By Alan Yeo

Stealing a headline from the title of Shawn Levy's movie is as good a way as any to start. Not that I'm suggesting that members of the HP 3000 Community are now dinosaurs or historic figures reduced to walking the byways of the Internet after dark. However, it is true that within this community there are many members whose computing careers date back to that pre-dawn era before the PC came to dominate the earth. You are part of the history of the development of mainstream commercial computing.

So if any venue is appropriate for a reunion for those who have worked with the HP 3000, the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley has to be it. For genuinely, we have seen and experienced computer history being made over the last four decades.
   
Now is the time for all good men
to come to the aid of having a party

I will only slightly paraphrase the sentence invented by Charles E. Weller to develop typing skills on the QWERTY keyboard. (A device that probably everyone reading this has used as the main tool of their working lives, although some of us remember hand punching 80-column cards before that.) Hopefully, this has also caught the attention of a few people for whom the initial headline was a bit dry.

But a “Reunion Party” is really what this is all about. On Sept. 24, a chance to meet again (or perhaps for the first time) those people from the HP 3000 community that we have worked with, met at conferences, used their software and/or hardware, perhaps have exchanged support emails with, or perhaps have only been familiar names on technical newsgroups. This is a group of people that coalesced around the HP 3000 and became a world-wide family and community.

Third of three parts on the Zelus HP 3000 emulator; part 1 and part 2 appear on prior days.

Although some of the Stromasys emulators are resold by HP, Hewlett-Packard has no plans to resell the HP 3000 Zelus emulator. This isn't the Digital marketplace, where Stromasys leveraged its roots with Digital executives, keying on Stromasys' origins as the European Digital migration lab. Instead, the company is going to establish an HP 3000 customer base itself, selling to one site at a time.

Stromasys' CTO Dr. Robert Boers explained that creating a customer-specific emulator which replicates one HP 3000 installation is the first phase of the project. Going beyond that, to an emulator that could be resold by independent vendors in the 3000 community, is a phase that Stromasys is studying.

“Building one which is hit with every kind of customer environment requires a lot more debugging,” Boers said. “We have to add additional peripherals. What we’ve done with VAX and Alpha has been to work with one big customer for a year and a half, until they really got what they wanted. When that emulator got really good, then we productized it and put it on the market.” The Stromasys emulator for Alpha entered this general product phase in 2005. HP stopped new system sales of AlphaServers in 2007, and the vendor still supports the last generation of those Alphas through 2012.

In contrast, an HP 3000 emulator only got crucial HP aid in development in 2009, six years after Hewlett-Packard stopped selling HP 3000s. Hewlett-Packard has been through many changes since the Stromasys bonds were forged with a DEC group that didn't start in HP, but ended up there through acquisitions.

The boot process for the Zelus HP 3000 emulator takes about four minutes in the present version (screenshot at left; click for detailed view). But the time to market for the product has extended much longer than predicted. "We'll take ourselves another year," said Stromasys CTO Dr. Robert Boers, citing the complexity and limited documentation of the 3000's system internals. HP gave Stromasys the technical access required to build Zelus, but working through the details was harder than expected.

The extra time will carry into field testing, too. The software company with operations in both Europe and the US has plans to work with 3000 customers to polish the details of Zelus. What's uncertain is whether Zelus will have a life as anything but a custom-order product, a kind of bespoke emulator.

"We have a number of large and small companies, who don't want to be named, who will work with us on building the first versions just for them," Boers said. "We haven't made a decision yet on making it commercially available as a general product. We'll make that decision by the beginning of next year."

Stromasys offered screen shots of the PA-RISC emulator for MPE/iX as evidence that the software can serve as a virtual platform for the 3000’s OS. The screen above shows the beginning of the boot sequence (click for detailed view). HP provided internals documentation to assist in the design.

A product journey toward a 3000 hardware emulator took another significant step this spring, as the Zelus cross-platform software booted MPE/iX on an Intel server.

CTO Dr. Robert Boers of Stromasys reported that the OS has come up on a version of the emulator that will managed, eventually, by Linux. Although the test screens that Boers sent were hosted by Windows, the "fairly preliminary version" will be released on an open source OS. "Windows is a little passé," Boers said. "But we now have a first prototype."

Stromasys said it has now been able to use Zelus to tap PA-RISC hardware diagnostics to get the bugs out. "The way we had to debug this was just looking at the code instruction by instruction," Boers said, "to figure out what it does. That took us a long time." Compared to the emulators for the DEC market, "this is by far the most complex emulator."

HP once blew up a computer with very high grade explosives, proudly. That Superdome was vaporized, probably. But the happy ending in that film was that an instant cutover of the system preserved all data. Not crowing over a computer as junk, to be sunk as a reef. HP also once wrecked a 3000 while it shot a video. George Stachnik, pitchman of the division, pushed that 3000 off a roof, and there was a happy ending there, too — they booted up the machine they’d tossed off a two-story office building.

But the latest disrespect to the 3000 -- a schoolboy display of firearms online at YouTube -- feels like those years when our Spurs were winning their four basketball championships by playing defense, not being flashy. Preventing scoring was boring. But those four trophies and four banners now gleam and fly in their arena. Boring gets the job done. And as basketball fans have noticed over the last few weeks, scoring drops off during the NBA’s May. Like the 3000’s legendary defense against abuses of flood and fires, the absence of bad times is what we honor. Preventing calamity makes room for prosperity.

I guess if you’ve managed or consulted on one of these 3000s, you’d recall times when even a semi-automatic wouldn’t be enough. This spring I re-gifted a gag called a Tech Sledge, boxed up as a "data processing and technology tool." Just a two-pound wood mallet from the '80s. A gift I had never used, but it enjoyed a featured spot in my old Chronicle editor’s office. My friend Steve, who’s done IT since the ’80s, understood the sentiment in the gift. These days we both consider ourselves part of the old guard. You might, too. For some it's an honor, for others, an epithet.

3000 NewsWire Editorial

We’re watching a passing of the guard this month. May means basketball at my house, hours and hours of it during this month filled with the NBA playoffs. This year’s play includes classic characters: The LA Lakers, the Boston Celtics, and our beloved San Antonio Spurs. Each of these teams are fading, some faster than others. All are now eliminated from this year's championship quest. They’re being pushed aside by newer teams. It’s a lot like computer technology.

But nobody’s standing these still-young men up and shooting them with tommy-guns. That fate has been dished onto a hapless HP 3000 this month.

It takes five minutes to watch its demise, but a sad cavalcade of clips up on YouTube that are filmed in a cornfield look like disrespect, mistaken for humor. The firing squad treatment includes an array of weaponry best suited for a Yosemite Sam cartoon.

A ruling from the 407th District Court of Bexar County, Texas has dismissed the claims against OpenMPE in a lawsuit filed by its former treasurer.

Chairman Jack Connor forwarded a document signed by the judge in the matter which granted a summary judgement to dismiss all claims in the lawsuit filed in November, 2010 by Matthew Perdue. Connor said that the board of directors of the group -- still on the hunt for $50,000 in contributions -- has decided "it does not feel it is prudent to comment further than provide what is available as a matter of public record."

Perdue, who filed his own suit and represented himself at an April 19 hearing, was given an extra three weeks to amend his lawsuit "to asset a cognizable cause of action" against the defendants. The extra time did not impress the judge, by a reading of last week's ruling.

Connie Sellitto has made a move out of a long-time shop using a 3000 box, not long before the system becomes litter at the US Cat Fanciers Association.

Sellitto, who's helped the community with advice online and served as an OpenMPE volunteer, had told us for years that the CFA would be a homestead shop for the foreseeable future, running an A-Class server and with no need to change platforms away from its in-house software. Then a new board of directors at the CFA came a-calling, and change swept in on the wings of new management.

It's not the technical failures of the 3000 that trigger this kind of migration. New management wants to shake off old gear, and the HP 3000 can easily fall into the gunsights of the short sighted. Sellitto asked for help this spring on mapping a "wireframe" of 3000 databases for a new migration team -- an effort led by a company that creates websites. "It will be interesting to see how this develops," Sellitto told us six weeks ago.

What developed was a fresh spot to take her 3000 skills and outreach. Hillary Software, "just a mile and half from where I live," embraced Sellitto as part of its staff. Hillary is a company vested in HP 3000 companies with its byRequest software, but also has an eye on migrations for companies in years to come. From Sellitto's report as she exited 23 years of CFA experience, years to come might be what's required for her prior employer to move off the A-Class.

Hewlett-Packard announced its second quarter results this week, numbers that one business news source said were sparked by a leaked internal memo about inevitable layoffs and cost controls.

Channel News reported that "CEO Leo Apotheker issued a gloomy secret memo warning executives that tough times are ahead," and "a Q2 financial report was rushed out following the leaking of Apotheker's memo." HP quarterly report dates, attended by dozens of stock analysts plus the public via WebEx meets, are usually planned many months in advance.

(Click graphic above for details.)

The HP Q2 numbers were respectable and even beat market analyst forecasts by a few cents per share. But HP trimmed back its 2011 forecast for total revenues by $1 billion, a reduction of less than 1 percent of its previous forecast. Sales from the Business Critical Servers divison, where HP-UX Integrity servers are built and sold, were virtually flat at a 1 percent increase. The HP-UX and Integrity sales now make up the smallest share, at 10 percent, of the ESSN operations. ProLiant business powered by Linux and Windows makes up 61 percent of the quarter's revenues.

However, with a 1 percent increase, Q2 marks the second straight quarter where these replacement systems for the HP 3000 have posted no decline in sales. Operating profits for the Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking unit, which includes the HP-UX alternatives of Windows and Linux servers, increased by about 1.5 percent of operating revenue.

But the memo cited by Channel News said that Apotheker has forecast hard times ahead for a company so large that it employs more than 300,000 and will sell about $130 billion in its fiscal year.

Apotheker told top executives that he's bracing for "another tough quarter" in the July period and urged his deputies to 'watch every penny and minimise all hiring." The memo indicated that the company is continuing to come under pressure and that job cuts are now inevitable. Apotheker said the company's existing headcount plans are "unaffordable, given the pressures on our business."

"Q3 is going to be another tough quarter, one in which we will be driving hard for revenue and profit," Channel News reported that he wrote. "We have absolutely no room for profitless revenue or any discretionary expenditures."

Swapping software tool costs for services engagements is one way to reduce the expense of a migration. When a company can use tools and do a migration themselves, taking responsibility for the accuracy of migrated code cuts costs.

Speedware believes that a company that takes full responsibility for the caliber of its migrated apps can save most of the cost of a fully-outsourced migration. In that latter model, Speedware's Chris Koppe said the company will do everything, “compared to the do it yourself approach, where you can save 90 percent of those costs.” An offer to the first 50 companies which contact the company to purchase the AMXW software suite will include those outsourced services, rewarding the early DIY companies with the added value of consulting.

Other vendors’ migration suites have fallen out of market consideration. Koppe pointed to Ed/Win from Ordina-Denkart, Legacy Liberator from Transoft and Unicon’s conversion tools as becoming footnotes in a search for 3000 DIY tools. While Unicon never sold its suite as a customer-only solution – it used its internal tools to convert COBOL — the other vendors combined software sales with training, the same combo Speedware will offer to the 50 companies.

Keven Miller of 3kRanger is doing migration work for a customer, but his labors have delivered a new function for the 3000 namespace of the HP 3000. HP added many useful functions for the server after the Posix introduction of the mid-1990s. But since some programs don't run from the Posix namespace, Miller needed to make a faithful replication of the putenv() for the 3000 namespace. putenv() changes or adds a value to an environment's variables.

You can download Miller's work for use on your 3000 at his website. "I found that the provided LIBC.LIB.SYS (MPE/iX 6.0) does not provide a  putenv()  function. So to whomever it may be useful, you can get one  under MPE Software, in the MPE issues in libc section. Now this can work in the MPE programming environment as well. Besides putenv(),  there are also a couple fixes for  sleep() and abort()." Miller explains further.

HP's Cathlene McRae noted that putenv() is a Posix function. In Posix, the environment is part of each process. In MPE, the environment is part of the job or session which allows all your processes access to the variables.

ANSI-C describes a getenv() function that retrieves environment variable values and is included in the MPE C library. It uses the HPCIGETVAR intrinsic to do so. However the putenv() function is not part of ANSI-C** and so I suppose that is one reason why it was left out.

A large part of migration projects I'm involved in is testing, to make sure the new environment works the same as on MPE. Therefore I attempt to make my code run on both environments. In this case, some built in runtime debugging code used putenv() which I happened to put back onto MPE for testing. I need to do this in the MPE environment, not Posix, since I'm working with MPE programs for migration.

So I put together a putenv() that uses the HPCIPUTVAR intrinsic; making a good match for the exiting getenv() function.

MB Foster has spent every other Wednesday teaching the principles of HP 3000 data management, best practices which customers are still using to structure their IT transitions. At a webinar this spring, one attendee said his company has been talking about migrating from the 3000 "ever since I've been here, 13 years," he said. "From our standpoint, the first decision that has to be made is, 'What platform?' "

That the kind of approach that flows from in-house apps, where doing a lift and shift onto another system means not purchasing a replacement software suite. Only 15 percent of customers are migrating code, while even fewer build a new system to replace what's on the 3000. MB Foster's Birket Foster said the decision to buy rather than build makes sense only to a company which has the resources needed to do the work.

"We look at whether customers should build, buy or migrate," Foster said, "and most of the time people buy. These days most folks don’t have the skill set to build. Only in a totally unique business will you get some competitive advantage from building the application. Otherwise, you should really consider buying something off the shelf."

Foster said that following a three-phased approach ensures the fewest risks. First you assess, then plan, then implement. Migration might not be the end of what you're going to do, he said in the 45-minute webinar. "It might be the first stage, to integrate better into the company's operations. While HP 3000 migrations have come into sharp focus during the last 10 years, MB Foster's got 25 years' experience migrating data. That data is the fuel that drives any migration.

Not only is the HP 3000 being dismissed by some for its indie futures, the computer is shedding its legacy in some quarters. Up at the Computerworld website, a story about operating computers in the data processing days included a canard about 3000 recovery.

The system's ability to reboot safely and swiftly, with no data loss, is a bedrock benefit. The powerfail protection for IMAGE data slipped away from the memories shared with "Sharky," an anonymous columnist who's spread a fish tale about a server that he never knew. And apparently, neither did the anonymous "pilot fish" telling the tale about a time he was cleaning floors and minding a 3000.

Eventually comes the fateful day when there's a power outage. And not just any outage -- something has taken out both the power and phone lines... "Fish" turns off his flashlight and waits in the dark for the return call, listening to the UPS beeping, and waiting, and listening to the HP 3000 drive heads crash... The tech from corporate determines that the NT server has lost a drive and has to be replaced, and the HP 3000 is "going to need some work."

Clever story, but unless somebody took a hacksaw and hammer to that NT-era 3000's disc pack, the novice operator doesn't remember the 3000's recovery any better than he could coldstart the system. Powerfail recoveries have always been an HP 3000 advantage, even while communicating with UPS systems didn't arrive for years -- until HP launched its own PowerTrust line of UPS units.

One of the companies leading the market into tomorrow is doing its work with people, with software, and with a blend of both online. Later today, MB Foster is linking its expertise with users in the latest of its line of Wednesday lunchtime webinars.

Today's meeting at 11 AM Pacific (2PM Eastern) answers questions and introduces an upgrade program to get 3000 sites to use UDALink, the company's Universal Data Access flagship product. An MB Foster webinar always includes time to ask questions, but the company will offer answers to the most important query: "Where it came from and where it is today and where it is going."

UDALink is the most current generation of software that was hailed by the 3000 community when it was scratching its way to parity with HP's other enterprise servers. MB Foster provided ODBC capability for MPE/iX in the 1990s in a deal with Hewlett-Packard, putting ODBCLink/SE on every 3000 shipped. When you register for today's program, the company says, you can learn about how to transform that database link tool loaded on your 3000 into something that could keep that 3000 relevant.

Speedware is celebrating its first anniversary of employee ownership by giving something away, instead of receiving gifts. The software and services company is making an offer to the 3000 community to mark its first year of refreshed self-management: 50 companies will get free migration services when they purchase the AMXW migration tool suite. The company wants prospects to connect them via the email address [email protected].

The offer throws the spotlight on the software that Speedware reports has helped take more than 700 HP 3000s offline during the last eight years. AMXW, purchased in 2003, is a vital tool that has automated migration work for most of those years. The software speeds the migration of HP 3000s to Unix, Linux or Windows, remaining installed to manage the distinctions between 3000 specifics like job control and the software processes used on target systems.

Jennifer Fisher, the director of Speedware’s sales and marketing, says the services giveaway is targeted at the 3000 owner who’s been unable to assemble the manpower or budget to migrate away from MPE/iX. Fisher said Speedware has matured along with the 3000 customer, so it wants to help them move onward if that’s the company’s goal.

Tomorrow the OpenMPE volunteer group gets its second and perhaps ultimate day in court. On April 19 the group's lawyer appeared before a Bexar County district court judge to offer four motions against the lawsuit filed by former treasurer Matt Perdue. The judge has been patient in the matter, because Perdue represents himself in the suit he filed on Nov. 23.

But reports from those on the scene show that three of the four motions filed by OpenMPE to quash the suit were granted. Only the final motion, to dismiss the matter entirely, remains to be decided. The OpenMPE attorney and Perdue present to the judge late in the afternoon.

OpenMPE chairman Jack Connor has been removed from the suit, because he doesn't live and work in Texas. The lawsuit Perdue drew up doesn't give the matter jurisdiction over an individual outside the state. Perdue's arguments didn't persuade the judge, who gave him a few weeks longer to come up with reasons why the matter shouldn't be ousted -- just like Perdue was removed from the OpenMPE board last November, a few weeks before he sued the group.

The HP Discover conference takes place one month from today, and MPE/iX has retained a small foothold among five days of labs, sessions, meetings and keynote speeches.

The daily session lineup for the biggest HP conference in company history includes 60 minutes of one meeting for OpenMPE, the group of volunteers who led the vendor through a more complete set of exit practices for the HP 3000. HP is assembling a summer conference lineup dotted with star power and a peek at the company’s new CEO Leo Apotheker. While Sir Paul McCartney will give a private concert at the new HP Discover, a session with MPE interest is almost as rare as a sighting of the deceased Beatle John Lennon.

The 3000’s OS issues are represented by the OpenMPE Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting set for 11 AM on Friday June 11, the final hour of a conference that opens with HP officers’ fanfare on June 6. Even sessions with the word migration in their title have become more rare, a sign that HP’s vision has shifted away from its advice and training about leaving platforms.

HP is promising the lowest possible conference pass price to users who attend a webinar on May 12 that outlines the return on investment for attending the show.

Database migration tools have become important tools for 3000 sites, whether they're staying with the platform or moving apps to another environment. One of the most senior has had some makeovers, as Taurus Software's Bridgeware has been the selected tool to move Ecometry customers.

Cailean Sherman of Taurus brought us up to date on the latest for this software created in conjunction with Quest Software. The newest version replicates IMAGE files in real time, as well as MPE files, Eloquence database and the usual suspects in the relational roster: Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, My SQL, or any ODBC database.

A good share of the Bridgeware work has been supporting customers who want to stay on the server. "We’ve been building a lot of operational data stores lately for customers who want to stay on the 3000," Sherman said. "These people want to have their production data available real time in a relational environment for reporting and analysis. The data can be ported to open systems once a migration is over, to replicate data between databases and files on open systems."

Taurus made its entry into the 3000 marketplace at the same time the server was getting PA-RISC hardware. When the new Series 900 servers emerged in 1987, Taurus came out with Chameleon, aimed at letting managers employ both Classic and MPE/XL command interfaces.

Initial reports about the June 1 migration from HP's support portal show that the HP 3000 customer might have been shown the door from HP's support -- just in time.

Bill Hassell, HP-UX guru and former HP SE, is still holding out hope for HP's replacement for its ITRC portal. The ITRC Forums still contain thousands of posts about support for HP 3000s and MPE/iX. But after a conference call and web preview last week, Hassell -- who's now the HP-UX expert for Source Direct -- is waiting for a clear content path to emerge. Right now, there's more emphasis on new functionality like podcasts and webcasts than evidence HP's maintained links to fixes from prior years, when the vendor was still supporting the HP 3000.

"The current Forums won their awards based on content, navigation and participation, not web designer creations," Hassell said in a report he forwarded from a LinkedIn post.

The user interface needs work. Too much white space, very little in site navigation, way too many clicks to get to a meaningful category or topic. In the current Forums, there are 20 major categories, all non-ambiguous and with 3-5 popular related categories listed under each category. All told, there are about 100 direct links to technical content with just one click. But on the (albeit preliminary design) Enterprise Business Community, there are the ever-popular Converged Infrastructure and Business Support Forums.

Big sigh...

HP seems to be using its support arm to steer customers into new product architectures and models. Regular users of the HP Web services might be more likely to need platform-specific directions to these user-contributed answers. With this loss of direct access, the ITRC migration makes the web pages from the HP 3000 indie support vendors even more of a value. "Like most technical users," Hassell says, "we need answers quickly."

The HP 3000 Community group on the LinkedIn social business network is growing up, even while HP's 3000 operations have been shrinking. A shift in the group's structure is giving the rest of the world a way to get group intelligence with just a simple search engine request.

The group was founded less than three years ago, during a period when HP's lab presence was winding down for the community. In that period LinkedIn was still a relative newcomer to the social networking space, but it has a distinct difference. It's based upon business relationships and career intelligence.

The HP 3000 Community grew slowly at first, recommended from one member to another. But two thirds of its members have signed on since spring of 2009 -- the period when HP's online presence about 3000 matters declined the most, while independent resources and channels opened up in full flower. More than 300 professionals with specific 3000 experience and resources are on the LinkedIn rolls today. The information shared covers both migration and homesteading issues that are important to the 3000 community.

Earlier this spring the group threw open its doors to become a LinkedIn Open Group. The shift makes the discussions and resources available to the rest of the world, including potential members, through search engines such as Bing and Google. The members consist of working 3000 managers, developers with decades of experience in MPE/iX, vendors who've supported the system since the 1980s, and even people looking for 3000 experts to hire. LinkedIn is free at a basic membership, which is plenty to connect with other 3000 pros and opportunities.

Over the weekend HP ended an Itanium promotion program designed to win customers for HP-UX. For six months the vendor was giving away $12,000 Integrity servers to any company willing to try out HP's Unix. Analysts said the deal was HP's play to lure Sun's Unix users away from Solaris. Sun's answer came after HP's former CEO took over Sun hardware and OS operations. Oracle, the owners of Sun, simply won't support HP-UX beyond version 11.

Actually, Oracle said it wouldn't support Itanium servers on Oracle 12. But since HP-UX runs only on Itanium, the Oracle Itanium ultimatum amounts to cutting off HP's Unix from its most installed database. Oracle is betting HP-UX won't migrate to x86 hardware. It's probably a safe bet.

HP took the hard-ware path to pushing its Unix, while Sun-Oracle shot a soft cannonball across the bow of Good Ship HP-UX. One was a carrot, the other a stick. Since some users began to ask if HP's creating a port of HP-UX, Kristie Popp, a social media rep in HP's Enterprise Server, Storage and Networking group has replied, "Please note, HP has no plans to port HP-UX to x86."

The HP 3000 faced a similar crossroads 10 years ago this spring. At that time Itanium chips were the early-decade darlings of HP's enterprise futures. HP-UX was already ported to run on Itanium, whenever HP could get its act together and ship servers driven by the chips. HP "had no plans to port" MPE/iX to Itanium hardware. Users heard at the 2001 Interex conference that PA-RISC had plenty of headroom for years to come. One HP 3000 leader in the community believes HP should be preparing its Unix users for a transition to Linux. Free hardware promos won't keep the HP-UX business alive.