3000 moves five years beyond Interex
July 21, 2010
Five years ago this week the HP Computer System Users Group, best known as Interex, locked its doors in a sudden bankruptcy. A Chapter 11 resuscitation was never attempted by the group's managers; a total overnight shutdown, direct to Chapter 7, was the only remaining option in the face of $4 million in debts.
Two questions remain relevant for the 3000 community after half a decade. Did Interex reduce the computer system's life resource for users by failing? More to the point, is there another user group resource to aid them -- or do 3000 users even need such a thing by 2010?
The chaos and turmoil of the July shutdown became our first big story for this news blog. You can revisit the highlights, or low points.
Interex closes its doors
A retirement, or a death?
The lights are off, the bankruptcy filed
Contributions frozen, one summer later
Interex customers may get auctioned
Two
years on, Interex still being sold off
User
group bankruptcy ends with pennies
Dust of Interex demise suggests virtual meetings
There's proof enough, in that series of stories, that a nexus was lost and millions of dollars were spent for naught. Over the same five years, Encompass became the Connect user group for HP 3000 users -- especially the ones who are choosing another HP enterprise to replace a 3000.
With these migrating sites in mind, the Connect user group is important to one slice of the 3000 world. Migrators have a successful user group to call upon while making contact with new HP worlds. Connect has made changes in the user group model, ones that go beyond a non-confrontational relationship with the vendor who spins the HP world. This group doesn't pay Bay Area rents, or employ several dozen managers and staffers. There's a lot of volunteer labor drafted to make Connect run -- much like Interex once used in the days when a Regional User Group hosted the conference each year. At my first Interex in 1985, the Mid-Atlantic group was omnipresent in snappy red blazers. HP felt like the guest in Washington DC.
Interex began making some of these vendor accommodations, starting back in 1996 when it allowed HP to control the name and brand of the group's biggest profit center, the annual conference. What was called Interex 1995 became HP World in 1996 -- and HP started to look toward an era of leading the users, rather than following a volunteer group of its more ardent customers.
Whether the rest of the 3000 community, homesteading and independent of HP, needs such a group today is debatable. In the five years since the Interex meltdown the Web has become a lightning-quick resource of knowledge, even of 3000 lore and arcana. Finding a manual for mothballed HP storage gear can be a matter of email queries combined with the pack-rat practices of belt-and-suspenders users. What has been lost, however, is a generational asset: a yearly event to meet comrades in person. But the whole HP 3000 experience feels generational by now, considering how many homesteading firms have their systems managed by Boomers.
Connect puts up a very good conference every year in place of HP World, so there's an ample event to feed the need to network. But as the late summer blooms on us Boomers, we recall how July was a month full of work on marketing and product plans, readying for the Interex show of summer (August '88 in tropical Orlando) or the fall ('02 in LA, home to the infamous roundtable stonewall). This kind of calendar compass point still exists for the Encompass/Connect member. The homesteaders need to point at their own compass over a year of IT management. Perhaps there's still room for an annual event in the 3000 World. (Say, there's a name HP doesn't have the rights to, I'd bet.) HP's new world has been drifting away from the 3000 for much more than five years.