James Byrne, a systems manager at Canadian logistics management firm Harte & Lyne, has reported a hair-raising development at his 3000 shop. A straightforward request to relicense Powerhouse from the MPE/iX version of the software to Linux resulted in an eye-popping quote.

The supplier of the software, Byrne said, has told him they want $300,000 to move the 20-seat license. Byrne noted dryly, "I recently had my decision to move our company away entirely from proprietary software validated in a most dramatic way."

It's always possible, when numbers like this surface on a Powerhouse relicense bid, that the wrong person in the Powerhouse business line has responded to a request for a quote. Byrne reported this exchange on the 3000-L mailing list, but didn't want to name the software vendor of Powerhouse. It used to be Cognos, but that stopped being true many years ago.

In a message of nine years ago, the debut of Powerhouse for Linux seemed tied to the fortunes of Powerhouse for HP-UX.

Cognos continues its ongoing commitment to its PowerHouse customers with the upcoming release of PowerHouse 4GL and PowerHouse Web for Linux. This is a direct port of the industry-leading application development tool that is so successful on other UNIX platforms as well as MPE/iX, OpenVMS, and Windows. User-based pricing for PowerHouse 4GL and PowerHouse Web for Linux is the same as for other UNIX versions. Please contact your Cognos Account Representative for availability.

Byrne said the exchange with the current supplier of Powerhouse licenses ended with a termination of the Harte & Lyne license for the software -- just after he was told the annual support fee for the relicensed copy was going to be $60,000 a year.

A job scheduler is a good bedrock for keeping an enterprise humming. But leaving the HP 3000 means leaving a very good scheduler behind. Good news: a Windows-based solution that manages non-3000 hosts is on the market. MBF Scheduler was built with the needs and power of the 3000 in mind, too.

On November 9 a webinar shows the details of this product. A note from the company's vendor, MB Foster:

A Windows Scheduled Task may have worked well in the past. Today, your company has grown, and you've acquired more infrastructure. Do you know what jobs have being scheduled, on which server and at what times?

One of the many achievements of MBF Scheduler is its ability to manage complex batches through queues and a fence, ensuring everything runs in the right order and notifies someone if a job stalls or aborts. With the right solution, automating your processes is both practical and beneficial.

Sign up at the MB Foster website to participate and ask questions. Lots of schedulers for migration platforms offer features. Few of them know what a 3000 shop has grown accustomed to reply upon.

Fifteen years ago HP was cutting its 3000 business loose and software vendors scrambled. A few of the bigger ones, like Adager, were looking for a way to buy the MPE/iX assets from Hewlett-Packard. Nothing could be arranged. However, HP recently started posting notices about its patented technology it's trying to license. 

The IAM Market (free registration required) has started to hawk the intellectual property of both sides of the HP, a company about to mark the first anniversary of its split-up. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is offering a range of patents, all designed to let a company use HP technology to serve business users.

HPE Patent Sale – Mission Critical Computing Portfolio

46 issued patents (41 US, 2 JP, 2 GB, and 1 FR) relating to servers and storage products for Mission Critical Computing (MCC). Key applicable areas include High Availability, High Reliability, Replication/Failover, SSD/HDD, System Management.

Except for that SSD element, everything in the portfolio could fall into the realm of HP 3000 and MPE technology. If only such a marketplace existed 15 years ago. More importantly, if only HP was actively licensing its IP back then. Something could have been worked out. Today, at least there's a mechanism for listing patents for sale and finding interested buyers.

Admit it. It's been a long time since you talked person to person about your HP 3000 with somebody outside your company. User conferences and one-day meetings for 3000 folk used to be as common as leaf piles in October. That's what happens when you live a long time. You can outlive your community and lose touch.

CAMUS, the Computer Aided Manufacturing User Society, has a way to reconnect. At 11 AM Central Time on Thursday, Nov. 10, the Annual User Group meeting of the organization will form around a conference call. Terri Glendon Lanza of CAMUS is organizing the call. It's free.

The agenda, shared by CAMUS member Ed Stein of MagicAire, is 10 minutes of CAMUS announcements, followed by general discussion with the Board of Directors and everyone on the call. It's manufacturing managers who make up CAMUS, but you might have questions about a certain emulator that earned its stripes in the Digital market before arriving to emulate HP's 3000 systems. Both Digital and MPE managers will be at this conference.

Or you may be interested in the new ERP replacement for MANMAN, Kenandy. Experts from the Support Group -- which is installing Kenandy at Disston Tools this year -- will be on the call. You might just want to know something about MPE management that could take only a minute to answer. 

Send an email to Terri at [email protected], or call her at 630.212.4314, to get your conference call-in phone number. The call runs until 12:30 Central Time. You might learn something, or get to show what you know.

I'm looking at how to save as much time as possible in rebuilding an HP 3000's software and directories. My options seem to be using STORE, versus the sysgen tape command "tape store=@.@.@". What's the best way to go here?

Donna Hofmeister of Allegro replies

Unless your system is small (like a 918 with 8-12GB of disc), you don't want to try to do a full backup via sysgen. If you really do a full backup then I prefer this syntax “store /;...” as it is self-documenting and you know that the Posix files will be backed up as well. (On older releases of MPE, @.@.@ did not back up Posix files <eek>)

You want to make sure that you run 'buldacct' periodically (and routinely). You also want to make sure that you are somehow backing up your directory (store /;*t;directory, for example). Between the two, you have belts and suspenders (for recovering your accounting structure).

On older releases of MPE, you want to make sure that the network is shut down prior to making your SLT tape. And it's still a good idea to have the system quiesced when making an SLT, since everything in the sys account (and .pub.sys in particular) will be locked while the tape is being made. Nothing quite like grumpy users to make your day.

Go back 20 years this week in the history of the 3000 and you'll find cheaper Oracle as a lure for application growth on MPE. Hewlett-Packard sank human resources and money into making Oracle a more attractive and affordable option for 3000 owners. By October, 1996 the pursuit of new applications was at its most ardent peak. HP would bring down the cost per seat of Oracle 7 by 25 percent just to get a company to install it on a new HP 3000. What the deal was seeking was places where Oracle might sell into a community that grew strong on IMAGE/SQL.

The deal, plus Oracle's applications, was trying to overcome three barriers to implementing Oracle. First, sites had data in IMAGE databases with no straightforward way in 1996 to move that information to Oracle's format. Second, site managers experienced higher management demands while using Oracle on other platforms. Finally, the price barrier for purchasing a second HP 3000 database (since IMAGE was bundled, even in 1996 after HP's efforts to split it off) kept sites from adding Oracle to their database mix.

HP's offer reduced one portion of the last hurdle. It offered Oracle's 7.2.3 version to 3000 sites at prices starting at under $1,200 per seat with an eight-seat minimum. Purchasing Oracle for an HP 3000 for under $10,000 hadn't been possible before. The price per seat increased based on HP's CPU tiers—the $9,600 price was available only for the lowest HP 3000 tier.

Oracle was always at arm's length from the 3000 user base, though. During the 1990s when HP was promoting HP-UX as a complete enterprise solution, the many Unix-based apps relied on Oracle foremost. In the middle 1980s, when Oracle was just rising up, a VP of market development asked me, "Why would I want to offer a database to a market where they already have a free, bundled database?" The question was a good one that never got a good enough answer for existing customers. HP and its Oracle allies had a good answer, but it was one that didn't matter much to the installed 3000 base.

We summed up HP's motivation on behalf of all customers with two words.

It's always a great event—since it's so rare now — to see 3000 folk gather in person. Last week an invite over 3000-L and other channels requested the pleasure of the company of anyone in the Bay Area who remembers — or works with — MPE and HP 3000s. The number of lunchtime diners at The Duke of Edinburgh pub was at the intimate level, which is not a surprise. What was interesting was how informed some attendees were.

"Some were finding out about the [Stromasys] emulator," Stan Sieler reported. He was among the few who were still working on MPE tasks. I was surprised that the news of the emulator was just arriving in October 2016, five years after the product's debut in the Bay Area.

In the fall of 2011, about 80 HP 3000 folk gathered at the last HP3000 Reunion. (I won't say final, because reunions tend to hold on until organizers and the ardent alumni lose the ability to travel, drive, and have meals together. We're not young, us 3000 folk, but we're spry.) The story of the Charon HPA product has orbited the MPE solar system for many months. Not everybody looks up at the sky to see the stars, of course.

Those getting wayback news about Charon included one who needed a free hobbyist license. That kind of license went off the market at the end of 2014, when Stromasys transitioned to an all-proof of concept licensing and sales plan. The PoC strategy has yielded a string of green-lit transitions to the non-3000 hardware. Hobbyist/freeware licenses got abused; free software was caught running in commercial settings. Other people might have failed at their no-cost DIY approach. You don't always get news of failures when you never knew about the attempts.

News travels slowly, especially for managers who are not in everyday contact with MPE and 3000s anymore. Sometimes 3000 news has traveled slowly for reasons other than simple oversight, or becoming busy with non-3000 computing.

I need to move a file to our 3000 from a Windows server with FTP and Windows doing the put. The Windows file has longish variable length records, but I would like them converted to fixed length on the 3000. When I tried, this was the result:

PUT C:\Dev\MViewFTP\transdata\AP_HEADER_GW.CSV LMAPGW.IVD;rec=-1024,1,f,ascii,disc=1000;move

200 PORT command ok.

550 The FILE EQUATION STRING option (item# 52) is not in a valid file equation form. (FILE OPEN ERROR -449)

Keven Miller replies

Item #52 refers to HPFOPEN. From the intrinsic manual

52 File equation string:

Passes a character string that matches the file equation specification syntax exactly. (Refer to the FILE command in the MPE/iX Command Reference Manual.) This option allows the specification of options available in the FILE command.

I don't like the trailing ";move" in your command string.  I'd remove that. Also, you have comma after "ascii" and it should be a semicolon, like this

;rec=-1024,1,f,ascii;disc=1000

We recently tried to be helpful for a 3000 manager who was desperate to get an MPE/iX server back online in steady, reliable service. Our role was just to feed questions to the volunteer force of experts on 3000-L and then pass back answers to the manager. The experience led us to think about what any company should do to fail at using a 3000 for mission-critical service.

Be assured, following these helpful hints will ensure your 3000 cannot do its work.

1. Do your support with someone who'll just help out from time to time. Save your support budget for your other servers that are mission-critical. Let the 3000 fend off errors with volunteer help.
2. Let your inventory of spares of the 3000's moving parts take care of themselves. A power supply or a hot-spare CPU board takes up a lot of room; set aside space for more modern computer components. Someone will be able to find something soon enough when trouble comes up.
3. When a software or network problem starts to occur, give the situation awhile to work itself out for a few months. Save your support budget for the time when things are crashing because they've gotten serious.
4. When your support vendor bills you on your 3000, let that expense take the same place as less-critical services. This isn't a vaccine, after all. It's just support for mission-critical servers.
5. Make it clear to your management you're saving money by using the 3000 in a mission-critical role. Reinforce the cost-effective nature of the use of MPE/iX by keeping the software on 15-year-old HP hardware.
6. If No. 6 might raise attention you're using MPE/iX, keep the age and support matters internal to datacenter planning. A 9x9 with no support provider is a fine way to ensure the future.

Five years ago this week Stromasys was doing a full technical detail demonstration of its PA-RISC emulation software. Since then, such virtualization has become an everyday choice for interim homesteading (just a few years of use needed) or long-term plans, too.

The software got its debut in front of a sophisticated crowd: HP 3000 veterans at that year's HP 3000 Reunion. In 2011 skeptics were schooled and devotees bowled over.

The rap on emulator choices from out of the past was performance. That's gone away by now, because moving an environment to a quick-growing OS like Ubuntu Linux -- the foundation for the emulator -- gives MPE an accelerating train of processor improvements to leap onto. Itanium won't leap like Intel's Xeon chips will over the year to come with Skylake. Here's a surprise nobody saw coming: the ultimate Itanium chip, Kittson, began development in 2011, and it's still not running in HP's servers. To think, MPE/iX could've had that fate if HP had chosen to port the OS to that chipset.

HP 3000 hardware and MPE experts at the Reunion believed in Charon's emulation future. In 2011 there were more in attendance at the Reunion than could fit in a single-family home. What's still in the years to come is making a home for MANMAN on one Ubuntu-Charon partition of a big Skylake Intel server, and MANMAN's replacement Kenandy on another.