Bouncing back to CSL help
July 15, 2005
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.
A lot of that CSL work is still quite useful, and it might be hidden to the 3000 manager who's taken over the server since the Interex CSL heydays. (There were once so many CSL programs that Interex used to award a prize for the best contributed program of the year, shipped out on something called a swap tape — a way to exchange files in the dark era before the Internet brought us so close together.)
Nowadays contributed work is appearing on the invent3k server and up on Jazz, the HP Web site run by the engineers at the 3000 division, all for free. HP has assured the community that the riches on Jazz and invent3k will outlive HP's support operation for the 3000. Where they will live is still to be determined.