3000 events often meet for one last time
July 27, 2011
The HP3000 Reunion will be meeting eight weeks from tomorrow, a Thursday-Saturday gathering that looks like it's bringing in some classic members of your community. This week Vesoft's Vladimir Volokh, now working in his 70s and still visiting customers, chipped in his pre-registration. Vladimir's conference visits have not been a common occurrence lately, although he was ubiquitous in meetings early in the 3000's history.
But the 3000's "one last meeting" has frequently been scheduled. The community has a way of getting back together to trade information and history. We used to call it networking even before the mysteries of the TCP/IP stack became part of the 3000's OS.
Here's a report from a July seven years ago, at the advent of another meeting of the 3000 community.
In the meantime, this month’s conference will marshal the remains of the 3000 community one more time. Benefits of attendance have tilted toward networking for 3000 manager and vendor — even with tech sessions like a four-hour hands-on tutorial about migration to IMAGE-workalike database Eloquence on the schedule.
Eloquence training is also part of the Sept. 22 meeting day of the HP3000 reunion, coming up in eight weeks. That training session from seven years ago was at the final Interex conference, held in August of 2004. The next summer a luncheon hosted tech luminaries and everyday managers when HP World 2005 went bust. HP took over the meeting business that year, but couldn't sustain 3000 gathering at the Technology Forum. So the 3000 community has been preparing to gather for a closing ceremony ever since the World Wide Wake of 2003 that marked the end of HP's 3000 sales. That event was organized, in large part, by the sparkplug of this year's Reunion, Alan Yeo.
I wonder if we could get Jon Bale along as well, and get someone like [Adager's co-founder] Alfredo Rego to make a presentation to them for creating IMAGE. Have they ever received a thank you from the community?
Bale and White have never been formally thanked for creating, and championing, the database that put the HP 3000 into critical mass status in DP. The Reunion is open for moments like this one, as well as others that the community can concoct. Maybe the best thanks up to now is the growing list of attendees for this One Last Time event. You wouldn't want to miss it. But the 3000's history shows that the September Reunion isn't likely to be the one last time when people network in this most social of computer communities.
People knew this even as they gathered eight years ago for that World Wide Wake. Despite the potential for gallows humor, those who celebrated were unwilling to bury their connection with the system. In Chesterville, Ontario, employees at MB Foster had a cookout, while the company’s founder noted that "wake" might not be the best term to describe the community’s affections.
"I think the wake was premature," said company CEO Birket Foster. "The patient’s not dead yet, but we did pass a milestone."
Why not be a part of the next milestone? Pre-registration is underway for this year's event, which is just about as free as all those Wakes around the world.