Steady steed of Invent3k saddled up again
August 5, 2015
After a couple of months offline, the shared development and archive 3000 server Invent3K is back once more, carrying its saddle bags of software and sandbox spaces. The system was put online at first by OpenMPE's volunteers after HP closed down the Invent3K hosted at the 3000 division.
Tracy Johnson, a member on the final board of directors, supplied an update last night.
The Invent3k machine is back online after almost two months of being down; it's now at invent3k.openmpe.com. Also after a few years, it is back in Texas where it belongs with HPSUSAN 0. (The DR machine that it has been running on is no longer accessible.)
It may be riding rough at first. There might be some bugs to iron out due to a big tape restore. But most of it is there. It was a group effort. Thanks to
- Rob Gordon at Black River Computer for donating the hardware and man-hours to fix it. (It all centered on fixing LDEV 1.)
- Terry and David Floyd with the Support Group for putting it back online and hosting the hardware
- Keven Miller with 3kranger.com for fixing the Web pages.
- Steve Cooper at Allegro for pointing the domain name to the new IP number.
In keeping with the spirit of HP's original Invent3k, the new INVENT3K offering is for the use of member accounts to compile and test their own programs.
More than a decade ago, Hewlett-Packard believed that a 3000 for public use would help the 3000 community. The server was dubbed Invent3K, because its mission was to further the 3000's lifespan through the invention of software. HP stocked it with subsystems, offered accounts for free, and let development commence. Some useful products came out of Invent3K. The first that comes to mind is a version of perl ready for MPE/iX. That's a version of Perl that continues to work.