Will MPE spell its end date in 2028?
July 1, 2013
We've covered this topic about a year ago on our blog, complete with a thorough examination from VEsoft's Vladimir Volokh. But a couple of recent reports about the future of MPE deserve some air time. The premise has always been that the calendar handling of the 3000's OS will be kaput in about 14 years' time, owing to some 20th Century-style thinking about the CALENDAR intrinsic.
But CALENDAR won't make a 3000 stop working. Jeff Kell, the networking wizard whose employer the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga still has 3000s on the premises, offered this opinion.
Well, by 2027, we may be used to mm/dd/yy with a 27 on the end, and you could always go back to 1927 :)
And the programs that only did "two digit" years would be all set (did you convert all of 'em for Y2K? Did you keep the old source?)
Our major Y2K-issue was dealing with a "semester" which was YY01 for fall, yy02 for spring, etc. We converted that over to go from 9901 (Fall 1999) to A001 (Fall 2000) so we're good for another 259 years on that part :) Real calendar dates used 4-digit years (32-bit integers yyyymmdd).
Entitled "Schlegel's HP3000 end of life," the message was delivered by Tom Ruganis, MIS Manager Emeritus.
I have been an HP user/manager for 37 years at Schlegel in Rochester, New York, starting on a Series II. We are now running a single 968RX, down from a network of six 3000s. For the last 20 years, we have run a mix of MANMAN and in-house Sales/Order Entry with a lot of local “enhancements.”
Our plans are to replace this with Enterprise IQ from IQMS, running on a Windows-based server, based in South Dakota. Hopefully this will occur soon, as I will be retiring as of this Friday (7/5/13). In the meantime, I will be providing contract support.
It will be a sad day when we finally pull the plug.