Good news stories about keeping a 3000
March 18, 2015
On Monday we updated our community on some migrations away from 3000s in the education sector. One of our favorite readers, Tim O'Neill, was a touch dismayed at the exodus. We reported four migrations in all, working off of the news from the vendor's (QSS) website. But that was enough to elicit a forlorn, "Isn't there anybody out there still enjoying the service of their 3000?"
Yes, there is, and we've heard from some of them recently. Earlier this month I posted a notice about the birthday of the NewsWire's founding concept on LinkedIn. We first dreamed it in March of 1995. Among the congratulations were some passing remarks about 3000 durability. Just another one came in today, from Tom Moore in the UK. "I suspect we all look a lot older," he said, "but I just do not feel it. I still have a 3000 running behind me. It runs our accounts."
The HP 3000s are still doing their vital work at Measurement Specialities, the manufacturer with operations in the US and in China. MANMAN is serving in its second decade at that company. Terry Simpkins, IT manager there, just reported that he's hired new staff for his 3000 development team.
There's a nice nest of 3000-using companies in the world. They don't provide much news copy, because much of what they're doing has been proven a long time. But the system's biggest, most devoted fans still want to hear something from a successful installed base.
Some of the potential costs of homesteading flow off an application vendor's strategy. If an app vendor won't be carrying its products forward on MPE/iX much longer, it could be far more costly to stay on a 3000 and homestead. But for home-grown applications, whose fate is still in the hands of the system manager and IT director, there's still a good case for homesteading.
Where the homesteading strategy needs help these days is on the hardware portion of the equation. Stromasys wants to put HP's gear into mothballs for the MPE/iX user, and ultimately put the virtualization server boxes out in a place like Rackspace. Without that option, the future for homesteading might look like a search for one piece of good news after another: We located a replacement CPU board as a spare. Those disk drives can be refitted for 3000 use. Here's a fallback tape device, like an LTO-3, we can jury-rig into a 3000's backplane.
The applications are more easily preserved, and even promoted as durable. They're nests for business logic. Keeping down the expense of redevelopment to maintain business process status quo — that's good news. It's not the sort you'll often hear barked from a newsie's stand, though. Extra, extra! Efficiency preserved in the face of change and growth!