Emulation key to any platform's survival
Webinar examines 3000 sites' plans for 2012

Emulator stays on target, adds networking

The release schedule for the CHARON HPA/3000 emulator remains on track for a first shipment in January, news we're able to release since the vendor is sharing its fielding testing updates with us.

X11 emulator Sept24 The current plan is to process requests for CHARON-HPA/3000 field tests until the end of October. We are still on schedule for a first product shipment in January. The virtual PA-RISC CPU performance at first product shipment will comparable to MPE running on a single CPU hardware e3000-A400, for commercial applications with light Floating Point use.

(I happen to enjoy that Stromasys is using the classic HP 3000 slash-naming for the product. In the days of bedrock 3000 development, the database was called IMAGE/3000.)

Only two weeks after showing a deep dive of the product at the HP 3000 Reunion, the vendor has polished up Ethernet networking enough to include it as part of the latest field test release. Three more weeks remain to sign up for the bedrock time of the virtualized 3000 server era. 3000 owners and managers can do so with an email to CTO Robert Boers. The greater the number of dedicated testers who sign up, the better this solution into the future will be, and sooner. The HP 3000 would have had more HP lab work at the end if testers of beta patches had emerged.

"CHARON-HPA/3000 Ethernet implementation has become stable enough to be added to the Field Test binaries," Stromasys said in its Monday note. "The download areas will be updated on Tuesday Oct. 11. Xterminal emulation works well."

Xterminal was the foundation for the HP 3000 Reunion demonstrations of the emulator. The MPE veterans in the room during the Sept. 24 demo were impressed to see a 3000 run Glance, DEBUG and boot up, but many wanted to see a window larger than the 32-character-wide X11 one on top of Ubuntu Linux.

There are several aspects to the birth of a product that might add many years to 3000 homesteading (or extend migration calendars). There's how it looks to the system managers. There's the level of emulation -- how much like a 3000's chip it behaves, right down to re-creating the bugs. Developers have worked around these bugs for decades by now.

And finally there's the plumbing and electrical wiring of the 3000's structure. Ethernet is working enough this week to pump some test current through it, starting tomorrow.

 

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