OpenMPE and belief in changes
April 19, 2006
In this week's saga of the cut-rate Series 987 on auction in South Texas, another Texan has pushed the bidding to triple digits. Matthew Perdue, who operates the ISP hillcountry.net, consults for HP 3000 clients in the healthcare biz, and sits on the OpenMPE board, holds the current high bid of $153 today.
Perdue, who will be the subject of our 3000 NewsWire Q&A interview in our upcoming May issue, wants to use the system for experimentation at first, then press the 9x7 hardware into service at a client site that's on a budget but needs more horsepower.
We first wrote about Perdue several years ago when he was offering a 3000-based ISP application, since the ones that he'd tried to use from the Windows world were so bad. This year he reports that he's hoping that 9x7 systems will eventually be able to run MPE/iX 7.0, to help with all of the HP patch beta-testing that's still to be done. It's a request HP has refused several times, even through extra help offers from the OpenMPE network of customers.
"When we at OpenMPE were trying to get HP to change the corporate mind set and let 7.x boot on 9x7 boxes, we offered to provide test hardware through various clients for HP to use, since they indicated the general unavailability of 9x7 boxes internal to HP was part of the problem. As you know, they didn’t change their minds."
"Should OpenMPE be successful in eventually getting read/write access to the MPE/iX source (and I do believe OpenMPE will) then 7.x booting on 9x7 boxes is on the list for work to be done — if of course the community puts up the funds necessary! Programmers at that level don’t work for free."
But advocates and free-thinkers like Perdue are working for free for the 3000 community on the OpenMPE board. That generousity ought to be rewarded somehow. Perhaps Perdue will win that 987 in the auction. The bidding wraps up Friday.