Five years ago this week we chronicled the story of Yosemite Community College, a 3000 site that fell to the Unix alternative hosted on then-Sun servers. The MPE apps at Yosemite were from a vendor who'd left the 3000 market, and so the college was doing its own app maintenance. There's a limit to how much of that which an IT department will perform. Eventually the pain of re-developing someone else's source code drives you into re-training and installling new datacenter mission-critical operations.

Edward Berner of Yosemite couldn't hold out, even though he said as far back as 2006 he could use such an emulator product. He was planning, back in 2009, to rent a 3000 for archival purposes.

Fortunately (for the college, but unfortunately for the emulator companies) we've finally managed to retire our HP 3000. I'll start advocating that we sell the hardware to a vendor or something.  After that we can rent a system, or use a service if we need to refer to something from our backup tapes.

But we're hearing from 3000 sites which are in archival mode with their 3000s, and several such customers have been installing and evaluating the Stomasys emulator CHARON.

An emulator wouldn't have kept MPE/iX and those applications in production use at Yosemite. "Our main use for an emulator would have been for running the HP 3000 software for a couple years after the migration was mostly done, for historical data and while the last few stray things were migrated," Berner said. "The attraction being that a 1- or 2-processor Intel system is a lot smaller than a 979 -- and the HP 3000 A Series always seemed too expensive to me."

At the University of Washington Medical Center, an HP 3000 has been in archival mode for more than three years. Computer Services Coordinator Deane Bell said the archival system might be in place for a total of 10 years. Given enough time, emulator providers usually catch up to and then lap the used hardware markets. Nobody's forecasting that the UW shop is buying CHARON. But around 2017, it might look better than a well-used Series 900 -- or even a by-then 14-year-old A-Class.