Where are they now?
September 10, 2008
[Editor's Note: While HP dismantles its 3000 presence, the community spins off some of its best-known members in a process some call diaspora. In an ongoing series, we’re tracking down some of the notable people who were part of the 3000’s saga but have dispersed.]
George Stachnik was an HP 3000 booster whose voice carried far. A series of TV broadcasts gave him a high profile in the modest 3000 community which could watch closed-circuit TV or order up VHS tapes of his talks. Stachnik narrated the infamous video where an HP 3000 was pushed off a two-story office roof onto a parking lot, and survived.
That narration voice has survived while Stachnik has held a series of jobs since his HP 3000 duties came to a close. He reports that he does podcasts for Hewlett-Packard’s internal use, working from the Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS) business, spreading the word on competitive analysis.
Stachnik had left the 3000 group for the company’s NetServer division before HP announced its exit from the 3000 community. But he was invited to return just after the HP-Compaq merger was announced in 2001. His series of transition Webcasts, which examined issues around migration from the HP 3000, covered the years of 2002 through 2004.
Now he’s using the voice that taught and preached the HP mission of migration to instruct HP staff.
“There’s one or two that have been made available externally,” he said, “but for the most part the podicasts are made for the sales force. They cover both the Unix servers and the Proliant servers.”
Stachnik said he’s communicating analysis developed by an HP team. “I was able to build on all of the audio editing that I learned doing those transition Webcasts.”
Podcasting is an interesting medium, he explained. “You can listen to this stuff in the car. You don’t have to be staring at a slide. It’s like talk radio.”
Stachnik’s other contribution to the community came in a long series of HP 3000 instruction articles written for Interact magazine, the journal of now-defunct Interex user group. Nearly two dozen articles covered the processes and strategies of managing an HP 3000. Terry Floyd, founder of the Support Group consultancy for HP 3000s and ERP customers, says he gives all of his new hires the Stachnik articles to read as a primary education on the platform.
Although Interact has disappeared from the Internet, Stachnik holds
the original, unrevised copies of the articles. He shared these with
the NewsWire after we talked, and we will be making them available
through our Web site.
Stachnik has made it back onto the Internet in a public forum, too,
he added. HP tapped him to record the beginning and end of videos up on
YouTube. Search on “HP Engineer Loses Bet” to find the video with the
broadcast voice of HP’s 3000 loudest outreach.