Homestead community reaches for ageless instruction
December 6, 2006
A comprehensive training resource for the HP 3000 community has resurfaced, risen from the ashes of the destroyed HP compuer user group Interex. Beginning in 1994 Interex worked with HP's George Stachnik to publish a series of articles teaching the technical nuances of operating HP 3000s. The 24-part series appeared in Intteract Magazine until the late 1990s.
Interex knew it had a valuable resource on its hands. You couldn't read the articles before becoming an Interex memeber, even though everything was posted on the user group's Web site. Interex user community assets such as the Contributed Software Library programs have been locked away since Interex self-destructed last summer. But now the community is at least taking back Stachnik's 3000 instruction.
Chris Thompson of The Internet Agency reports the company "has copies of the set of 34 tutorials by George Stachnick, which we downloaded just prior to the demise of Interex. Most of them have been recreated in MS Word format; the last few being PDF’s. I suppose we could PDF the others too."
Thompson added that he seems to recall that there may be one or two missing figures but these are so trivial as to be of no conssequence. "It is our plan to place this set on our Web site, along with a revised PDF version of TRAX-Cobol, but if anyone needs copies prior to this then please email me."
There's also another way to read these fine articles, using the Internet's Wayback Machine.
Michel Adam reports
I’ve found that ‘The Wayback Machine’ is your friend in these cases.
Go to archive.org, and plug in the link from Jazz, in this case http://www.interex.org/enterprise/hp3000.html
That will get you a page of links. Pick the October 29, 2000 one, which will give you the first 20+ articles, which are directly accessible.
For the other ones, pick the last page (I guess July, 2005), and start copying and pasting the links to a text file. You will need to go do some hunting in the archive.org database, since you can’t get them directly due to the login page that comes up for the later articles.
In the archive.org search page (do a search by using web.archive.org/web/*/interex.org/pubcontent/enterprise/* ) and then start hunting for the relevant pages based on the links you copied earlier to your text file. Try forming a link for the above search that use as long a string from your text file of saved results. It could speed things up.