does not affect the user licensing fees associated with many 3^rd-party software licenses.

Improving I/O performance is generally associated with improving disk I/O. Disk I/O represents the very largest component of total I/O transactions generated by the HP3000.

However, without expanding upon the various options available to reduce the I/O bottleneck (which I will do in the future), let me suggest a very simple and affordable opportunity to achieve significant improvement in tape I/O performance and thus reduce your system backup times.

Shortening the time necessary to complete your backup means increasing the availability of the system for online productive use.

Other benefits could include reducing times necessary for system updates, patching, and file restoration from backup.

If you are currently using dds, dds1, dds2, or dds3 tape drives as your backup device, you could gain significant improvements in tape reading and writing times by simply replacing the drive with a dds4 – a very affordable option.

Moreover, this simple tape drive replacement requires not even a system reconfiguration and will result in immediate benefits.

There is even more good news.

Wirt Atmar, one of the 3000 community's most seasoned developers and advocates, is teaching a course on Modern Programming philosophy starting next Monday. It's a course to be taught using the technology Atmar's company has developed, meaning that students will be able to view lectures from anywhere they can get a reasonable bandwidth Internet link. QCShow has been a project that Atmar's team at AICS Research has developed over the past several years, funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant, that feeds course lectures through a browser, complete with slides and instructor audio. You can still sign on by faxing Wirt your full name, credit card number and expire date, and e-mail address, to (505) 526-4700. "Philosophy of Modern Programming," offered July 11-August 21 will be

...a pre-prepared downloadable audio slide show which you can watch at your convenience, so even if you have travel plans during this period, unless you will be completely disconnected from the internet, you should be able to stay current quite easily.

It's a natural to see Wirt offer a class to the 3000 community at large. His advocacy and experience with the 3000 puts him in an elite echelon. He's a professor and scientist by trade as much as a software company developer and president. He began his commercial 3000 development experience by creating a word processing solution during the early years HP was heavy into the 3000 terminal market. Years ago his firm created QueryCalc, a super report generator used as the basis for applications on 3000s around the world. QCTerm followed, a free Windows-based terminal emulator for HP 3000 hosts.

One of the things that's fun about Wirt is that he likes to cut across accepted wisdom. In 1996 he was instrumental in creating the World's Largest Poster project, which unfurled tons of plotter paper across an Anaheim football stadium to promote MPE to HP officials at that year's HP World. When the management at HP decided in 2001 to step away from the community, Atmar replied by making a case for staying on the platform another 20 years. (Wirt said "indefinitely" as far as the 3000's prospective term, but it looks like a calendar problem in 2027 might be a roadblock, at least for now.)

At the same time, he's made avid use of other environments and platforms; QCShow runs on Windows, and the company is waiting to see what happens with the new x86-based Macs before it proceeds with a QCShow player for the Mac, Linux and Unix, for example. The course will show some of the technique that let AICS developments emerge.

Happy Independence Day, if you are among those who celebrate the independence of the US. (Our friend Alan Yeo of ScreenJet in the UK quips that the Brits celebrate July 4, too, as "the day we got rid of our offspring.")

Independence is important to The 3000 NewsWire. You see the word in our tagline under our logo, so it's part of our essential mission. We have published stories over the years that sparked controversy and ruffled some feathers, part of the byproduct of saying what we think, as well as relaying what you think. As a small company we couldn't do the work by ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of this community of users and developers who tell us what they know. We also rely on a long-time friend and Webmaster, Chris Bartram, to deliver news through our Web site.

We don't except there will be a lot of news today with the US holiday slowing the pace somewhat. But it might be news to you to learn how much Bartram has done with his 3k.com Web site. You can download software for your 3000 for free there, utilities tried and tested by the user community over years. Have a look at our latest Q&A interview with him to learn more about the 3000's Web resources and a hopeful outlook for the platform.

HP is asking customers to tell the vendor how they want to see the HP 3000 patch operation run in the future. A message posted late last night on the 3000-L and OpenMPE mailing lists, and then forwarded from Jeff Vance at HP, directs customers to a Web site to take a survey. Vance said in his message that HP will be reviewing the results and "Your responses will make a difference in our patching approach."

HP's survey form is at www.hpuseradvocacy.org/node/1920. HP hasn't announced a deadline to receive survey forms. You need to register with hpadvocacy.org to submit the survey form, but it doesn't ask many questions and promises to keep the information private. It looks like a fine overhaul of the Web site.

That patch process at HP has only 18 months left to operate, according to information the customers have today. When HP pulls out of the 3000 market at the end of December, 2006, it will take down its support operations. Today, the only way to get a patch from customer's bug fix request into general release is through an HP support account. Beta testers must be HP support customers to test patches before HP makes them available to general release. The customer community has already told HP they'd like to have fewer restrictions on who can test HP 3000 patches. HP, for its part, has said last summer they want to hear more from customers about what to do about this "patch gap," the distance between the smaller number of customers on the latest, most-patched HP 3000 release and the majority of the customer base.

Even doing more backporting would close the gap. SIG MPE co-chair Donna Garverick said that at the last HP World meeting, "SIG MPE requested HP to back-port to 6.5 and 7.0," she said. "But the question on everyone’s mind is — if stuff is back-ported will anyone install it?  CSY really needs to get a clear answer to this question.  If most people say ‘no’ — that’s clear.  What we don’t want is people saying ‘yes’ when they can’t actually patch their systems (probably because they’re locked down)."

One interesting element of HP communique is the mention of patching scope. The message says the survey is:

...specifically aimed at MPE 9x7 and other issues regarding an understanding of your MPE/iX patching and/or updating plans and requirements over the next 1-2 years.

If you're keeping score, two years from today is six months past HP's end of support date for the 3000.