The District Court in the capital of Kansas is switching off its HP 3000 this week, a process that's going to pull the district clerk's office competely out of service over the first two days of May. The Topeka court's IT department said the alternative to replacing the 3000 software would be going back to paper and pen. The project will knock all court computing offline -- both old and new systems -- for one work week.

"Anyone who needs to file or pick up documents should do so between 8 AM and noon on Thursday and Friday," the court advised Topeka-area citizens on its website. The Topeka courts have been using HP 3000s since the 1980s. Four years ago the court commissioners voted to spend $207,800 for FullCourt software to replace the 3000 application. The court has been paying for the software -- which will be loaded with data May 5-9 -- over three years at no interest. All court data is being extracted and replaced during the workweek of May, when only jury trials, emergency hearings and essential dockets will be heard.

The court is predicting a go-live date of May 12. The HP 3000 will be shut off Friday, May 2, at 5 PM, according to a schedule "that may fluctuate."

The HP 3000 has "outlived its life expectancy, making it essential that we either move on to another system or we go back to paper and pen," according to a statement on the court's website. Converting data is the crucial part of the migration.

No other district court in the state of Kansas has attempted such a challenge.  This data conversion is one of the most important attributes of this project and is carefully being implemented by continuously and repeatedly checking thousands of data elements to ensure that all data converted is “clean” data which is essential to all users. When we finally “go live,” we would sincerely appreciate your careful review of data as you use the system.

32-year-old Justice Systems of Alberquerque sells FullCourt. The latest marketing materials for the software company's Professional Services include a testimonial from Chief Information Technical Officer Kelly O'Brien of the Kansas Judicial Branch. The court's announcements did not break out the cost of software versus the cost of professional migration services.

Chief Judge Evelyn Wilson said in a statement, “We know this system affects the entire community. There are bound to be some bumps in the road. While the court has tried to take into consideration the different issues that may arise, there is no way we can address all of them. Initially, we anticipate that productivity may be slower as people get accustomed to the new system. We’ll do our best to accommodate you, and we ask you to do the same."

The software vendors most likely to sell products for a flat rate -- with no license upgrade fees -- have been the system utility and administration providers. Products such as VEsoft's MPEX, Robelle's Suprtool, Adager's product of the same name -- came in one, or perhaps two versions, at most. The software was sold as the start of a relationship, and so it focused on the understanding the product provided for people responsible for HP 3000s.

That kind of understanding might reveal a Lewis Carroll Cheshire Cat's smile inside many an HP 3000. The smile is possible if the 3000 uses UDC files, and the manager uses only MPE to do a file PURGE. There is a more complete way to remove things from a 3000's storage devices. And you take care about this because eliminating UDCs with only MPE can leave a user unable to use the server. That grin is the UDC's filename. 

To begin, we assume your users have User Defined Commands. User Defined Commands are a powerful timesaver for 3000 users, but they have administrative overhead that can become foolproof with the right tools. These UDCs need to be maintained, and as users drop off and come on to the 3000, their UDCs come and go. There's even a chance that a UDC file could be deleted, but that file's name could remain in the filesystem's UDC master catalog. When that happens, any other UDCs associated with the user will fail, too. It might include some crucial commands; you can put a wide range of operations into a UDC.

When you add a third party tool to your administrator's box, you can make a purge of such files foolproof. You can erase the Cheshire Cat's grin as well as the cat. It's important because that grin of a filename, noted above, can keep valid users from getting work done on the server with UDCs. This is not the reputation anybody expects from a 3000.

As part of the recent CAMUS conference call meeting, Arnie Kwong of MB Foster mentioned the prospect of additional costs the CHARON emulator might trigger. As an example of one possibility, a user of a Series 900 server could move up to a multiple-processor instance of CHARON that's A-Class or N-Class caliber -- gaining MP ability without needed to plug anything into an HP-built hardware multifunction IO board.

Many vendors in the community wouldn't bother with any fee for increasing MPE horsepower at a customer site. They'd be glad for the extension of life of a support contract. And some companies always sold their MPE utility software on a single-fee basis. Whether you ran an N-Class or a Series 918, the cost was the same, usually in the middle four figures.

Some of the larger vendors, selling applications like Infor's MANMAN or PowerHouse when it was a Cognos product, priced their MPE software much differently. The customer base grew accustomed to those upgrade fees even though they didn't like them. Now that MPE/iX is strictly in the hands of independent companies for support, there's an expectation developing that prices for running the server should be much lower. Approaching free would be a preferred trend, but that strategy won't do the homesteading community as much good as imagined.

"The vendor community wants to keep things alive, and enabling economic success," Kwong said near the end of the conference call. "But part of this sucess is the people thing. Birket [Foster] and I have been participating in parts of this community for onto our fourth decade. There’s just a lot of goodwill on a people-to-people level. That’s one of the things that helps us all see all this through."

The rise of an emulator indicates there's a new possible economic opportunity for MPE and its users. That fact alone ought to show that no-fee upgrades to 3000 licenses aren't likely to appear -- at least not from vendors who've got a heritage of conducting that upgrade-fee business.

Second of two parts

When CAMUS held its recent user group conference call, MB Foster's Arnie Kwong had advice to offer the MANMAN and HP 3000 users about the CHARON emulator for PA-RISC systems like the 3000. A more complex environment than HP's decade-old 3000 hardware is in place to enable things like powerfail recovery while protecting data. And readying licenses for a move to the Stromasys CHARON 3000 emulator means you've got to talk to somebody, he said.

"Everybody is pretty helpful in trying to keep customers in a licensing move," Kwong said. "If anyone tells you that you don't even have to ask, and that you're just running a workalike, that would be a mistake. You have to have an open and fair conversation. Not doing so, and then having a software problem, could be a fairly awkward support conversation. You can't make the assumption you'll be able to make this move without any cost." 

If you create secondary processing capacity through CHARON, you'll have to execute new licenses for those licenses. But most of the third party vendors are going to be pretty reasonable and rational. We've all known each other for decades. People who do lots of IT procurement understand straightforward rules for handling that. 

Kwong said that CHARON prospects should make a catalog of their MPE software applications and utilities, and then talk to vendors about tech compatibility, too.

In manufacturing IT in particular, its cost has been declining recently. "Short of somebody paying $10-15 million to re-engineer around SAP, or Infor's other products, most of the incremental spending in the MANMAN and 3000 environments have been to extend life. People do a lot of stuff now on Excel spreadsheets and SQL Server databases around the ERP system. We look to see if the 3000 is the essential piece, and often it is. We look at what other things are affected if we change that 3000 piece."

First of two parts

The recent CAMUS user group meeting, conducted as a conference call, promised some testing and analysis of the Stromasys CHARON HP 3000 emulator -- as done by an outsider. MB Foster is an insider to the HP 3000 community, but the vendor doesn't have an affiliation with Stromasys as a partner. Not at this point, although there are always opportunities for longstanding vendors to join their customers with such a new solution.

CEO Birket Foster said the company's been asked by its customers if MB Foster products would run safely in the CHARON environment. The question not only has been of high interest to 3000 managers. One similar answer lies in the Digital environment, where CHARON has more than 4,000 installations including some CAMUS members who run MANMAN in a VAX system. All's well over there, they report.

CHARON is so much newer in 3000-land. Principal Consultant Arnie Kwong of MB Foster outlined some of the research results from testing on an Intel i7 server with 64GB of memory and SSD storage, as well as a more everyday 8GB capacity box, albeit an AMD-based system. (Both systems can run CHARON for the 3000 emulation.) Wong said using a private VMware cloud, or private backup machines, are common computing-share practices that deserve extra attention with new possibilities of CHARON. "What will it let me do that's different?" he asked.

One of the assumptions of using cloud infrastructure and these new capabilities is whether the fundamental operating characteristics, business processes and business rules embedded in applications like MANMAN are sufficient for what you're doing now. Having talked to lots of MANMAN customers, all of the industry-standard and regulatory practices can be impacted if we do something major like shifting the platform.

Kwong went on to forecast the use of CHARON in a cloud-based implementation and ponder if that use affects regulatory compliance, as well as "the ability to operate on a global basis, and what new opportunities we can do in that mold." He said he'd confine his comments to instances where a cloud-based infrastructure was already in use at MB Foster customer sites. "But our leading candidate to do this kind of thing isn't a VMware kind of architecture." CHARON, Kwong noted, relies heavily on VMware to do its emulation for HP 3000 operations.

The industry-wide provider for hosting TypePad is up, then down, then up again in the battle being waged with hacker Denial of Service attacks. It's the everyday host of the Newswire's blog, so you'll have some trouble getting onto it to read us. It's been five days, and everybody is getting frustrated. This sort of an outage would be getting a 3000 pro's IT recommendations reviewed. Not even deadly storms have knocked out many a 3000 this long.

This is the genesis of good experience, however. It's giving us a good reason to build out an important new branch of the 3000 Newswire's services. Story for Business, which as of this week is a simple Tumblr blog, is giving our readers stories about MPE-related news.

If you go far enough back, you'll recall an era of our history where we hosted our website from an HP 3000 Series 928. We worked with HP's MPE implementation of Apache/iX, until the lags and differences -- imagine an FTP server which didn't include all protocols -- pushed us onto Linux machines. Those machines at 3k Associates continue to perform.

So we're using the formula this week suggested by MPE veteran Vladimir Volokh. Clearly, this is a bad experience that our sponsors and readers are weathering. Vladimir says, "We get asked, 'how do you come up with so much good experience for us?' Because, good experience comes from bad experiences."

There are not many aspects of MPE that seem to best the offerings from open source environments. For anyone who's been tracking the OpenSSL hacker-door Heartbleed, though, the news is good on 3000 vulnerability. It's better than more modern platforms, in part because it's more mature. If you're moving away from mature and into migrating to open source computing, then listen up.

Open source savant Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies told us why MPE is in better shape.

I know that it's been covered other places, but don't know if it's been explicitly stated anywhere in MPE-Land: The Heartbleed issue is due to the 'heartbeat' feature, which was added to OpenSSL after any known builds for MPE/iX.

That's a short way of saying: So far, all the versions of OpenSSL for MPE/iX are too old to be affected by the Heartbleed vulnerability. Seems that sometimes, it can be good to not be on the bleeding edge.

However, the 3000 IT manager -- a person who usually has a couple of decades of computing experience -- may be in charge of the more-vulnerable web servers. Linux is used a lot for this kind of thing. Jeff Kell, whose on-the-Web servers deliver news of 3000s via the 3000-L mailing list, outlined repairs needed and advice from his 30-plus years of networking -- in MPE and all other environments.

For the last 18 hours, the 3000 Newswire’s regular blog host TypePad has had its outages. (Now that you're reading this, TypePad is back on its feet.) More than once, the web resource for the Newswire has reported it’s been under a Denial of Service attack. I’ve been weathering the interruption of our business services up there, mostly by posting a story on my sister-site, Story for Business.

We also notified the community via Twitter about the outage and alternative site. It was sort of a DR plan in action. The story reminds me of the interruption saga that an MPE customer faces this year. Especially those using the system for manufacturing.

MANMAN users as well as 3000 owners gathered over the phone on Wednesday for what the CAMUS user group calls a RUG meeting. It's really more of an AUG: Applications User Group. During the call, it was mentioned there’s probably more than 100 different manufacturing packages available for business computers which are like the HP 3000. Few of them, however, have a design as ironclad against interruption as the venerable MANMAN software. Not much service could be denied to MANMAN users because of a Web attack, the kind that’s bumped off our TypePad host over the last day. MANMAN only employs the power of the Web if a developer adds that interface.

This is security through obscurity, a backhanded compliment that a legacy computer gets. Why be so condescending? It might be because MPE is overshadowed by computer systems that are so much newer, more nimble, open to a much larger world.

They have their disadvantages, though. Widely-known designs of Linux, or Windows, attract these attempts to deny their services. Taking something like a website host offline has a cost to its residents, like we reside on TypePad. Our sponsors had their messages denied an audience. In the case of a 3000, when it gets denied it’s much more likely to be a failure of hardware, or a fire or flood. Those crises, they’ve got more rapid repairs. But that’s only true if a 3000 owner plans for the crisis. Disaster Recovery is not a skill to learn in-situ, as it were. But practicing the deployment it’s about as popular as filing taxes. And just as necessary.

I have someone at a remote site that may need a drive replaced.  How can I tell which drive is a certain LDEV?

Keven Miller, who at 3kRanger.com describes himself as "a software guy with a screwdriver," answers the question -- for those that don't have the benefit of seeing an amber light on a failed drive.

Well, for me, I run SYSINFO.PRVXL.TELESUP first. Then you have a map of LDEV# to SCSI path. Next, you have to follow your SCSI path via SYSINFO.PRVXL.TELESUP.

From the example above, on my 928, 56/52 is the built-in SCSI path. Each disk has a hardware selection via jumpers to set the address of 0 to 6. (7 is the controller). You would have to inspect each drive, which could be one of the two internal ones, or any external ones.

The CAMUS manufacturing app user group has a meeting tomorrow (April 16), starting at 10:30 Central time. An email to organizer and CAMUS RUG officer Terri Lanza will get you a dial-in number for the event. Birket Foster of MB Foster, one of the community's longest-tenured migration and sustainability vendors, will brief attendees on his perspective of the CHARON HPA, the HP 3000 hardware emulator.

CAMUS also has a Talk Soup as part of its dial-in agenda that runs through noontime. They only host their call twice a year, and it's a worthwhile endeavor to check in with others who are running HP 3000s in production mode.

Contact Lanza for your dial-in at [email protected].

Last week I lumped a error of omission by users into the basket of Hewlett-Packard's 3000 miscalculations. I made my own mistake by doing that. In part of an article about the 3000 user's longer view, I figured the miscue that sparked programming for the Y2K crisis fell into HP's lap. After all, the date handling in MPE was built to break down in 2028. Surely the valiant reworking of two-digit year representation came from a shortcoming out of HP's labs as well, I reckoned.

Vladimir Volokh called me to correct that concept. There was much work to do in our community to salvage good computing in the years leading up to 2000. But that work was the result of developers repairing their own mis-estimations of the durability of 3000 applications. Four-digit representations of years were possible from the very first month the 3000 went into serious duty. (That month happens to be just about 40 years ago, as of this month.) The users of the system, and commercial developers, just didn't see the need for using precious storage to represent four complete digits during 1974.

Four decades have brought the 3000's dating capability within sight of the end-date of accuracy. In the same way as 2000 was a community-wide roadblock, Volokh said that, just like age 70 is the new 60, "2028 has become the new Y2K."

The year 2028 is notable for customers who don't plan to leave the HP 3000. It's the year when timestamps stop being accurate, because the CALENDAR intrinsic in MPE/iX only uses 7 bits to store year information.

For those HP 3000 applications using CALENDAR, HP has advised you use the newer HPCALENDAR in your apps. The newer intrinsic, polished up in 1998 with version 6.0, extends the 3000 application's date accuracy to more than five decades beyond the 3000's inception. 2027 will be the last year to accurately generate timestamps in the 3000's filesystem. HPCALENDAR goes further, for whatever that's worth.

An HP advisory explained the differences, at least in part:

The original MPE timestamp format was that used by the CALENDAR intrinsic, a 16 bit quantity allowing 9 bits for the day of the year and 7 bits for the year, added to 1900. Since the largest number represented by 7 bits is 127, this format is limited to accurately storing years up to 2027.

The newer HPCALENDAR intrinsic uses a 32 bit quantity, allowing 23 bits for the year, since 1900 and the same 9 bits for the day of the year. This format provides a significantly longer period of timestamp accuracy.

Heartbleed needs a repair immediately. Windows XP will need some attention over the next three years, as the client environment most favored by migrating 3000 sites starts to age and get more expensive. XP is already "off support," for whatever that means. But there's a window of perhaps three years where change is not as critical as a repair to Heartbleed's OpenSSL hacker window.

Then there's MPE. The OS already has gone through more than a decade of no new sales. And this environment that's still propping up some business functions has now had more than five years of no meaningful HP lab support. In spite of those conditions, the 3000's OS is still in use, and by one manager's accounting, even picking up a user in his organization.

"Ending?" Tim O'Neill asks with a rhetorical tone. "Well, maybe MPE/iX will not be around 20 years from now, but today one of our people  contacted me and said they need to use the application that runs on our HP 3000. Isn't that great? Usage is increasing!"

Pondering if MPE/iX will be around in 20 years, or even 13 when the end of '27 date bug surfaces, just shows the longer view the 3000 owner still owns. Longer than anything the industry's vendors have left for newer, or more promising, products. My favorite avuncular expert Vladimir Volokh called in to leave a message about his long view of how to keep MPE working. Hint: This septuagenarian plans to be part of the solution.

The most wide-open hole in website security, Heartbleed, might have bypassed the web security tools of the HP 3000. Hewlett-Packard released WebWise/iX in the early 2000's. The software included SSL security that was up to date, back in that year. But Gavin Scott of the MPE and Linux K-12 app vendor QSS reminds us that the "security through antiquity" protection of MPE/iX is a blessing that's not in a disguise.

WebWise was just too late to the web game already being dominated by Windows at the time -- and even more so, by Linux. However, the software that's in near total obscurity doesn't use the breached OpenSSL 1.0.1 or 1.0.2 beta versions. Nevertheless, older software running a 3000 -- or even an emulated 3000 using CHARON -- presents its own challenges, once you start following the emergency repairs of Heartbleed, Scott says.

It does point out the risks of using a system like MPE/iX, whose software is mostly frozen in time and not receiving security fixes, as a front-line Internet (or even internal) server. Much better to front-end your 3000 information with a more current tier of web servers and the like. And that's actually what most people do anyway, I think.

Indeed, hardly any 3000s are used for external web services. And with the ready availability of low-cost Linux hosts, any intranets at 3000 sites are likely to be handled by that open-sourced OS. The list of compromised Linux distros is long, according to James Byrne of Harte & Lynne, who announced the news of Heartbleed first to the 3000 newsgroup. 

Computing's Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) forms part of the bedrock of information security. Companies have built products around SSL, vendors have wired its protocols into operating systems, vendors have applied its encryption to data transport services. Banks, credit card providers, even governments rely on its security. In the oldest days of browser use, SSL displayed that little lock in the bottom corner that assured you a site was secure -- so type away on those passwords, IDs, and sensitive data.

In a matter of days, all of the security legacy from the past two years has virtually evaporated. OpenSSL, the most current generation of SSL, has developed a large wound, big enough to let anyone read secured data who can incorporate a hack of the Heartbeat portion of the standard. A Finnish security firm has dubbed the exposed hack Heartbleed.

OpenSSL has made a slow and as-yet incomplete journey to the HP 3000's MPE/iX. Only an ardent handful of users have made efforts to bring the full package to the 3000's environment. In most cases, when OpenSSL has been needed for a solution involving a 3000, Linux servers supply the required security. Oops. Now Linux implementations of OpenSSL have been exposed. Linux is driving about half of the world's websites, by some tallies, since the Linux version of Apache is often in control.

One of the 3000 community's better-known voices about mixing Linux with MPE posted a note in the 3000 newsgroup over the past 48 hours to alert Linux-using managers. James Byrne of Harte & Lyne Ltd. explained the scope of a security breach that will require a massive tourniquet. To preface his report, the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and SSL in the TCP/IP stack encrypt data of network connections. They have even done this for MPE/iX, but in older, safe versions. Byrne summed up the current threat.

There is an exploit in the wild that permits anyone with TLS network access to any system running the affected version of OpenSSL to systematically read every byte in memory. Among other nastiness, this means that the private keys used for Public Key Infrastructure on those systems are exposed and compromised, as they must be loaded into memory in order to perform their function.

It's something of a groundbreaker, this hack. These exploits are not logged, so there will be no evidence of compromises. It’s possible to trick almost any system running any version of OpenSSL released over the past two years into revealing chunks of data sitting in its system memory.

Today's the day that Microsoft gives up its Windows XP business, but just like the HP 3000 exit at Hewlett-Packard, the vendor is conflicted. No more patches for security holes, say the Redmond wizards. But you can still get support, now for a fee, if you're a certain kind of Windows XP user.

It all recalls the situation of January 2009, when the support caliber for MPE/iX was supposed to become marginal. That might have been true for the typical kind of customer who, like the average business XP user, won't be paying anything to Microsoft for Service Packs that used to be free. But in 2009 the other, bigger sort of user was still paying HP to take 3000 support calls, fix problems, and even engineer patches if needed. 

A lot of those bigger companies would've done better buying support from smaller sources. Yesterday we took note of a problem with MPE/iX and its PAUSE function in jobstreams, uncovered by Tracy Johnson at Measurement Specialties. In less than a day, a patch that seemed to be as missing as that free XP support of April 8 became available -- from an independent support vendor. What's likely to happen for XP users is the same kind of after-market service the 3000 homesteader has enjoyed.

Johnson even pointed us to a view of the XP situation and how closely it seems to mirror the MPE "end of life," as Hewlett-Packard liked to call the end of 2010. "Just substitute HP for Microsoft," Johnson said about a comparison with makers of copiers and makers of operating systems.

Last week a 3000 manager was probing for the cause of a Command Interface CI error on a jobstream. In the course of the quest, an MPE expert made an important point: Patches to repair such MPE/iX bugs are still available. Especially from the seven companies which licensed HP's source code for the HP 3000s.

This mention of MPE bug repair was a reminder, actually, that Hewlett-Packard set the internals knowledge of MPE free back in 2010. Read-only rights to the operating system source code went out to seven companies worldwide, including some support providers such as Pivital Solutions and Allegro Consultants.

The latter's Stan Sieler was watching a 3000 newsgroup thread about the error winding up. Tracy Johnson, the curator of the 3000 that hosts the EMPIRE game and a former secretary to OpenMPE, had pointed out that his 3000 sometimes waits longer than expected after a PAUSE in a jobstream.

I nearly always put a CONTINUE statement before a PAUSE in any job.  Over the years I have discovered that sometimes the CPU waits "longer" than the specified pause and fails with an error.

A lively newsgroup discussion of 28 messages ensued. It was by far the biggest exchange of tech advice on the newsgroup in 2014, so far. Sieler took note of what's likely to be broken in MPE/iX 7.5, after an HP engineer had made his analysis of might need a workaround. Patches and workarounds are a continuing part of the 3000 manager's life, even here in the second decade of the 3000's Afterlife. You can get 'em if you want 'em.

April 16 is going to be a busy day for MB Foster's CEO Birket Foster.

Long known for his company's Wednesday Webinars, Foster will be adding a 90-minute prelude on the same day as his own webinar about Data Migration, Risk Mitigation and Planning. That Wednesday of April 16 kicks off with the semi-annual CAMUS conference-call user group meeting. Foster is the guest speaker, presenting the latest information he's gathered about Stromasys and its CHARON HP 3000 emulator.

The user group meet begins at 10:30 AM Central Time, and Foster is scheduled for a talk -- as well as Q&A from listeners about the topic -- until noon that day. Anyone can attend the CAMUS meeting, even if they're not members of the user group. Send an email to CAMUS leader Terri Lanza at [email protected] to register, but be sure to do it by April 15. The conference call's phone number will be emailed to registrants. You can phone Lanza with questions about the meeting at 630-212-4314.

Starting at noon, there's an open discussion for attendees about any subject for any MANMAN platform (that would be VMS, as well as MPE). The talk in this soup tends to run to very specific questions about the management and use of MANMAN. Foster is more likely to field questions more general to MPE. The CHARON emulator made its reputation among the MANMAN users in the VMS community, among other spots in the Digital world. You don't have to scratch very deep to find satisfied CHARON users there.

Then beginning at 1 PM Central, Foster leads the Data Migration, Risk Mitigation and Planning webinar, complete with slides and ample Q&A opportunity.

As the next end of days bears down on us -- Windows XP will become a former Microsoft product next Tuesday -- it's worthwhile to remember that the life beyond a vendor's designs can still fulfill. XP will operate in millions of places from next week and onward, but it's going to be a legacy system to many IT planners. That puts it in a similar spot with MPE, as well as IBM's legacy, the Series i systems.

Yes, they all have differences in their legacy standings. MPE's hardware -- well, the stuff badged with HP on it -- is beyond a decade old. There's nothing new there. Microsoft's hardware is everywhere, but the security essentials are taking a mortal wound starting next week. As for the IBM legacy options, we turned to Fresche Legacy's Jennifer Fisher. The company helped build up the 3000 and MPE worlds as Speedware, before it rebranded itself and expanded its focus to IBM.

Fisher, the VP of Global Sales and Marketing, said that love and IT can and do go together, something the company has experienced while serving both the 3000 and Series i worlds. "When we say 'IT can make you smile' and 'love your legacy,' this is want it's all about," she said. "You need to nurture and care for the legacy. Leverage it, and make it work for you."

By Ron Seybold

It might feel a bit absurd to think that hand-written forms, some even photocopied, would be essential vehicles of crucial monetary reports. PDF has become old-school, it’s so mainstream now. After all, several current and former Newswire sponsors sell software to eliminate paper. 

“Good luck with that,” my friend says of eliminating the need to extract. We meet for our coffee in the evenings now, while drinking decaf, because his alarm rings at 5:30 every workday and a good night’s sleep makes for an accurate workday. He's breaking open envelopes with springtime government forms, and more lately paper checks and money orders, enclosed. It's a temporary job with lasting benefits.

He tells me, with a look that I envy, that his wife is rousing herself into those wee hours to make his breakfast, pack his lunch. It’s like the Cleavers, June and Ward, I told him. “Yeah, and just like my dad,” he replies, talking about his pop eating eggs in the Sixties before sunup, to make a 7AM shift start. He says those eggs were cooked by his mom, who was just as much on the clock as his dad.

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I remember such mornings only dimly, from my own days when I served that government in the US Army. You got used to a workday beginning before sunrise. Coffee of high-test variety was essential. And boy, was that Army of the 1970s ever run on paper. Three part forms and carbon and typewriters, not to mention my job — radio teletype operator, relaying troop strength and mobile armor readiness reports. All printed out on rough newsprint-grade paper in three-inch-thick rolls. Delivered across equipment that was already more than a decade old, and balky on our lucky days.

But those Army days of mine, like my pal’s temporary workdays, have one thing in common. It’s the rare job, he says, “where when you’re not there, you don’t have to care.” The work is important, of course. This agency pumps the lifeblood of revenue into the US. But for a season that’s well-known this time of year, it’s powered by piecework. Like a dance, he tells me, and I furrow my brow because I don’t get it. “We can raise up our desks to stand, and I rock back and forth while I move that mail.” I can just see him in his thick-soled shoes, flexing calves while he funnels all that paper through the mill, a throwback to shift work. There’s even a company cafeteria, he says, and a nurse’s station for paper cuts and sometimes worse.

The careful reader of ours will note that we’re now shifting to calling our paper issues Spring, and so forth. We have printed four per year, like the seasons, ever since 2006. Things do change, like climate or the habits of readers. If it were up to me, there would be a respected place for paper in my life for the rest of it. If I’m lucky, that’ll extend beyond the 3000’s CALENDAR wall of 2028. I’ll only be 71 by then. Just a boy, compared to the sage age of Fred White (beyond 85 now) or Vladimir Volokh (just celebrating number 75 this spring, he tells me.)

While my friend talks of everlasting paper, I think fondly of our newsletter, that name we gave to this Newswire product when we created it back in 1995. It was a time when online usually meant rolling off a PC terminal or a 3000’s 792 hardware. There was no Web when we planned this, but we certainly had to embrace it quickly. We got advice on making a website, but the blog was built out of our own observations. It helped that I’d been telling 3000 stories for a couple of decades before the blog went online.

Almost 10 years after the last update to MPE/iX -- the PowerPatch 2 of release 7.5 -- a new version of the operating system is emerging. What's being called MPE/iX 8.0 by the World OS ID board has begun to surface from the rogue collective of open source coders known as ReBoot.me, which has a website based in Macedonia.

It's not known as this point how ReBoot.me got its hands on MPE/iX source code, but the modifications to the OS appeared to be demonstrated on an HP L-Class server. The new version was captured in a video released for a few hours on YouTube, but removed from North American, Asian, African, European and all Middle Eastern YouTube users. This 8.0 MPE/iX can still be viewed in a demo from viewers in the Bahamas, or any location that employs the domain .bs.

The secrecy appears to stem from some first-ever features on any operating system. Much like the groundbreaking memory space allocation of MPE/XL, the 8.0 release -- ReBoot.me calls it New MPE -- supports cloud hang time, self-repairing line breaks, and the manipulation of drone clusters. Seynor Blachboxe, the code-named spokesperson for the open sourcers, said the drone support was a late addition, one that helped fund the entire project.