On the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a record pinnacle, Hewlett-Packard released quarterly results that pushed the company's stock down 10 percent.

HP is no longer in the Dow, a revision that the New York Stock Exchange made last year. HP is revising its organization this year in preparing to split in two by October. The numbers from HP's Q1 of 2015 indicate the split can't happen soon enough for the maker of servers targeted to replace HP 3000s. The company is marching toward a future more focused on enterprise systems -- but like a trooper on a hard course, HP fell out during the last 90 days.

HP said that the weakness in the US Dollar accounted for its overall 5 percent drop in sales compared to last year's first quarter. Sales would have only fallen 2 percent on a constant-currency basis, the company said. It mentioned the word "currency" 55 times in just its prepared marks of an earnings conference call this week. The 26.8 billion in sales were off by $1.3 billion on the quarter, a period where HP managed to post $1.7 billion in pre-tax earnings. 

That $1.7 billion is a far cry from Apple's $18 billion in its latest quarter profits. HP's arch-rival IBM is partnering with Apple on enterprise-caliber deals.

Meanwhile, the still-combined Hewlett-Packard has rolled from stalled to declining over the last 18 months, which represents some of the reason for its bold move to split itself. "Enterprise trends are set to remain lackluster absent a transformative acquisition," said one analyst while speaking to MarketWatch this week. Two-thirds of the $5.5 billion in Printing came from supplies. Ink is still king in the printing group

Industry Standard Systems (Intel-based Windows servers) provided the lone uptick in the report. Sales of products such as the newest Gen9 ProLiants lifted the revenues up 7 percent compared to the Q1 of 2014. HP is ready to take advantage of upcoming rollovers in Windows Server installations.

Last week on this day we announced we're going all-digital with HP 3000 news. So what follows here is not a good night to publishing, but a good morning. Early each day I trek to my Mac and open a digital version of our Austin newspaper. We make coffees and print out the day’s crossword and number puzzles, using the digital American-Statesman. Abby I write on these two pieces of paper, front and back, because it’s the classic way to solve puzzles. But the rest of the day’s news and features arrive digitally. We can even follow our beloved Spurs with a digital version of the San Antonio paper, scanning an app from our iPads.

We discovered that we don’t miss the big, folded pages that landed on our driveway, the often-unread broadsheets that piled up under the coffee table. I hope you won’t miss those mailed pages of ours too much. Paper is holding its own in the book publishing world, yes. The latest numbers show 635 million printed books sold in 2014, a slim 2 percent rise over 2013.

But this is the news, periodical pages whose mailed delivery period is usually measured in days. A tour of publications that quit print in the past year or two is in order. We start with the most recent retirement, Macworld. Its final print issue mailed last fall — now all-digital. It sells what it is calling “digitally-remastered” articles, something aimed at iPad readers. The subscription cost has even increased.

How about some venerable newsweeklies, like US News & World Report and Newsweek? Both still serve stories from lively websites. Their stalwart competitor Time still sits on waiting room tables and newsstands, though. But just 48 pages of print is the norm for that weekly.

Some publications in our own 3000 world pulled their plug too early, or too late, to deliver a digital generation.

A physical dongle has been required up to now, but the new Stromasys Charon-HPA licenses for MPE will be designed to use software-only verification. Applications will still be matched against HPSUSAN to prevent any kind of fraud.

“We are moving toward a software license,” said Alexandre Cruz, Stromasys Sales Engineer. “This will prevent any licensing problems that might occur while using a cloud provider. We will create a machine for licensing purposes which has exactly the same structure as a USB dongle. We still require the HPSUSAN and the HPCPUNAME.”

“We finished the testing and we’ve already discussed it for a couple of customers. I have deployed it myself for testing. These customers have not started to use virtualization for their HP 3000s, but we are proposing that they use the cloud instead of a physical server.”

Stromasys has started to offer cloud-based versions of its HP 3000 virtualized server, after successful tests using Rackspace as a cloud provider. The software solution’s total ownership cost will drop as a result, according to company officials.

The Charon HPA virtualization system is also being sold at an entry-level price of $9,000, according to Razvan Mazilu, Global Head of Presales and Services. That price point delivers an A400 level of performance with eight simultaneous connections.

“The price range for our solutions goes from $9,000 for the HPA/A408D to $99,000 for the HPA/N4040,” he said.

Deploying that software in a cloud setting is still in early stages, now that the testing was completed in November. Stromasys says customers can use their own cloud providers, or Stromasys can recommend a provider as robust as Rackspace.

We always knew that digital delivery was part of The 3000 NewsWire mission. We branded our publication with the word “wire” because that’s what the world understood in 1995 about anything beyond printed information. 

Closing in on 20 years later, it’s time to unplug from print. The change has been inevitable, a lot like many changes for the 3000 community’s members. It also mirrors the way information and content moves today: virtually without wires.

In the year that my wife Abby and I started the NewsWire, using wires was essential to staying connected. Our computers were wired to the network, the modem wired to the computer. Our music came to us over a CD player wired up to a stereo receiver, and the receiver was wired to our big honking speakers.

Today it’s all wireless, and starting after this month's Winter issue, just mailed, we’ll be all paperless. Our music and computing has gained flexibility and speed while it shed its wires. Going paperless and wireless amount to the same thing: embracing a new, fluid future for what we need.

When I started writing this news resource, I had to be connected via wires just to make a paper product. Now we can send and receive information with no wires to speak of, except for those in the datacenters where our information is stored and exchanged. The laptop is wireless, tablets and phones are wire-free. So can build on what we’ve shared for close to 20 years using no paper. Even the invoicing has gone all-digital.

We still love paper here. There’s no future that I can see where paper won’t be a special medium for consuming and enjoying some stories. But for news, and things that evolve, digital delivery is the flexible choice for 2015 and beyond.

No, this isn’t our end-of-life notice. But after more than 8 million mailed pages since 1995, we can go farther with digital delivery.

After almost 20 years of reporting news and technology updates using our printed issues, The 3000 NewsWire goes to an all-digital format following this month's Winter 2015 print issue. It's our 153rd, and this announcement marks our new focus on delivering information exclusively online.

This is not a farewell. We're only saying goodbye to our paper and ink.

The articles and papers published on this blog will continue to update and inform the MPE community. After racking up more than nine years of digital publishing, this blog now has more than 2,500 articles, including video, podcasts, and color digital images from resources around the world. We have immediate response capabilities, and rapid updating. We have a wide array of media to tell the stories going forward from 2015.

It’s the reach of our Web outlet that enables the strategy to take the NewsWire all-digital, also reducing the publication’s eco-footprint. Online resources go back to 1996. We'll take special care to bring forward everything that remains useful.

The first paper issue of The 3000 NewsWire appeared in August of 1995 at that year’s Interex conference in Toronto. We hand-carried a four-page pilot issue to Interex '95. To introduce the fresh newsletter to the marketplace, HP announced our rollout during its TV news broadcast 3K Today.

By Brian Edminster
Applied Technologies

As great at it would be to see, it really doesn't matter if MPE/iX's network software is never updated to natively handle IPv6 addresses Here's why.

HP 3000s are rarely the only computer system in a datacenter. There's almost always some other system to handle DNS and email and file-serving (although our beloved systems can serve these functions) — to say nothing of firewalls and switches and routers that shield our systems from unwanted accesses, while optimizing the flow of information that we do want to occur. 

These other systems (especially the firewalls and routers) are going to be the network access salvation for our legacy systems. That’s because many can, or will, provide bridging between IPv6 and IPv4 address spaces.

And not yet discussed, but even more important, is that in the long run Hewlett-Packard’s HP-PA iron won't be hosting MPE/iX.  It'll be running in an emulator (The Stromasys Charon-HPA, as of now) emulation that is hosted on hardware and under an OS that does support IPv6.

Four years ago this month we reported that it was time to get ready for the bigger-scale network addresses called IPv6. In that year, the Internet was reported to have run out of the IPv4 addresses, which was the impetus to create the larger IP numbers. It also seemed like the HP 3000's inability to address IPv6 was going to be one of those sparks to getting migrated off the system.

But despite a lack of resources -- which would have been OpenMPE volunteers -- it looks like IPv6 hasn't hemmed in the 3000 from continued service. Now the open source project called Docker has a new 1.5 release, one that aims to bring these bigger IP addresses to more systems. Open source, of course, means Docker might even be of some help to the 3000s that need to be in control of network addresses.

The IPv6 protocol was among those OpenMPE considered when it applied for its license for MPE/iX source. It was suggested back in 2008 that a contract project might revise the 3000's networking to accommodate the new protocol.

As we surmised four years ago, native support for IPv6 networking hasn't been the deal-breaker some 3000 experts expected. Although HP prepared the 3000 to do DNS service, the vendor didn't build a patch in 2009 to eliminate a security hole in DNS for MPE/iX. That's bedrock technology for Internet protocols, so it would have to be made secure. Much of this kind of routing for 3000 shops takes place on external PC systems today.

Making old dogs do new tricks has been demonstrated on Windows. You can even make an older Windows XP box do IPv6, according to Paul Edwards, a former OpenMPE director who's been a training resource for the 3000 community for decades.

How do I use the tar utility to put data onto tape on an HP 3000?

1) Create a tape node

:MKNOD “/dev/tape c 0 7”

2) Enter posix shell

:SH -L

3) Mount a blank tape and enter the tar command

shell/ix>tar -cvf /dev/tape /ACCOUNT/GROUP/FILENAME

How can I determine the validity of an SLT tape?

Use CHECKSLT.MPEXL.TELESUP option 1.

What is the command to abort a hung session? I tried ABORTJOB #s3456. I seem to remember there is a command that will do more.

You can use =SHUTDOWN. But seriously, there is a chance that if it is a network connection, NSCONTROL KILLSESS=#S3456 will work. If it is a serial DTC connection, ABORTIO on the LDEV should work. Finally, depending upon what level of the OS you are on, look into the ABORTPROC command. This might help as a last resort.

This second month of the new year is the first full month for changes to retailer or e-tailer enterprises. While the HP 3000 is scarcely involved in retail IT, the e-tail aspects of the industry triggered the fastest growth in the installed base. That was during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, when Ecometry fielded so much growth that it represented more than half of the new HP 3000 installations.

The nature of e-tailing is built around holidays, so the last three months of each year, and much of January, see few changes to IT operations. But now it's a data mart month for these enterprises. Marts have been around a very long time, well back into those 1990s. A mart is a subset of a data warehouse, and the mart has established itself as fundamental database technology.

In the e-tailer sector where 3000s still operate, new data insights are much prized. Catalogs started these businesses, and by now there's a gold standard to capturing customer dollars based on data analysis. The discount website Zulily measures customer interaction on a per-transaction basis, then tunes the landing pages to fit what a customer's shown interest in during prior visits. That's the kind of insight that demands a serious data mart strategy.

Most e-tailers, the kind of 3000 user that does e-commerce, are not that sophisticated. For those Ecometry sites with requirements that outstrip that software suite, Ability Commerce has add-ons like an order management system. For data mart setups, these sites can rely on MB Foster, according to its CEO Birket Foster. Ability and MB Foster are in a new partnership for this data mart season.

"Ability has complementary products to the Ecometry system," Foster said, "but they also can replace the Ecometry system. We, on the other hand, do work on putting together data marts for retail. We expect there will be an opportunity for us to have a chat about how a data mart might work for these people."

These e-tailing sites are just now getting to look at the most recent Ecometry strategy from last June, Foster added. It's a prime time for plans to form up and migrations to proceed. With every migration, data has to move. That's what a big online movie vendor learned last year.

New general manager Glenn Osaka felt confident about the 3000's useful life out to 2013 in this 1993 article from the HP Chronicle. (Click for pop-up details.)

Just 22 years ago this month, the leader of the HP 3000 division figured HP would still be selling and supporting HP 3000s working in businesses today. Glenn Osaka was in his first few months running what HP called CSY, a group that was coming up hard against HP's own Unix sales force.

"I think there's another 20 years in it," he said in 1993, "but I can tell you that 20 years from now, we'll probably look back and the 3000 won't be looking at all like it looks today."

Nobody could see a virtualized server looking like HP's proprietary hardware. PA-RISC computing was just becoming dominant. In 1993 there was no serious emulation in enterprise servers, let alone virtualization. The magic of Charon had not even dawned for the Digital servers where the Stromasys product notched its first success.

But HP was thinking big in that February. Osaka said the 3000 was about to take on "applications that traditionally  would have been thought of as IBM mainframe-class applications. That program is going gangbusters for us. To get that new business on the high end of the product line is very effective for us, because it's the most profitable business we can do. More and more of our new business is going to come from people who are coming from mainframes."

The division was posting annual growth of 5-10 percent, which might have been impressive until HP compared it to 40 percent annual growth in its Unix line.

In a year when HP was just introducing a Unix-like Posix interface to MPE, Osaka said HP's "work that we're doing on Unix is very easily leveraged to the 3000, and we're simply using our sales force to help us find the opportunities to bring it to market first." 

He identified the newest generation of the 3000's database as "SQL for IMAGE," something that would help with relationships with partners like Cognos, Gupta Technologies, PowerSoft and more. What HP would call IMAGE/SQL "will give our customers access to these partners' tools without having to change their database management system." A new client-server solutions program was afoot at HP, and the 3000 was being included on a later schedule than the HP 9000 Unix servers.

The server would "carve itself a nice, comfortable niche in some of the spaces we don't even really conceive of today, particularly in transaction-based processing." Osaka would hold the job until 1995, when he'd become the head of the Computer Systems Business Unit at HP. By that time, he'd guessed, HP would still be able to show its customers that "the level of capability that we provide on the 3000 is higher" than HP Unix servers.

A webinar briefing this week on data transfer technologies and application portfolios included a new phrase: Going Cloud. It sounded like the ideal of going green for paper-based enterprises, or moving away from something that once served its purpose well. One of the providers of a migration replacement package for 3000 manufacturing users suggests it's high time to consider the unseen potential of the cloud as a place that ERP can go.

In a blog post called Cloud ERP: Inertia Is Not An Option, a technologist at the ERP vendor Kenandy touts an analyst's white paper that says there are "increasingly credible alternatives to the old line behemoths,” and giving Kenandy as an example. The white paper by Cindy Jutras of ERP consultants Mint Jutras is titled Next Generation ERP: Kenandy's Approach. It makes a case for why an HP 3000 stalwart like MANMAN, built by ASK in the 1970s, is ready for a trip to the cloud.

Kenandy needs to actively engage not only with its prospects, but also its customers. For that type of engagement, it needs to build an active community.

This was something Sandy Kurtzig’s prior company ASK was very good at – so good in fact that the MANMAN community has outlived the company and lives on even today. Can Kenandy replicate this kind of success? Odds are in favor of doing just that. The MANMAN community was built on word of mouth, local and regional user groups and an annual conference.

Not only does Kenandy hope to be able to deliver a full customer list for references (as ASK did for many years), but also has many more tools at its disposal to support that community, including a one-stop customer portal (called the Kenandy Community). Its ability to engage with the community either as a whole, or personally, one customer at a time, has never been more technology-enabled.

Editor's note: When I saw a request this week for a copy of HP patch MPEMX85A (a patch to STORE that enables Store-To-Disk) for older MPE/iX releases, it brought a storage procedure request to mind.

I'm dealing with some MPE storage processes and need assistance. You would think after storing files on tapes after 10-plus years, we would have found a better way to do this. We use TurboStore with four tape drives and need to find a way to validate the backup. Vstore appears to only have the ability to use one tape drive. Currently I have some empty files scattered through the system and use a separate job to delete them, remount the tapes and restore, trying to access all four drives. 

When using vestore:

vstore [vstorefile] [;filesetlist]

It seems that vstorefile is looking for a file equation similar to:

File t; dev=tape
vstore *t;@.@.@; show

This is why it appears that I can't use more than one tape drive, unless they are in serial, while we want to use four drives in parallel. What method or software should I be using?

Mark Ranft of Pro3K replies:

We always found that DLT 8000 tapes worked well in parallel. When the backup got so big that it wouldn't fit on two DLT 8000 tapes, we split the backup, putting the databases on two tapes in parallel and everything else on a third tape. Keep in mind, we didn't have a backup strategy. We had a recovery strategy and backups were a part of that. We found, for us, organizing backups in this manner allowed us to speed recovery — which was far more important than anything else.

You can achieve good times doing Store-to-Disk backups. But then what? Do you back up the STD to tape and send it offsite? FTP it somewhere? The recovery times on getting this back are too slow.

MB Foster has been holding Wednesday Webinars for years. So far back, in fact, that the first round of webinars appeared less than six weeks after HP announced its drop plans for the 3000 in 2001. Those drop plans might not be working completely as expected, if Foster's response to a new Thursday Webinar is a good measure.

The company has added private Webinars, and it's also setting up by-invitation webinars, too. While we were researching updates on the e-commerce alternatives for 3000 sites, we learned this week's presentation on Thursday covers the UDA Link connectivity software for the HP 3000. Registrations for the guided tour of this software are outpacing the company's general interest The 3 R’s of Migration: Rehost, Replace, Retire.

While UDA Link does run on other servers, its most avid customer base operate their businesses using MPE/iX systems. It's one data marker to show that some system managers are still auditioning tools for 3000s. An invitation to that by-invitation UDA Link webinar is just an e-mail away, a message a manager can send to [email protected].

The Wednesday Webinar on those 3 Rs starts at 2 PM Eastern time; a web form on the MB Foster site manages registration for that session.

Companies that use Ecometry's ecommerce package have been in transition a long time. Once HP announced in 2001 that the 3000's future was limited at the vendor, Ecometry's campaign to migrate got more intense and focused. After several acquisitions of this software and more than a decade, its customers are still facing some migrations.

But some of the customers are looking at a migration beyond just an alternative platform for running Ecometry's successor, JDA Direct Commerce. When IT operations make a transition like this, one kind of destination can be moving to a different vendor's application. Any existing app vendor would be of little help in this kind of move. Then again, the replacement app's vendor might not know enough about a 3000 Ecometry version, or even the Windows Ecometry version that many 3000 sites have embraced.

This kind of migration is one of several that alliance partners assist with. These partners are companies that have experience with implementing and customizing the IT around the application. Sometimes, as in the case of Ability Commerce, they have an alternative ecommerce app like SmartSite and still operate as a partner with Ecometry's latest owners, JDA. A partner brings deeper experience. When there's data to be moved, a company wants to be sure they've got all of it, ready for the new app, safely transformed from its prior incarnation in whatever version of Ecometry it is still running.

Such IT operations sometimes look for help from a place like MB Foster, which is why the company became a partner with Ability late last year. Ability is hosting its own Ability Commerce User Summit in a month in Delray Beach, Florida. That's the town that used to be the HQ for the old Ecometry. Birket Foster's company will be a sponsor at the Summit. He said his company's work is '"for the standard migration to Ecometry on Windows, or if the customer has a choice of deciding they'll go to something else," he said. "We'd also be able to provide assistance with moving to the Ability Order Management System, for example."

Services companies like Foster's can act like independent insurance agents, or unfettered consulting shops. They'll enable a move off of MPE/iX applications. And sometimes that move can be all way off the existing vendor's alternative apps, and onto another vendor's package. Or in this case, customers can tap a partnership to embrace allied software that will help in a migration.

The HP 3000 made its bones against IBM's business computers, and the wires are alive this week with the fortunes of Big Blue circa 2015. Starting with meetings yesterday, the company is conducting a Resource Action, its euphemism for layoffs. IBM employees call these RAs, but this year's edition is so special -- and perhaps so deep -- it's got a project name. The cutting is dubbed Project Chrome, and so the IBM'ers call getting laid off Getting Chromed.

Hewlett-Packard has never wanted to call its layoffs by their real name either. The first major HP layoff action during the 3000's watch came in the fall of 1989, when more than 800 of these separations were called "being excessed." Employees had four months to find a new place inside HP, but had to search on their own time. Engineers and support staff were given the option to remain at the company, but jobs at plant guard shacks were among their new career options. Another virulent strain of HP pink slips came in the middle of the last decade, one of the purges in pursuit of better Earnings Per Share that pared away much of the remaining MPE/iX expertise from the vendor.

Aside from bad quarterly reports, these unemployment actions sometimes come in the aftermath of ill-fated corporate acquisitions. This week on CNBC's Squawk Box, analysts identified HP's Compaq merger as one of the worst calls of all time. The subject surfaced after the questionable call that led to a Seattle defeat in Sunday's SuperBowl. A big company's failures in new markets can also be to blame for getting Chromed. IBM has seen its revenues and profits fall over the last year, while mobile and cloud competitors have out-maneuvered Big Blue.

IBM has already shucked off the Cognos development tool PowerHouse as of early last year, but now comes word that other non-IBM software is getting its support pared back in the RA. In the IEEE's digital edition of Spectrum, one commenter made a case for how IBM is sorting out what's getting Chromed. 

I am the last US resource supporting a non-IBM software package, which is in high demand globally -- yet the powers that be seem oblivious to it. Rather than create a dedicated group to go after that business, they cut anyone with that skill, since it is not an IBM product and therefore, "not strategic." Unfortunately the company continues to gamble on their Tivoli products, which clients seem to embrace about as much as Lotus Notes, rabies and bird flu.

Once we broach a topic here on your digital newsstand, even more information surfaces. Yesterday we reported on the state of HPSUSAN number-checking on 3000 hardware. We figured nobody had ever seen HPSUSAN checks block a startup of MPE itself, so long as the HPCPUNAME information was correct. The HP subsystems, though, those surely got an HPSUSAN check before booting, right?

Not based on what we're hearing since our report. Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies related his experience with HP's policing of things like COBOL II or TurboStore.

I can't claim to be an expert in all things regarding to software licensing methods. But I can tell you from personal experience that none of HP's MPE/iX software subsystems that I've ever administered or used had any sort of HPSUSAN checks built into them. That would include the compilers (such as the BASIC/3000 interpreter and compiler), any of the various levels of the HP STORE software versions, Mirror/iX, Dictionary/3000, BRW, or any of the networking software. (I'll note that the networking software components were quite picky in making sure that compatible versions of the various components were used together, in order for everything to work properly.)

The only time I saw HP-provided software examined using the HPSUSAN was when server hardware was upgraded. It checked the CPU upgrades, or number of CPUs in a chassis.

HP 3000s have been outfitted with unique identity numbers for decades. In the '90s a scandal arose around hardware resellers who were committing fraud with modified system IDs. People were jailed, fines were paid, and HP made the 3000 world safe for authorized resellers. Until it crashed its 3000 futures and those resellers' businesses two years later. We've not heard if those fines or jail terms were rolled back. 

It's probably not fair to think they would be, since those resellers stole something while they fabricated ID numbers. That sort of fraud may still be possible. We heard a question last week about what sort of checking would ever be done regarding the HPSUSAN number. In the recently-curtailed emulator freeware model, an enthusiast could type in an HPSUSAN they avowed they had the right to use. Verification of that number wasn't part of the process. This is called the honor system.

The question: Did HP ever check HPSUSAN numbers, and what format would they have to be in? Is it like a 16-digit credit card number and expiration date checksum?

"There are only digits, no letters," said a veteran of the HP SE service, one who's worked for many third party vendors as well. "I don’t think there any certain number of digits. I don’t think HP ever checked the HPSUSAN, only the third parties."

HP has announced its new management lineup for the split company, but many key positions for the refocused Hewlett-Packard Enterprise won't change in the reorganization. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is the name for the corporation that will sell, support and even develop the HP suggested replacements for the HP 3000. Customers who invested in HP's Unix servers, or even those using HP's ProLiants as Linux hosts, will care about who's leading that new company.

But those customers won't have to spend a great deal of time tracking new faces. Current HP CEO Meg Whitman will head the company that promises to increase its focus on enterprise computing, the kind that HP 3000s have done for decades. While reading the tea leaves and doing the Kremlinology for the heads of HP computer operations, the following leaders are unchanged:

• Cathie Lesjak will be the Chief Financial Officer
• John Schultz will be the General Counsel
• Henry Gomez will be the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
• John Hinshaw will be the Chief Customer Officer and lead Technology & Operations
• Martin Fink will be the Chief Technology Officer and lead Hewlett-Packard Labs

While remaining as the General Manager of Enterprise Group, Bill Veghte will lead the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise separation efforts. He's not doing a small job now. The Enterprise group is a $28 billion annual revenue business that includes server, storage, networking, technology services, and cloud solutions. Giving him transition duties is reminiscent of the days when leading the HP 3000 operations as GM had devolved into a part-time job, shared with the GM duties of HP's Business Intelligence Unit. It's different this time; there's a second-in-command who'll manage the Enterprise Group operations in this year of transition.

With HP's Labs, Enterprise chiefs, and the head of the boardroom table all the same, it will be interesting to see what changes get managed with the old team. HP will have an old mission, too -- very old, from the era before it heard the siren song of consumer computing. 3000 customers used to wish for an HP that was marketing-savvy. When that HP arrived, it seemed to quickly forget the 3000. There was a renaissance in the 3000 thinking and plans from Roy Breslawski in marketing, and Harry Sterling as GM. But Sterling was then handed Business Intelligence GM duties alongside his 3000 mission. Within a couple of years after Sterling retired, the 3000 was out on the chopping block.

Nobody knows what will be excised from the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise that's going to have to get even leaner as a smaller entity. But at least that Enterprise won't be spending a lot to lure new executives with fat recruiting packages like the one given to Mark Hurd. That was at the peak of the consumer pursuit at HP. Some might call it the nadir, from an enterprise computing perspective.