Finding the knowledge HP once shared free
January 11, 2017
In 2008 was the debate, and I don't mean between our now-outgoing President and his rival. The debate was in your community about future knowledge. Where could you expect to find HP 3000 and MPE/iX manuals in the coming years? It didn't turn out to be where it was planned and proposed, but a manager of a homestead 3000 does have options today.
For many years, MMM Support hosted the full range of HP's manuals for hardware and software. As of this morning the website is offline, but it's probably a configuration error and not a sign of a company's demise. You'll find plenty of links on our blog to the hpmmmsupport.com site. The manuals are in PDF format and you don't experience any pop-up or page-takeover ads like you see in YouTube.
The newer player in the hosted HP manual arena is TeamNA Consulting. While it's a newer site, the venture is led by one of the older (in history) resources. Neil Armstrong, one of the tech wizards at Robelle, is the NA in TeamNA. Armstrong started with the HP 3000 more than 34 years ago—an era where MPE IV was still a common OS for the servers. Plenty of experience there, and plenty of manuals available too. More manuals than HP will share with the world today. The extra information is hardware documentation.
This wasn't the future the 3000 community expected in the days when official 3000 support from HP was nearly gone. Today that support is well-filled by companies like Pivital, a bedrock upon which homesteading and 3000 emulation rests.
Even though the two companies made good on promises to preserve the Jazz content, including programs, the manuals escaped re-hosting there. It was an oversight or perhaps a over-reach on the part of the companies; logging and making access to hundreds of manuals is a big job. Business focus changed as well. Those Jazz links at Speedware (now Fresche Legacy and absorbed with IBM work) are tucked away under hpmigrations.com. Not exactly the place where you'd look for homesteading tools.
This kind of confusion was not supposed (there's that word again) to matter so much. HP said it would keep its manuals online through 2015. A very long time for a corporation where those promises emerged from a division that was being closed down.
The website docs.hp.com lands you on a mostly-useless landing page at HP, Inc. That's the half of Hewlett-Packard with scant link to anything related to MPE/iX. A Google search on hpe.com today unearthed those HP-hosted manuals. Well, some. At this moment they're a collection of 7.x documents, 269 of them, plus a tracer-file for the Jazz content that goes nowhere. That link above is 436 characters long, something that looks like it's going change based on how HP Enterprise keeps rearranging its business. But there it is, for now, keeping HP's promise two years later than the 2015 plan.
As for manual hosting from the companies with continuing business and with knowledge of MPE/iX, the TeamNA and MMM websites are far better Web addresses. Today. Armstrong is like me, a half-generation younger than the most senior wizards in 3000 lore. He's got more years in the future with MPE/iX, probably. Knowing where to get answers and relying on experience can keep us in the 3000 knowledge game.
It's a intern-style assignment to download the 321 manuals off the HP site for homesteading reference. This assignment seems like a good idea. It's certainly easier than locating (and storing) those blue HP binders full of paper—which were the only bibles before PDF was our tabula rasa for knowledge.