Marxmeier Software released the Version B.08.00 build of its Eloquence database for the Windows platform this month. Among many enhancements, the release improves scalability through better threading, enhances recovery utility to support point-in-time recovery, as well as fine-tunes a utility that mimics the QUERY report tool used on the HP 3000.

Eloquence has notched many success stories during the Transition Era, starting with a notable contribution to Summit Information Systems' credit union application migration. The new features, listed in an extensive technical note at the Marxmeier Web site, deliver the same capabilities that Marxmeier rolled out in its HP-UX version of B.08.00 last fall. The database server now supports replication and case-insensitive indexes, for example. The product that has included its own programming language now has full Windows keyboard mapping, too.

Marxmeier has been adding the features through optional, soft-rollout patches throughout 2008, but this official release brings all of the software to the Windows 32-bit Intel (x86) and 64-bit (x64) architectures. HP's fifth-generation Proliant server line, one of the more popular blade-style hardware platforms for migrating 3000 sites, employs Xeon CPUs to run Windows Server 2008 x64.

One year ago today, AICS Research founder Wirt Atmar asked the 3000 online community a question about migration targets. The company had rewritten its QueryCalc product from the ground up, creating a client to run in Windows and server-side code to access Unix-hosted databases. QCReports was the result, avidly used by the Summit credit union sites who've migrated to HP-UX. Wirt, who passed away almost two months ago, posed the following query on March 30 of last year:

As information rolled in, it became apparent that moving host code to the 3000 for QCReports was not going to net any appreciable interest, as Wirt defined it. But AICS Research will never turn its back on the HP 3000 customers who continue to use the original QueryCalc report writer, even as the company embraces the changes in the 3000 community's hosting. Reports need a smooth upgrade path to make a migration more efficient, and AICS is doing it right.

Migration customers from the HP 3000 community will experience a change in the automated patch reports the vendors sends, starting in June. The new format removes some crucial and exacting information that was delivered in text-only format of the alerts. As a bonus, the service leaves new room for HP to promote its product specials.

Automatic notice of patches has been a vital and crucial service from HP's support department. Since we signed on for the alerts and notices in the spring of 1997, countless notices have been delivered via e-mail about HP's repairs to software and firmware. While this won't be much of a change for the MPE/iX user — HP ceased such repairs for all types of HP 3000 problems in December — HP's other enterprise computer users will be impacted.

Plainly put, this appears to be a reduction in HP's service levels. Perhaps the vendor always intended to reduce this free-to-the-community level of support. Anyone could sign up for the text-only notices, the most efficient gateway into HP's byzantine and overstuffed database of problem resolutions. Perhaps the new format, coming in a few months, will not sacrifice as much as appears today. But the revised format, a PDF file (shown above, click for more detail; here's a file to download), one that replaces technical details with sales information, suggests a slippery slope leading away from ownership value.

Today's entry in the 3000 NewsWire's blog marks the 1,000th article in our news and community resource. For 10 years we took pleasure in reporting to the 3000 community on paper issues of the NewsWire, mailed monthly to offices, plus the Online Extra e-mails we transmitted in-between.

But we stepped onto a faster track back in June of 2005 with this blog. Less than a month later, the 31-year-old Interex user group slammed its doors shut overnight. I was never so grateful to have an every-workday news outlet to keep up with the collapse of a multi-million-dollar institution that was so close to the heart of the community. Sorry news for the thousands who lost millions of dollars, yes. But a blog was the best way to spread needed information in a confused time.

From 2005's "Less tangled SOX for 3000s" to this week's final resolution of that Interex bankrupcty, I've been blessed to have a community of wizards, gurus and wise-acres helping create all of that content. Sometimes it's just a quick e-mail reply that helps form an article; others come from an hour-long interview over Skype or even the regular phone. And you can find articles written by contributors like Gilles Schipper, Birket Foster and others. It's all in the archives.

Hewlett-Packard has been migrating away from HP 3000s in its IT operations for years. The transition is becoming more complete in these months that remain before the vendor ends its support for the platform. Much of internal HP has been run using SAP as the base application platform, and now the massive app is taking over HP 3000 operations for the vendor.

A few IT managers at HP Canada have checked in to report that their HP 3000 duties are drawing to a close. "I am currently supporting HP 3000 applications for Hewlett-Packard in Canada," said Jennie Lo when she recently joined the Linked In HP 3000 Community group. "However, the applications are scheduled to retire within 2009."

SAP is popular with corporate organizations the size of HP: Fortune 500, multinationals, companies with an extensive IT staff and a dedication to the ITIL practices that Hewlett-Packard has helped to write and preaches to its customers. The solution is not inexpensive, however significant its benefits turn out to be. Lufthansa Airmotive has gone from a clutch of HP 3000 apps to SAP. PACCAR, which builds Peterbilt and Kenworth commercial trucks, has followed the path of SAP, but on IBM hardware. SAP is also picking up HP 3000 implementations that have been running at companies which are already using SAP elsewhere, such as Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics.

SAP is a way up for a certain size of HP 3000 customer. Being a broad-spectrum solution, SAP offers a good array of persuasion tools to nudge a prospect onto this broad path: A list of top Webcasts offers a primer on SAP's proposed benefits.

My operator, in his infinite wisdom, decided to change passwords on MANAGER.SYS.  Of course he forgot, or fat-finger-checked; I don’t know.  At any rate, I need some help.  Any suggestions, other than a blindfold and cigarette?

Chuck Trites offered this solution:

Duane Percox of QSS added a simpler approach:

Plus, Steve Ritenour suggested that a logon to the MGR.TELSUP account will unlock the passwords. The Telesup account usually has SM capability, if it wasn't changed.

For some 3000 managers, the subject itself should be filed in a place not easily found. "These responses are all well and good," said Bruce Collins of Softvoyage, "but shouldn't we be thinking twice about posting this kind of information (how to hack an HP 3000) to the 3000 newsgroup?"

Although the remains of the Interex user group have been doled out to creditors, the 3000 community is also getting its share of the assets which users helped create. The Interex HP 3000 Contributed Software Library has been available since late last spring, free to anybody with an 3000 terminal emulator. AICS Research has its free QCTerm for download to assist in your access to the CSL.

Tracy Johnson, one of the OpenMPE board members, collected all of the freeware from the CSL and hosted it on his HP 3000 back in May of 2008. These programs might represent some of the most significant assets for the community. It's tough to measure how much a program is worth if it saves you hours of development, or keeps a mission-critical enterprise running smoothly. But that value, collectively across hundreds of 3000 sites, is a lot greater than the $400,000 or less which the bankruptcy trustees distributed this month.

OpenMPE is at work on a different interface to get your freeware from the CSL. Matt Perdue of Hill Country Technologies is the hosting manager for the online assets of that user group. The organization, built entirely from volunteer help for the past seven years, is also at work on finalizing a licensing agreement for the Jazz freeware built and copyrighted by HP.

HP's longest-standing user group finally experienced its death rattle this month when the Interex bankruptcy case resolved the outstanding debts to thousands of creditors. US government notices arrived in mailboxes of companies as large as Hewlett-Packard and as small as single members like the Hungarian News Agency. The March 18 notice was the last shoe to drop in a death dance that began in the summer of 2005.

Creditors who spent money with Interex received about 10 cents on every dollar owed, according to the latest documents filed by the US Northern District of California court in Santa Clara County, California. Hewlett-Packard took one of the larger losses, at $200,000, while a handful of major hotels across North America failed to collect six-figure deposits or never saw payments for hotel rooms which were either reserved in blocks or occupied during conferences.

Losses closer to home in the 3000 community came at software and services vendors who paid for booths at the suddenly-closed HP World show of 2005. Birket Foster of MB Foster said that "Interex took our booth deposit and kept it," he reported earlier this month. "We'll get a check for approximately 10 percent of everything."

Minisoft has rolled out a 7.0 version of its eFORMz paperless reporting utility for the 3000 community. The new version recognizes the Rich Text Format (RTF) used by Microsoft Word and understood by other word processing applications. Minisoft says the new support means

EFORMz is Java-based, so Minisoft recommends that 3000 sites host the software on a non-3000 platform to avoid the Java on MPE/iX performance issues. But it works with applications common to the HP 3000 community such as MANMAN, Ecometry/Escalate — really just about anything that generates data for a report from 3000s. Users design forms in a favorite word processor (Microsoft Word, WordPerfect), desktop publisher (PageMaker, QuarkXPress), or drawing package. Once the form is designed, eFORMz captures the output and adds the electronic form to its library.

The eDirect module, which can help sites go paperless, is included in eFORMz 7.0. Using eDirect enables eFORMz to send any document via e-mail in PDF format. The new eFORMz also supports the next generation 2D stacked barcodes, which allow more information in a smaller space; data is encoded in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. The money-saving new US Postal Service barcodes are also supported.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that IBM is in talks to purchase Sun Microsystems, a $6.5 billion deal that could give Big Blue a big edge in the enterprise Unix derby. Hewlett-Packard might hope that the deal is only a rumor — or that at worst, it has as much impact as HP's purchase of Digital did seven years ago.

Technically, HP didn't buy Digital outright, but it acquired Compaq, which had bought Digital. By the time Digital products like OpenVMS showed up on HP price lists, their impact was only on the installed base of Digital customers. HP killed off the Digital True64 implementation of Unix and axed one of the best processors ever sold in Alpha. You could argue Compaq did more to hobble Digital's Unix than HP in the three years Compaq owned Digital before the HP-Compaq merger.

The consolidation dance is supposed to help a vendor gain market share. Sometimes the edge shows up when a salesperson can say, "Oh, instead of buying a Sun system, why not move toward our Series p [IBM Unix] line? Unix is Unix, after all, and we'll be melding product lines before too long."

That Unix mind-meld has been more of a fantasy than a dream over the last decade. It's useful to have a Unix application already for sale when you want to offer it on another version of Unix. But unlike Sun's Java, Unix was never "write once, run everywhere." Unix differs too much to ever be the "open system" it promised 20 years ago.

Any assimilation of Sun into IBM is going to cause a ripple in HP-UX server business, however. IBM will pursue Unix enterprise server business more effectively than Sun did. Big Blue will use the same selling edge that HP enjoys: "We offer everything in computing that a company could want, from services to software to systems, of all sizes and capital costs." This could be troubling news for the customer who's hoping that HP can keep its HP-UX market share from sliding. (Industry-standard Windows servers make up all of HP's server growth these days.) Everyone in the 3000 community knows what happens to an HP product which experiences declining revenue growth.

The 3000 community can count on third party resellers to provide fresh HP 3000s for years to come. While these systems will not be factory-fresh, they bring new horsepower and connectivity to sites that need upgrades. Homesteading customers as well as long-term migration projects require refreshed 3000s.

But an offer of a 3000 system does not always include a license for MPE/iX. Even though HP once said that an MPE license can't ever be separated from a server, during the past several years that has not been true. Customers who toe the legal line for 3000 ownership might find a 3000 out on the market without a legal MPE license. And such servers turn up because Hewlett-Packard created them, through deals or oversight.

Manufacturing firms are cutting through rough waters in 2009, rocked by the same waves that are sending bank stocks below $2 and removing clerks from retail stores in staff cutbacks. The Parker Hannifin Corp. in Cleveland, Ohio had to make cuts recently which sent 22-year veteran Edna Houston to the unemployment ranks. Most of us know someone who's been furloughed, laid off or some other term for less busy than they want to be day-to-day.

Houston took to her blog last week to talk about the steps that her employer, which has used HP 3000s for those two-plus decades, took before cutting staff:

There was a time not long ago when being idled was an HP 3000 expert's unique situation, unless they learned other skills. But the retreat from business expansion is pushing a much broader range of IT veteran onto the unemployment rolls. We only have fear itself to fear — but the first step toward fearing only fear is to look reality in the eye. The second step is to tell what has happened to you, and then network.

HP's only authorized reseller for HP 3000 products, Client Systems, unveiled the first public re-hosting of the Jazz software utilities today, but the programs are penned up behind a thicket of legal language from an HP materials agreement. While initial response from the community complained about the Materials Use Agreement, the terms gauntlet was tossed down by the HP Development Company, not Client Systems. (The screen shot above illustrates the standard display of the terms at the Client Systems Web site. Click to enlarge it, though it will not help.)

The dense legal restrictions might have been already in place in HP's mind before Jazz left Hewlett-Packard's 3000 division. But the agreement was finalized only about two months ago, and the vendor insisted that any re-hosting licensee accept the terms — and that re-hosting organizations demand that community users accept terms before using the freeware. Unless the users click to agree, they cannot access the Jazz materials. (Well, there is a way to access the software download page directly, although the path sidesteps the legal agreement.)

Computer users blast through such End User Licensing Agreements every day, from installation of updated software to downloads of freeware. But the Jazz software targets a more advanced user, the IT manager, director or administrator of business systems. Early responses to the document that restrains Jazz use were not kind.

"Give me a month to read through all that fine print, and pass it off to the legal department," said Craig Lalley, owner of consulting firm EchoTech. "Then I will be happy to comment on the content." While the agreement might make HPDC and its attorneys happy, the presentation to the user community could be some of the sorriest Web display I've ever seen for a critical piece of information. At the least, could it be in black type on the white background?

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. has a wonderful gallery of gear on its floor, but tonight may be one of its more special evenings for HP 3000 folks. VEsoft founder Vladimir Volokh is in the Bay Area, visiting customers to consult on one of his multi-week tours. He's planning to meet with Allegro Consultants co-founder Stan Sieler after-hours at the museum, where Stan volunteers as a docent.

A member of the Interex HP user group's Hall of Fame, Stan will lead Vladimir tonight as two of the 3000 community's leading technology lights walk through the CHM's aisles of history. For any of you who wish they might be alongside to hear some of Stan's histories, we've got a few minutes' worth recorded from a tour he led last year. Take a moment to measure the passion in Stan's voice as he touts the merits of the most technically-advanced personal computer of 1974, the first year that the HP 3000 advanced enough to do serious computing. (He goes on to mention the CHM's donated Apple I — not anywhere near as superior, but the foundation of a company analysts are eyeing as a new member of the Dow Jones 30 blue chips.) What made the Intel 8008-based MCM-70 PC stand out was included software, the same kind of bundled resource behind the 3000's success.

Sad to say, as Stan notes, that technical superiority does not ensure commercial success. Hewlett-Packard created many advanced computing products during the 20th Century, including your community's server. As a for-profit business, HP measured its return on investment for each one. The company has a history of dropping low earners. But the 3000's value to the owners is higher than the value to HP. Your success with the 3000 doesn't require commercial embrace of your computer to continue its return on your investment.

This week's issue of the Olympic College's newspaper The Olympian includes news of the HP 3000. In specific, the paper reports about the fate of systems which support admissions, registration, financial aid and graduation tracking. This nearly-total range of college operations relies on an HP 3000 the college has been working to replace since 2003. In fact, more than 30 colleges continue to count on this 3000 that college IT directors like Jack Hanson say will be hard to maintain and find parts for after 2010.

Projects move more slowly in the academic world, a fact that could be even more true at the Bellingham,
Washington community college. Olympic College is part of the Washington Community College Consortium (WCCC), a group of schools which operated HP 3000s that were destined to become a single .NET server. Hewlett-Packard first earned the approval to do the migration, with Transoft to perform the work. In the fall of 2003 we reported:

The Olympian and the reports to the Washington State Student Services Commission & Councils tell the rest of the story. Plans for a move away from an in-house system failed, so HP had to back away from the engagement and settle up on what couldn't be finished. The colleges still intend to run on another platform by 2010, The Olympian reports, the end of HP's support. One bit of the delay might stem from what the colleges hoped to convert: reports written in Protos, a unique mix of COBOL and fourth generation language.

Speedware has developed and offered tools for self-migrators, the companies in the 3000 community who prefer to do the work of migration with their own staff. (And perhaps some consulting to start, advice to help organize what will be the biggest project ever for most IT departments.) Using a formula that's become proven in the marketplace, the 3000 toolset for migrations also includes some software best used by a migration services team rather than in-house staff.

In the earliest years of the migration march, Speedware developed a database transformation and migration tool, DBMotion. But migration can mean moving much more arcane elements than old databases to new platforms. This year Speedware is offering an RPG to .NET converter for the world of applications which reach back into the 1980s.

Admittedly, there's not much RPG out there on HP 3000 systems. But Hewlett-Packard offered the language alongside the almost-omnipresent COBOL during the 1980s, partly to lure IBM sites using RPG. While the three-letter language has far more fans in the IBM AS-400 marketplace, RPG can be moved with the ML-iMPACT software created by Sykora-ML and now resold and used by Speedware. RPG applications, Transact code — nearly anything can be moved off a 3000. The question to ask about such tools is "how much hand-coding is required to complete the job?"

The Texas road meanders around sharp bends and stands of juniper trees, eventually revealing a resource for retiring 3000s. On a few acres just southwest of Lake Travis stands a concrete fortress of modest size and significant ambitions. A remote, outsourced datacenter, operated by the Support Group, inc., is adopting 3000s, data and applications from companies moving away from their 3000s, or firms just looking for a way to free up IT resources.

The datacenter is relatively new, a project started about a year ago by tSGi, which has supported MANMAN and ERP customers for more than 15 years. From a thick slab to six-inch walls to redundant telecomm and power resources, the datacenter has grown up and gained customers. It's probably the only one in the 3000 community that's managed by a father and son, too: The Floyds, Terry and David.

Outsourced resources for 3000s aren't a brand-new concept. Disaster recovery operations, some with hot-site replication and automatic fail-over, have been available for more than two decades. But in more recent years the 3000 market is finding and using datacenters like the one at tSGi. The blockhouse that houses a handful of 3000s sits on a road with a unique sign at the curb. "Computer operaters wanted," says the sign. The Support Group is reaching globally for 3000 customers, but hiring locally.

Having contributed so much to the 3000 experience in his lifetime, Wirt Atmar wanted a simple finale on the occasion of his death one month ago. No eulogy, a cremation instead of burial, and no funeral. Accolades and thanks flowed over the 3000's Internet newsgroup to celebrate his life. But enduring gratitude, and recognition, still seemed out of reach.

The 3000 community has organized a fitting memorial to this important man. Wirt was a research associate with the famous Field Museum in Chicago. OpenMPE secretary Donna Hofmeister contacted the museum about establishing a memorial fund in his honor. Hofmeister received immediate assurance this was the best way to thank him for a questing mind that found and spread solutions for the HP 3000, like his Plan B for staying on the 3000 instead of migrating. Plan B is a good start for considering the complete set of sustainability decisions.

"Both Both Bruce Patterson," Hofmeister said, "Wirt's friend and colleague, and Sheila Cawley, Vice President Institutional Advancement at the Museum, think that this is an excellent way for us to both help the Museum and preserve Wirt's legacy." The HP 3000 and its community has earned that unique attribute, a legacy, so it's fitting that a memorial is underway. You can make a donation at www.fieldmuseum.org/annualfund and click on the "Join Now" link.  At the bottom of that page, click "Online."

One month ago today community pioneer Wirt Atmar passed away, but his contributions to the 3000 user continue to keep the system sustainable in a world far different than the era when HP 3000 was created. The server did not include a database for its first four years of life, but when HP added IMAGE to the bundle, the computer took off for new heights HP had never scaled in the industry.

IMAGE beefed up to become TurboIMAGE as the 3000 shifted to the RISC architecture, but it took efforts led by Wirt to give this included database the technology to keep it included in IT models. Built as a networked database, IMAGE gained SQL. Jim Sartain led HP's liasion with the 3000 community in this period of change, and he reports that IMAGE/SQL started as an HP design, but the vendor wanted to segregate this enhancement from the user population by making it an add-on.

The 3000 community thinks of Hewlett-Packard's 3000 operations and sees faces it knows and voices it has heard. While the master of R&D Ross McDonald made a career of staying out of sight, the computer has had business managers since 2005 in Dave Wilde and Jennie Hou, and liaisons such as Jeff Vance, Jeff Bandle, Mike Paivinen and Craig Fairchild. Every one was at least a part-time employee of the HP 3000 division, or virtual CSY as they liked to call it.

All these faces and voices are now gone. HP's 3000 operations are run by two overseers. Bernard Detreme manages the Worldwide Support ops, just about the only place a customer can still buy something 3000-specific from HP. Determe made a conference call appearance last spring, but he's not a face well-known by your community.

The other overlord of 3000 intellectual property is the Hewlett-Packard Development Company. The CSY staff always had to deal with HPDC, and four initials trumped two. In a matter for lawyers and licensing, the Development Company has insisted on hanging on to copyright and property rights for software that HP will not support by 2011 — as well as software HP never supported, like the freeware programs from the Jazz server.

During a briefing with the OpenMPE board yesterday, chairman Birket Foster noted that the former e3000 business manager Jennie Hou is now working at HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers group. Ross McDonald, Hou's supervisor while at the 3000 division, is reported to be at work on technical projects for HP's Unix servers. Much of the 3000 community at HP has moved away to other parts of HP. This exodus, sparked by the flame-out of 3000-style products at Hewlett-Packard, was kindled by the relatively-new HP Development Company L.P., organized to wrest maximum value from the property rights of HP products.

HPDC is a very different HP from the company you may have known over the past three decades. Changes to any business are inevitable over as many years as Hewlett-Packard has operated. The rate of change and depth of difference can vary, however. The differences represented by HPDC what the migrating 3000 customers, staying with HP on new platforms, must accept and embrace. If a business cannot manage $100 million in revenues per quarter, HPDC can't find a place for it.

And for the homesteaders, that sound you heard this quarter starting with the final HP advisory on the 3000? It was the footsteps of HP, the Hewlett-Packard you knew when you bought your first HP 3000. And like Elvis ending a night of songs, HP was leaving the 3000 building. When HP’s labs finally shut out the MPE lights, some of HP’s last friends of the computer had to leave the vendor’s tough bouncers guarding the door. HPDC now has its hand on the spigot of software for the community.

The OpenMPE advocacy user group ratified its 2009 election results today. The 63 ballots put four directors into seats for the next two years. Birket Foster, Anne Howard and Alan Tibbetts were returned to seats for the volunteer organization. Tony Tibbenham joins the group from a unique perspective, as a board member who has already migrated his HP 3000.

The ballots equalled the number of 2007 votes cast in an election with contested seats. Meanwhile, th contest between which would last longer, Hewlett-Packard's 3000 division or OpenMPE, has been decided as well. 3000 community members will see proposals and action from OpenMPE while HP has retired its lab and division expertise.

"I think it says something that OpenMPE is still here, and HP is not," Foster said today in a conference call to ratify election results. "This is not the only marketplace that HP is in that things are fading out on. IBM, Sun, all the rest of those guys have the same issue: At some point it's not economical for them to run the platform."

OpenMPE has a list of active issues about the 3000 the vendor hasn't addressed, but there are some crucial items the group had to retire from its list. HP 3000s will never get the un-throttling code to release the full power of the N-Class and A-Class processors. HP will never make MPE/iX 7.0 run on the eldest Series 9x7 systems, despite years of asking from OpenMPE's directors. But the additions of programs and processes is impressive, from a rudimentary source code licensing plan to the transfer of HP's 3000 programs from Jazz onto third party servers at Speedware, Client Systems — and soon, OpenMPE's own server.