One of OpenMPE's board members, Matt Perdue, is launching a disaster recovery (DR) business this month. Recovery can be a complex project for a company that doesn't know your HP 3000 and its needs.

But Perdue's Hill Country Technologies is the home of the famous $5 HP 3000, that system which went on auction last summer at an outrageous discount. In fact, we wouldn't be surprised to hear that the very same system is part of the Hill Country's DR outlay.

So you know that this DR host knows your systems. Hill Country Technologies yesterday announced the availability of disaster recovery and application service provider hosting solutions to the HP 300 community. Other platforms will be supported as needed for clients.

Precious little has been posted or said about HP's new Right To Use (RTU) for HP 3000 upgrades. The policy isn't retroactive — unless you're upgrading, the new license has nothing to do with a customer's 3000 ownership.

But judging by the reaction to an e-mail blast we sent out a few weeks back, not many of the 3000 customers have paid much attention to HP's reach into the 3000's tomorrow. Few of HP's 3000 policies have been based so clearly around the system's future. The RTU means nothing unless a customer upgrades a 3000 today — and this upgrading is still taking place in an era when HP has been advising customers to leave the platform for more than five years.

If the customer base continues to purchase 3000s, in spite of HP's advice, well, wouldn't those customers prickle at HP's involvement, or praise the vendor's pluck in staying connected to revenues for the server?

Yes, and yes. But the surprising lack of response might mean

1. 3000 customers are disconnected with the vendor after 2001's disappointment
2. So few upgrades are happening that the policy has little impact
3. Upgrade purchases flow through a part of a customer's firm where 3000 policy is a minor point. In other words, parts is parts. If we buy them, we own them.

All three might be true, so long as anyone was listening to us or to the vendor. At least a couple of observers had a comment for us, though.

The Encompass Web site has opened up details for the June HP Technology Forum, showing a keynote on the conference's first evening (June 18) and sessions and entertainment running through June 21.

If a June 18 6 PM keynote from HP CEO Mark Hurd is not that important, you might schedule your travel during that Monday. Las Vegas hotels are famous for offering the lowest rates Sunday through Thursday. The Luxor Hotel, right across Mandalay Bay Road (less than a half mile) from the conference HQ at Mandalay Bay sold me a room at about 40 percent less than the Mandalay.

Details on the Encompass Web page are still sketchy today; the conference remains in the process of attracting and selecting papers to cover the four days of breakout sessions.

As we've said before, the Tech Forum could be important to the 3000 customer whose migration includes HP as a key supplier in the future. Talks from last year's conference featured many sessions on moving away from the system. OpenMPE's advocacy board presented just about the only homestead-related content.

Under the topics page of the Tech Forum site, MPE/iX is not mentioned at all. Such talks are aimed at the other HP operating environments. HP 3000 advocacy group OpenMPE, still working with HP on a weekly basis to plan the post-HP life of the platform, has submitted a proposal for a presentation at the Forum.

Robert Holtz writes:

We have our 911 interface running on our HP 3000 24x7.  Once a week, we abort the Public Safety Systems Incorporated (PSSI) application to close out the spoolfile that the application generates.  Is there a way to keep the application running and redirect the output to a new spoolfile?  We are running MPE/IX 7.0 PP2 and this is on an N-Class e3000 system.

Our Homesteading Editor Gilles Schipper replies:

I think the only way you could do that would be to actually modify the application program to periodically (say, for example, every 10 pages or every 100 pages) close then re-open the print file.

Olav Kappert of IOMIT International adds:

If the program can be slightly modified, then I would suggest creating a message file as a conduit to the application. The program would do a read of the message file with the nowait option every once and awhile.  If the application encounters a keyword indicating a new spoolfile, then the program would close the spoolfile and reopen it.

An alternate method would involve the application being modified to close and open the file at a particular day and time during the week.

COBOL rules the records of the HP 3000 community. A business language with an oft-repeated death sentence — one it has always outlived — COBOL drives more than 75 percent of all HP 3000 applications, by our estimate. We'd quote an even higher number, but there are Speedware and PowerHouse apps a-plenty working out there, too. COBOL code dwawfs all other languages, however, when you sum up lines from 3000 sites.

These organizations have their business-critical applications written in COBOL, and now they can both query and manage Acucorp's COBOL data files much like they would data in a relational database. Acucorp announced today it's released a new single-vendor solution, AcuXDBC, which gives migrating 3000 sites that choose AcuCOBOL the flexibility to access data from ODBC-enabled applications. In essence, the product extends ODBC access for Acucorp customers who use ACUCOBOL-GT — so they have one package to take data into desktop tools like Microsoft Excel and Crystal Reports, as well as JDBC-enabled Java applications.

Acucorp built ACUCOBOL with the features of the HP 3000's COBOL in mind. That has made the compiler a popular choice among 3000 sites doing a migration.

The objective of the product is to give COBOL records a transparent bridge onto desktops that don't run COBOL applications. This is what any good ODBC solution can do, but Acucorp now has a solution to include Vision files, created by its ACUCOBOL-GT. When a site deploys AcuXDBC — either on standalone systems or on networked hosts and clients — these AcuCOBOL-GT data files can be imported into Windows apps. The application data that a migrating site has created with AcuCOBOL-GT is now available with transparent access.

People think that a computer system like the 3000 — to be cut loose by its vendor sometime in 2008 or later — doesn't need much. Those people would be wrong, most of the time.

Unless 3000 customers have their systems sealed up in a wire cage, their 3000 still requires know-how and training. (We're not kidding about the wire cage. More than 300 HP 3000s sat in such cages across the Long's Drug chain during the 1990s. Store owners could do little more than feed a backup tape into them, according to legend.)

But your system probably isn't caged up. You still need to maintain it, learn how to solve problems and update things. Like what? How about a Daylight Saving Time change? Betcha remember that one. (If you don't know what we're talking about, have a look at our articles from earlier this month. Your clock on the nightstand wasn't the only thing that had to be reset back on March 11.)

One of my favorite pieces of advice is based on something that our At-Large Editor Birket Foster says all the time, giving talks about the 3000. In many cases, if the 3000 were an airline aircraft, "the flight attendants are flying the plane now," he says. So you need to train them, or they need to keep in touch with an expert, or keep up support, to ensure nothing goes down.

That's what a user conference does well. Especially if it's got a "flight attendant" track.

In his spare time, Mike Anderson of the Greater Houston 3000 user group helps a few local companies get ready for migration. Yesterday he shared a little trick with us. Leave bits of code, routines that act as trip wires, inside your forest of application modules. Go ahead, do it today, no matter how soon you will pull the trigger on your actual migration.

First, this counts as migration work. Creating code to identify when a module gets used, and report back to Routine Counting Central, can be the prelude to a savvy migration. Because like our At-Large Editor Birket Foster has said so often in the many talks he's given, you want to know how much of your code you will need to migrate.

Second, this kind of development can be a positive thing to report to a company boardroom. "Our migration project has begun with detailed research on the size of the task. Specialized code is being placed in our company applications. This software will deliver metrics we need to create budgets and schedules."

That's a report which may be good enough to buy some time to do the work correctly and efficiently. It's also true, too — this code must be specialized, because you will need knowledge and access to your source code to leave this trail of trip wires.

While some migrations take six weeks, like the SAP implementation at Aearo Technologies, many span months if not years. A customer needs to keep their current HP 3000 applications and databases in service while migration changes roll out, especially if there's a network of field systems to migrate, too.

Not long ago Taurus Software announced it is helping the express package and mail service Freightways Group in New Zealand move its databases — with hundreds of millions of HP 3000 records — to HP's Integrity servers. Bridgeware, the Taurus solution to move data between databases and Web applications, will smooth the transition, according to Taurus president Caliean Sherman.

“Freightways is benefiting from one of BridgeWare’s key benefits – the ability to run a seamless, trouble-free migration,” said Sherman. “BridgeWare and Integrity servers make it easy to move your data between various databases and the Web with minimal system impact.”

Taurus reported that keeping Freightways' network field operations productive during the migration added a challenge to the transition.

Google scours the Web as well as many tools, and even better than most. Today our search-bot turned up an early obituary for an HP operating environment. Well, two such notices, if you know much about the HP 3000 market's current status.

Over on searchdatacenter.com, Google found us a story about HP server customer Aearo Technologies. This HP 3000 and HP 9000 shop had little faith in HP's Integrity offerings just last spring, according to Mark Fontecchio's report. But now the customer stands to save up to $80,000 a year in HP support by replacing its PA-RISC servers with Integrity units.

That's replacing both the HP 9000 as well as HP 3000 servers, according to the story. After 20 years on the 3000 — and who knows how long on the HP 9000 — neither environment looks like it's got long to live. At least according to searchdatacenter.com, Aearo

is considering getting away from the HP 3000 or HP 9000 platforms because the support end of life is either near, as in the first case, or they fear it's near, as in the second.

Whispers of HP curtailing HP-UX support have been with us a good while now. It's probably safe to say the rumors of HP's Unix death are exaggerated. We could make an argument that MPE/iX support is not near death, either.

Encompass launched the drumbeat of marketing for its 2007 conference during the past week. Today HP chipped in a new verse to the "come commune with us" song. HP's e-mail shows how essential the user group meeting has become to HP communication with customers. Between the lines (as Adager's Alfredo Rego would say about a love letter), HP's e-mail also explains why the traditional autumn conference called the HP Technology Forum has jumped ahead to be a midsummer meeting this year at The Mandalay Bay.

HP now calls this year's June 18-21 meetings in Las Vegas "the trifecta" by including a long-standing HP Americas StorageWorks conference and a new "HP Software Universe" on the agenda. The Storage meeting has always been held much earlier in HP's fiscal year, unlike the Tech Forum held twice in HP's Q4. But since HP is ever alert to the possibilities of collaboration and consolidation (both good for profitability), the three meetings now merge in a single week.

It's kind of like having a "South by Southwest" week-plus rear its head in Austin, instead of the original three-day music festival. Us Austinites have watched the engine of the week, the Austin Chronicle, rev up just-ended SXSW to include Interactive (Web and gaming) and Film festivals, all overlapping by a bit. We see a lot of hipsters in the coffee shops here for about 10 days in March. We also see movies and hear music which may never see screens or ring ears again (alas, no distribution deals for much of the content). And if you design for the Web or create interactive software, well, you can find out how far you've fallen behind the cutting edge.

You will need cut loose an invitation to HP's StorageWorks meeting, held at the more tony Venetian resort  a few casinos down the street. For the HP 3000 customer, the new Trifecta could offer a way to combine three research trips into a single junket, and in the city of Lost Wages, no less. The only downside we can see is The Weather in June. The temperature on last June 18 topped out at 107 degrees. But it's a dry heat, my mom says, having lived there since 1990. Of course, those Las Vegas resorts boast the Superdome of air conditioning. A tram takes you between resorts for a few dollars a ride. At night, June's outside air almost makes it down out of the 80s.

If only HP and Encompass had decided back in 2005 to make their new show a mid-June event, perhaps the Interex HP user group would still be around. (Perhaps not, considering the debt which was already on the back of Interex.) Back then, the new Encompass event was scheduled less than a month after the promised HP World show. HP World never raised its 2005 curtain. The '05 Tech Forum ran into Hurricane Katrina, but retreated to Orlando to emerge as the only remaining North American HP technology show.

3000 customers and community members report that most of the new jobs for the platform involve migration assistance. Knowing the HP 3000 seems to be of greatest value, consultants say, when you're helping a company move away.

But there are still homesteading jobs out on the employment boards. You have to look harder or wait longer for them to appear. A longstanding success like the HP 3000, however, will retain a customer base longer, too.

Monster.com, one of the biggest job sources on the Web, offered one such position this week:

HP 3000 Programmer/Analyst

Customer is looking for two experienced contractors with skills in HP3000, COBOL, JCL and Turbo Image Database. Candidates will write program specifications and submit for review. They will conduct code walkthroughs, and create test plans and test cases for the programs.

There is little on the HP 3000 platform that is broken. We mean "not working any longer" when we say broken.  Some solutions for MPE/iX are falling behind, however, a state that makes it difficult to keep applications abreast of company needs.

Java is an example of an HP 3000 solution not broken, but well out of date by now. The current Java version in MPE/iX is 1.3, a generation behind the 1.4 in use on most other platforms. At Quest Diagnostics, the HP 3000 there uses Java for its applications. Not all of the apps, but enough to prompt Jim Gerber in the IT operations to ask about getting Java upgraded for the 3000.

"We are using some Java here," Gerber said. "HP announced that the last supported version is 1.3, which is getting rather long in the tooth.  One of our Web developers wants to use an Enterprise Java Bean, for the extra security that it provides. But we would need Java 1.4.1, or later, on the HP 3000."

HP has turned away from Java on the 3000, after hailing the language nine years ago as a conduit for applications. Java works today behind the scenes and under the covers of many Web apps, or Web clients for hosted applications. Keeping the 3000's Java behind the times is putting shops like Quest under the gun.

HP took note late last year of its step away from Java on the 3000, in this brief statement on the HP Jazz Web site:

HP will no longer be able to offer sustaining engineering for Java/iX after December 31, 2006. As a result, HP will be unable to provide patches or fixes for new problems requiring modifications to the Java/iX source code. Existing patches will remain available from their current locations, and technical support for Java/iX will remain available from the Customer Support Centers through, but not beyond, the MPE/iX end of support date, December 31, 2008.

In the shadow of HP's annual stockholders meeting, one former HP employee and two private eyes plead no contest to charges in the company's pretexting scandal — while former HP chair Patricia Dunn was exonerated.

Shareholders met on the same day former HP employee Kevin Hunsaker and private investigators Ronald DeLia and Matthew DePante entered no contest pleas to misdemeanor charges of fraudulent wire communications. Dunn, battling advanced ovarian cancer, saw her name cleared when charges against her were dropped by the California Attorney General's office.

Hunsaker, DeLia and DePante will serve 96 hours of community service each, according to an Associated Press story. But the quartet of HP execs and their hired PIs got a rude surprise earlier today when the AG's office said everyone would plead guilty. The AG's office corrected that notice — "a mistakenly predicted" press release — later in the day.

Hunsaker, DeLia and DePante also must "make restitution" for invading the privacy of HP employees, executives, reporters and family members of the press. The restitution will be based on requests made by the victims of the hoax. The tactics included HP-subcontracted investigators pretending to be phone company employees to gain access to phone records. Congressmen lambasted HP's probe methods and ethics in a 2006 hearing.

HP has admitted enough complicity in the scandal to pay a $14.5 million fine to the State of California, but the matter never escalated beyond state charges and the testimony before the US Congress.

A pair of vendor information resources for the 3000 customer are getting spruced up, using reports  straight from the community — with no gatekeeper. One Web list offers vendors enough access to update their own product listings, while the other improved resource will use research from a new volunteer at OpenMPE.

The longest-lived, deepest vendor list for 3000 products has been hosted at 3k.com for a long while. During the 1990s, Brian Duncombe of Triolet Systems began compiling HP 3000-related product listings. That list that just got a new nest this year when Chris Bartram of 3k Associates opened the community's new 3000 Wiki pages to the information. As of this month, Duncombe's vendor list is getting the Wiki treatment, complete with community editing of vendor information. In the old model, a single, overworked volunteer had to apply vendor-submitted changes to this comprehensive listing.

Any vendor can head out to the 3k.com Web site's Vendor Directory to update a listing. In the Wiki tradition, anyone — vendor or not — who's registered can edit an item. The result is a resource where 3000 customers can browse these product and company lists. They're grouped by category as well as posted by vendor name.

To update a listing, or contribute what you know about HP 3000s at 3k's 3000 Technical Wiki (Twiki), you  need to register. Get a free username and set your password at www.3k.com/twiki/bin/register/Main/WebHome Bartram explains that the new resource eliminates an old bottleneck, "An online, up-to-date HP 3000 Vendor and Product directory, where the biggest bottleneck (a single overworked maintainer) is no more!"

Since Brian Duncombe took his [HP 3000] directory down a few months ago, I decided to resurrect it on the Twiki. I've been busily cutting and pasting to recreate the directory as it last appeared. Though still a work in progress, the HP 3000 Vendor/Product directory has been resurrected, and in an "All New Improved" formula. The directory is now all Wiki, with each vendor and product entry set up as a separate user-editable page.Once I get all the remaining old data converted into the new format, vendors will be able to log in and update their own contact info and product data.

Bartram's idea is catching on, too. Another revived, community-driven effort surfaced this week to update the application listings at the OpenMPE Web site. Both projects call on an important common element: contributions from a 3000 community which is still maintaining its tight knit of connections.

Monday morning dawned with a small smile on North American IT managers' faces. The "mini Y2K" of the new Daylight Saving Time deadline passed without incident. Unless you were a migration manager at an HP 3000 site, watching hours of productive time drip away in yet another unforeseen diversion.

The DST dance — first, we've got a bit of software for you to keep your time straight, then oh wait, it needs more work, so back out those changes — is all too typical of today's IT change calendars. These events suck up manpower and money, the resources that many average-sized 3000 sites try to reserve for migration projects. The smaller the shop, the harder they must work to set aside migration resource.

Even a homesteading 3000 customer must deal with a DST event, but at least that kind of shop has more modest computing plans. Rather than changing platforms, or applications plus a platform, those sites manage day-to-day challenges. The dirty little secret is that those day-to-day ops in IT now include plenty of governmental compliance work, satisfying auditors more than ever before. Some companies have calculated their bill for remaining a public company — and paying to make regulated, mandated changes — and decided that buying back their stock and going private is cheaper.

DST typifies the reason most migration projects are taking longer than estimated. As important as migration may be to a 3000 shop, there's no ticking time bomb in that project unless your application provider has gone belly up. In contrast, we see 2 AM on Sunday morning, or this coming September for customers running banks and encrypting data. Real deadlines, soon, and with easily measured consequences if you miss them.

Long ago HP was "Hewlett-Packard" to most of its HP 3000 customers. In those days Bill Hewlett or Dave Packard were still on the scene, around the offices, managing by walking around, if only in the boardroom. And back in those 1980s, HP offered some customer retention gifts and awards you can't see the likes of today.

But here, perhaps 15, maybe 20 years after HP introduced them, are some of those gifts. They are on offer, as the British would say, for the modest cost of a donation to a favorite charity of mine.

We use the British term because these ties come from the archives of Dave Wiseman, a long-time friend to the HP 3000 community who was associated with many 3000 vendors and enterprises. ScreenJet, one of our founding sponsors for this blog, came to the community through his help and efforts, along with his partner Alan Yeo.

We have seven of these available to our readers. Make a donation to the Hill Country Ride for AIDS charity — a favorite 50-mile cycling event of mine, to raise money to help AIDS survivors — on a secure Web page to claim yours, which we will send you one postage-paid, as the old-school offers once said. Add a note in your donation to identify which tie you'd like. E-mail us if you'd like more detailed pictures.

These silk and rayon blend garments remind us that not all of HP's "ties that bind" come in the form of license agreements in perpetuity. HP's dreamed up some other gimcracks (or gems, if you prefer) to keep up the faith in the 3000 community. Reach out for these sweet antiques if you want to to fasten up your customer archive — and enjoy a bit of evidence that says, "I knew HP when I thought of it as Hewlett-Packard."

Many members of the HP 3000 community assume that HP won't have much to say about their computer's use, sale or transfer once HP exits the market.

But those members would be wrong. HP considers its intellectual property — the MPE/iX software that's is as essential as an engine in an auto — to have license terms which extend in perpetuity. That's forever, until HP says otherwise.

HP's Jennie Hou — an HP 3000 R&D project manager with focus on the customers, partners, and business — confirmed the tenure of HP's ties to 3000 customers in a brief e-mail. Hou explained the new Right To Use 3000 license (RTU) recently in our February print issue, as well as on the pages of this newsblog.

A routine check on our search engine at the 3000 NewsWire main Web site today turned up a seminal story. Give the 3000 NewsWire site's "Advanced Search" engine a run to do your Web-based 3000 research. Our Web mentor Chris Bartram hooked up Google's search code to the site just last night.

I usually search on the name "Prather" (as in Winston, HP's final 3000 general manager) when I test an engine. Winston Prather has been mentioned in more than 110 articles from 1995-2005; he was the leader of the 3000 labs for much of that time, then had a three-year tenure as GM. This was a fellow who drew a lot of copy, because he influenced HP's efforts for your system so profoundly.

By chance, I happened to click on our Winston Prather story from the Year 2000 HP World conference. Yes, a great deal has changed since then; there's no more HP World, or Interex. HP's got new leadership at the top of the company, as well as different people in the foreground to help the vendor get its 3000 business wrapped up. Oh, and there's that matter of the 3000's future with HP. People in this market know the future of HP and the 3000 pretty well, or they believe they do.

But that 2000 story still strikes me as emblematic of how things can change without warning. In October, 2000 HP was telling customers that the 3000 had a secure future with the company. Executive VPs Ann Livermore and Duane Zitzner both taped "don't worry" messages for the 3000 faithful. Those videos aired about a year before the system got scratched off HP's futures lineup.

You never know what might happen, even in the face of what look like clear messages.

Balloting for the OpenMPE board of directors ended at the very end of March 2, an election that returned all but one incumbent and gave Anne Howard the seat occupied by Strobe Data's Alan Tibbets. Chuck Ciesinski, Paul Edwards and Birket Foster returned to the board. Foster has served since OpenMPE's inception in 2002.

Howard, a longtime HP 3000 community member, has been in the HP 3000 community since her COBOL programming days at the European Division of University of Maryland — where she completed her BS in Computer Sciences. After graduation and return to the US, she served as DP Director at a Texas school district.

In taking her board postion, Howard made a case for OpenMPE being a key element in the success of HP 3000 futures. HP has less than 22 months before retiring from the community, unless the vendor extends its support and licensing operations yet again.

"I'm excited about this," Howard said about her new post, "as the group elected this go-round will be in place when HP finally discontinues its support for MPE. HP's extension of support gives many sites that time needed to transition to other environments, but we all know there are an awful lot of HP 3000s out there. Solutions will be needed after HP finally ceases support."

HP has announced the ultimate version of the time zone table for the HP 3000, key software to letting the systems keep up with the new changeover date to Daylight Saving Time this coming weekend.

HP engineer Jeff Vance sent out word late today that the new TZTAB file is available at the HP Jazz Web site page for the software. The patch is LBCMXY5 and will soon be available from HP IT Response Center. [Ed. note, March 2010: Since HP's Jazz Web site was shifted in 2009 to independent hosting sites, you can download the file from the Speedware or Client Systems Jazz hosts.)

HP recommends that all HP 3000 customers "install this updated copy of TZTAB at your earliest convenience. The changes included in this file are:

Atlantic (AST4ADT) and Newfoundland (NST3:30NDT) Timezones now include the U.S. 2007 DST definitions.

Also added, for compatibility reasons only are the AST4ADT#CANADA and NST3:30NDT#CANADA Timezones which are identical to AST4ADT and NST3:30NDT respectively.

The Aleutian (AST10ADT) and Yukon Timezones (YST9YDT) now include the 2007 U.S. 2007 DST definitions.

In our first podcast of 2007 (7 minutes, 6 MB) we talk of the early retirement program offered by HP during this month. Many HP 3000 advocates inside the company — some say nearly all of the most prominent managers and engineers — got an offer in a Fed Ex envelope a little while ago.

   Inside HP, the highest-minded talk is about “giving this system the finish that it deserves.” But that finish is taking longer and longer, as the vendor lingers around support money you’re still paying. So that exit of the experts, those best-versed in how to make HP help its 3000 customers — that’s what the community is facing this month.

   These are experts who told customers in 2003 that “HP intends” to make an emulator license of MPE available. There were a host of other intentions in that springtime statement, most made by people who got a Fed Ex envelope not long ago.

Migration business picked up during 2006 for several segments of the 3000 community. One group of customers who made plans and began projects: PowerHouse sites, especially those who want to stick with the Cognos language while they make the shift to other platforms.

Speedware's Chris Koppe, director of marketing a frequent presenter at 3000 events, has told customers one of the fastest migrations is a "stick-to-your-fourth generation language." Speedware-to-Speedware success stories quote fast turnarounds. Recently Speedware's migration unit started to migrate Cognos customers with the same strategy.

This Speedware-Cognos alliance announcement prompted concerns from a portion of the PowerHouse customer community. On the PowerHouse mailing list, a few customers said they feared the deal will accelerate Cognos’ detachment from PowerHouse futures.

Robert Edis, an independent PowerHouse consultant, took note of Cognos’ Automated Development Tools (ADT) income dropping out of Cognos’ shareholder reports, along with eliminated or reduced mentions of these ADT tools in Cognos conference presentations, sales force pitches and product lists. He sketched a forecast of PowerHouse futures.

Cognos took the concerns in stride and pledged loyalty — point by point — to a product still earning revenues for the company.