A mysterious photo on a 3000 group website has started to spark guesses this week. Brett Forsyth has tacked a photo onto the LinkedIn Group that serves the HP 3000 Community. He's invited guesses on how a suitcase, or some sort of case, can be traced to Hewlett-Packard history.

Most of the guesses so far concern the size of the case. Forsyth has been replying to the efforts, as if he's a game show host moving the contest along by eliminating wrong answers. If you're interested in playing, the group page provides a comment string. You can also supply guesses in our comments here, but for now we're just as much in the dark about the mystery as anyone but Forsyth. Just a few days ago he released another clue.

This game is one way a website can engage visitors. There's always been a lot of passive readership on the Web -- nearly all of it, in truth, compared to how many people visit a site. We run a comments string to the right of our webpages, but our visitor count is a large multiple of those connections, even here in 2018. Contests are old-school, but so are HP 3000 customers and experts. It's always surprising how a $25 Amazon card still motivates us as a giveaway.

Last week one of the organizers of the upcoming HP 3000 party in the Bay Area suggested a fine finale for the mystery. Dave Wiseman would like to see it solved in person at a June 23 meeting in Cupertino. The gathering is a reunion for some and a retirement party for others. Wiseman's invited Forsyth to bring the case along to the meeting on that Saturday afternoon. The meeting location is being worked out, but it won't be as much of a mystery as the case itself.

We have a tape device that is not responding; that is, we put the tape in, but it is not coming online. I also see that a user is logged into the system using the LDEV assigned to the tape drive. SHOWDEV TAPE also does not list the device.

Gilles Schipper replies:

I’ve seen this before for DDS drives, Probably during your most recent reboot, there was a (possibly temporary) malfunction with your tape drive’s power supply such that its existence was not recognized during the boot up process. That would normally result in a “device unavailable” condition and the subsequent disabling of that logical device number.

I have noticed instances where that LDEV number is actually made available to the logon device number pool (for subsequent assignment for logon session device numbers). Long story short, the solution appears to be a power cycle, START NORECOVERY reboot.

After shutting down and powering off the CPU and all devices, run ODE to ensure all devices are recognized before START NORECOVERY. Failure to recognize the device at that point should lead to further investigation of the power supply, SCSI device number setting, or other hardware malfunction. If this situation happens frequently, I would first suspect a problem with the power supply of that device.

Get rid of that internal DDS tape drive

By John Burke

People complain of problems with internal DDS tape drives in systems located in remote areas with little onsite expertise, problems that lead to frequent drive replacements and downtime. It reminds me of the old vaudeville joke where the patient comes to the doctor with a complaint, “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” The doctor replies, “Then don’t do that.”

HP 3000 gurus have cautioned for years that people should not use internal tape or disk drives in 9x7, 9x8 or 9x9 production systems. The most likely failure is a tape drive and the next most likely failure is a disk drive. Everything else in the system cabinet could easily run for a decade without needing service or replacing. [Editor's note: John's advice came in 2004, so a decade-plus is definitely bonus time.] When an internal tape or disk drive fails you are looking at serious downtime while the case is opened and the drive is replaced. A common urban legend says that the primary boot device (LDEV 1) and the secondary boot device (usually LDEV 7) must be internal. Not true.

Bite the bullet now. Remove, or at least disconnect (both power and data cables) all internal drives. At the least, replace the internal DDS drive with an external DDS3 or DDS4 drive. In the case of the DDS drive, you will not even need to make any configuration changes if you set the SCSI ID to 0 on the external drive.

The provider of the only HP 3000 emulation solution, Stromasys, has announced a new product for its Digital VMS customer base. The Charon VAX platform got a launch of OpenVMS Operating System support on both the original VAX hardware and emulated platforms.

This new initiative complements the virtualized Charon VAX platform. Stromasys touts it as "a seamless service solution that guarantees the legacy hardware clients an outstanding ongoing service experience. The primary role of this additional support offering is to assist this passionate community of software professionals in keeping their mission-critical applications and systems running smoothly around the clock."

In a nutshell, this is the Stromasys entry into the VMS support arena. VMS has been cut loose from its futures by HP Enterprise, and an independent lab, VMS Software, Inc., is carrying on. A one-stop call for software as well as platform needs (think the HP CE and SE model, computers and software) evokes yet another take on the top-shelf vendor days of the 1990s and earlier years.

Support providers see themselves through many lenses. Some arrive with hardware to spruce up, adding the OS needs as required. Others open the door with specifics on MPE/iX that are hard to find anywhere else. They support what their customers use, and in some cases that's Stromasys Charon HPA for the 3000 site. Now there is another take, where the emulator becomes the linchpin because it represents the hardware. The VAX-VMS deal extends to companies that don't use an emulator yet.

There's no offer today of MPE/iX support from Stromasys like the VAX-VMS product announcement. But John Prot, CEO of Stromasys, says the company approached the VMS offering as a way to support a thriving software community. "We welcome all OpenVMS OS customers to the Stromasys family," he says, "and are excited to provide support to those customers still utilizing VAX physical or emulated hardware to run mission-critical applications."

Such support needs to come from a deep bench of expertise in the OS. "By providing ongoing support to classic systems, organizations can keep moving forward with their company’s key business initiatives," Prot says. The 3000 community has always enjoyed a lively give and take between its support providers, even to this very day. Legacy markets are supposed to lose their ecosystems. What sprouts up instead might look a lot like an old-growth organism.

My first thought for this article was to ask, "Are you lonesome tonight?" Of course it's the lyric to the famous Elvis song. The tale of that tune suggests that being separated from something you love will help you back to it. It's easier to do if you can hear the crooning in the King's voice.

One belief about bad news is that it can only lead to a worse future. Cancer and disease would seem to prove this, but the world is full of survivors who have better lives because their adversity made them refocus. What happened in our market more than 16 years ago had immediate as well as eventual impact on many lives. At one point I heard a story from a 3000 pro who was driving two hours on a commute to keep working on MPE/iX. His family saw him on most weekends.

Eventually the tech pros in our community find a way to keep contributing to their households and to the world through their work. Some go into restaurant management and others teach. In my household, the HP cutoff of the 3000 futures set us onto deeper and broader paths. The NewsWire continued at a much lower rate of revenue and Abby started a yoga teaching career that's won national notice. This week Women's Health ran a 90-second story to sum it all up and included a note about what drove the better future coming out of bad news. Our revenues didn't fall off as fast as they reported, but the rest of the tale is true.

Experts like John Burke, our founding technical editor, might have preferred to keep their lives intact in that world where their skills weren't legacy assets. They didn't have a choice and kept working. He's a professor now. Others moved into new fields. Christian Lheureux "was doing MPE/3000 stuff for almost three decades, 1981-2010. Now I've not touched a 3000 since Jan. 2010. I no longer even work in IT. I've now started my own company in the travel industry, Passion USA." Some continue to work in MPE today, surviving in a legacy market. Some are bound to be lonesome with nobody to share their work with. That's what user groups were once for, and today what the Web can deliver. We got separated from our comforts in 2001, sent onto a road that was sometimes lonely in an epic way. A poster from the first years showed the challenges well.

Interaction over the Web, though, is harder than delivering news, skills, and analysis. Twitter might be a scourge, but for people who know how to use it well, it's as polished as any comments forum. There's a need for a way to connect as legacy computer managers. There was also a need for body-positive yoga when HP culled the 3000 out of its futures. Abby rose to that need and built HeavyWeight Yoga. Perhaps skidding into a lonely space can drive us to a better future. That future would be a life where we're better connected.

By John Burke

After reading Jim Hawkins’ reply to my SCSI is SCSI article, I was reminded about HP’s 4Gb disk drive fiasco. These branded drives had a nasty habit of failing after being powered off after they’d been running for a while. The problems were not limited to the HP 3000 versions, either.

At one point we got so frustrated we just replaced all 4Gb drives with the much more reliable 9Gb drives. I never blamed HP for these failures, or the failures of the 4Gb drives on my HP 3000 — even though all were purchased from HP, and had HP stamped all over them. The failures were the fault of the manufacturer, and no amount of certification testing would likely have shown the problem. But the failures made me wonder: What does HP certification and HP branding mean?

In Hawkins’ reply, he puts great emphasis on the statement that “In the SCSI peripheral market, Industry Standard is really defined as ‘works on a PC.’ Unfortunately, the requirements for single-user PCs are not always in alignment with those of multi-user servers.” Maybe inside HP the desktops look different, but I have never seen a company use SCSI peripherals as a standard for desktop Wintel systems.

At my last employer, we had approximately 1,200 desktops, and not a single one had a SCSI disk drive. SCSI disks are used primarily in the multi-user server market, not the desktop market. While Hawkins says some interesting things in the rest of his article, these two sentences tend to prejudice the reader against everything else he says.

Unfortunately, Hawkins’ best argument came out in private correspondence: “Putting newer disks inside a 9x7, 9x8 or 9x9 may overtax the power supply and/or ‘cook’ your CPU or memory.” However, most of us outside HP have been advising against using internal drives in production machines for many years because of the obvious maintenance headaches. It still amazes me how many people believe you have to have at least one internal drive in an HP 3000.

The debate seems like it highlights at least four things going on.

In late April of 1999, first steps were being taken for the largest website ever devoted to the 3000 community. The site was not from the 3000 NewsWire, although we'd been publishing 40-plus stories a month for almost four years in paper, on the Web, and through Online Extra emails. The newest entry in 1999 was 3k World, a site launched by Client Systems, North America's largest HP 3000 distributor.

At the time the HP 3000 was in full renaissance. HP had remade the server as the HP e3000 to stress the computer's Internet readiness. The system was at its sales peak for the 1990s, capturing e-commerce business by drawing well-known clients like M&M Mars. Client Systems was reaching for a way to connect the thousands of 3000 owners as well as the market's vendors. A big website with community message boards and a repository of tech manuals and bulletins seemed to be a great draw.

3k World needed steady content, though, the kind that messages and tech papers from HP couldn't provide. Client Systems reached out to us. Sure we had content, contributed and written by experts and veterans of the MPE/iX world. We had news as well, plus some commentary and opinion. Client Systems licensed everything we produced for use on 3k World, while we retained the rights to use it on our own website.

For several years 3k World built its readership and its content, even though the membership was not posting a lot of discussion. Then HP pulled the plug on its 3000 business and Client Systems watched revenues decline. The NewsWire's content — articles, reviews, and tech papers — stopped appearing on 3k World when that site's budget sank.

3k World might have had a chance of connecting customers across many miles, but the content was all-English language, and so the French and Spanish users were taking a small leap to use the content. Within a few years the site became static and this blog was born in the summer of 2005.

Community is always the driver on these kinds of missions: attracting it, growing it, and making its discussions useful and worthy of a visit. LOLs and "you betcha" in comments do not engage readers. Prowl the comments sections of many tech websites and you'll find that experience. It takes a village to build a community, and that village needs to share what it knows and ask for what it needs.

It's a reasonable question, that one, whose answer gets pursued by homesteaders and migrators alike. How many of those computers are still running out there? That's the question asked by the vendors who aren't familiar with the 3000. From another voice, the query sounds like "How many of us are left, by now?"

We heard the question from a migration services company and thought we would ask around a bit. The range of estimates is wide, and unless you're reading from a client list, the calculation of how many systems is a guess based on whatever activity you've seen. Sales of used systems to companies would be one way of measuring such activity. Support contracts would offer another data point. Customers currently paying for support of apps might be a third.

From Steve Suraci at Pivital Solutions, the estimate is 500 active servers in production use, and at least that many more for some sort of historical purpose. In between those two systems might lie hot spares or Disaster Recovery servers. If a system is mission-critical enough to have a hot spare, it's probably going to be one of the last to be mothballed whenever MPE goes dark altogether.

Some of the mystery comes from the fact that 3000s are running all across the world. We've reached some North American community providers, but European and Mideast-Asia is beyond our reach. The numbers in this story reflect North American activity.

Starting with that low end of 1,000-plus systems, Steve Cooper of Allegro estimates 300 to 1,000 active servers. He adds that his number includes both real and emulated systems, acknowledging the role that the Stromasys Charon HPA emulator is playing. Another 3000 veteran at Allegro, Donna Hofmeister, estimates up to 2,000 active systems, "but that seems a bit optimistic to me," Cooper adds.

I’m replacing my Model 10 array with a Model 20 on MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET, so it'll require a reinstall. What’s the best way to reinstate my network config files? Just restore NMCONFIG and NPCONFIG? I'm hoping I can use my old CSLT to re-add all my old non-Nike drives and mod the product IDs in Sysgen—or do I have to add them manually after using the factory SLT?

Gilles Schipper replies:

Do the following steps:
- using your CSLT to install onto LDEV 1
- modify your i/o to reflect new/changed config.
- reboot
- use volutil to add non-LDEV1 volumes appropriately
- restore directory or directories from backup
- preform system reload from full backup - using the keep, create, olddate, partdb,show=offline options in the restore command
- reboot again

No need for separate restores of specific files.

In the aftermath of the Interex user group bankruptcy, an HP enterprise user group survived. That group remains intact to this day. Its survival is due to an ability to combine forces with other groups, an effort that kicked off 10 years ago this week.

That week was the time when Encompass, the user group that outlasted Interex, gave members a vote on merging with three other HP-related groups. At the time of the April vote, Encompass and these partners weren't even sure what the allied group would call itself. Endeavor was being floated as a possible new name.

The vote of the Encompass members approved the merger with the International Tandem User Group; the European HP Interex group, which was operated separately from the rest of Interex; and a Pacific Rim segment of the Encompass group. The European Interex reported that it had 35,000 members at the time of the merger.

Encompass became Connect, a name announced at HP's Discover conference later that same year. Connect still operates a user group with a large meeting (held at HP's annual event, for the in-person gatherings) as well as smaller Regional User Groups.

The group bills itself as Connect Worldwide, the Independent Hewlett Packard Enterprise Technology, a membership organization. Membership in any user group has evolved during the decade-plus since Interex expired. By now it's free to join the group that serves OpenVMS customers, companies that still employ HP's Unix computers and hardware (Integrity), and sites using the HP NonStop servers (the former Tandem systems).

Those Tandem-NonStop users make up nearly all of the in-person meetings other than the HP Discover event. Discover is devoted to everything HP Enterprise sells and supports. One of the few links remaining to the 3000 at Connect is Steve Davidek, whose management and then migration off 3000s at the City of Sparks made him a good transition leader at Connect.

There are Technical Boot Camps for both NonStop and VMS customers that Connect helps to organize. A boot camp for HP-UX never became a reality. That's one of the choices a group of allied users must face: even some support for a resource like a boot camp (some members were eager) needs to be balanced against the majority membership's desires.

By Roy Brown

Each kind of migration has its advocates, and each has its pros and cons. Your constraints are going to be cost, time, and risk. Probably in that order. I can’t say much about the first two; that depends on your circumstances. Last week we talked about the differences between conversions and migrations and the risks. Another option is going to a package to execute a migration off MPE/iX. It might even be a familiar package — but on a less familiar platform.

Packages

If you have a package running on your HP 3000 which you are happy with, and the vendor provides that same package, or something very similar, on other platforms, then it’s likely just a case of choosing which platform to go with.

Your vendor-supported migration path should be pretty straightforward, and your hardest problem is going to be to decide what to do with the crust of subsystems and reporting programs that have built up, and which surround the package proper. If there are some you can’t do without, and the features aren’t provided by the package anyway, on the new platform, this may be a good chance to get to grips with the tools and utilities on the new platform, and how things are done there.

But maybe you had a bespoke or home-grown application on the HP 3000, in an area now covered by one or more packages on other platforms, and it makes more sense to move onto a package now than to go bespoke again?

In that case, you have a three-way analysis to do; what does your existing system provide, what does the new package provide, and what are your users looking for?

I’ve heard the advice “don’t go for customization, go for plain vanilla” a lot. It certainly gives cost and risk reduction, though perhaps at the expense of business fit. I reckon that a shame; every company has something that is its USP – unique systems proposition – something in its IT that gives it its edge in its chosen business.

On the other hand, sometimes a company does things differently because it was easier, or “it was always done that way.” Those are things you shouldn’t lose sleep over giving up.

Newswire Classic
By Roy Brown

So you are going to migrate. When migrating to a different system or platform, there’s usually something the vendor needs you to lose. But is it essential business functionality, or just an implementation quirk of your old system?

Which migration are you going to have? The luxury option of a custom replacement of your old system? To a package on a new platform, maybe a version of a package you had before, or one new to you? Perhaps the rewrite option, where a team of programmers, possibly offshore, re-implement your system in a whole new environment, while keeping the existing functionality. Or will it be a conversion, where your existing system is transferred to a new platform using automated tools?

Each has its advocates, and each has its pros and cons. Chances are, your constraints are going to be cost, time, and risk. Probably in that order. I can’t say much about the first two; that depends on your circumstances.

Code Conversion

But risk comes in two timescales; immediate risk – “Can we do this? Can we get onto the new platform?” – and the longer-term risk that you are maybe painting your company into a corner by accepting some compromises now that later will turn into shackles.

Those with very long memories may recall some of the early packages being offered for the HP 3000, the apps with KSAM file structures, not IMAGE ones. You just knew they had been ported from elsewhere, not written native on the HP 3000. And if you could find what you wanted, on IMAGE, you were surely glad.

That’s the longer-term risk, then, for some conversions with low short-term risk; you’ll be on the new platform, certainly. But you may have something that plays like the modern-day equivalent of having KSAM, when the smart money is on IMAGE.

Look hard at where you are going to be after a tools-based conversion; will you be fully on the new platform with all-independent code, or will you be running in an environment provided by your conversion specialists? If the latter – and these can indeed lead to faster, cheaper, lower-risk conversions – treat your supplier as a package implementer that you are in with for the long haul, and judge them accordingly.

Likewise, what about ongoing, internal support? One of the reasons to move to new platforms and new paradigms is to tap in to the new generation of people who know their way around them. But if it’s hard to see how you are going to get ongoing support for your HP 3000 apps, how much harder will it be to find people who can support a hybrid old/new system you might wind up with?

Stromasys, makers of the HP 3000 virtualization and emulation product Charon-HPA/3000, announced the company has hired Susan Skonetski as its Director of Customer Development. Skonetski comes to the Charon product team from the VMS Software firm that's been taking over responsibility for that Digital OS from HP. She's also a former executive at HP, where she was the go-to person for the VMS customer community.

Birket Foster of MB Foster has compared Skonetski to a George Stachnik or perhaps a Jeff Vance: a company exec who's relies on an intimate knowledge of a customer base which uses legacy software and hardware. At HP she was manager of engineering programs for the OpenVMS software engineering group until 2009. She logged 25 years of advocacy service to VMS working first at Digital, then Compaq, and finally HP. She became a leader independent of HP and still strong in the VMS community after HP laid her off in 2009. That was the year HP was also halting the HP 3000 labs development. She became VP at third-party support vendor Nemonix.

In 2010 Skonetski revived a VMS boot camp that had languished during the year she left HP. The event was held in Nashua, NH because until 2008 an HP facility in that city was one of the places where VMS matured. At that boot camp attendees also heard from a 3000 marketing linchpin, Coleen Mueller, addressing technical issues and innovations along with OpenVMS partner companies. We chronicled the event in a story about how HP's unique enterprises stay alive.

Skonetski said that understanding a legacy community flows from years of organizing events and strategies aimed at a unique customer base.

Through my experience, I’ve seen up close the critical role that these legacy systems play in daily business cycles. Helping to ensure the availability of these applications is imperative, with service and support options decreasing for SPARC, Alpha, VAX, and the HP 3000. Stromasys’ innovations, along with their strong team of software designers, solutions executives, and account management professionals, made joining the organization a natural fit. I’m proud to help bring to market both cutting-edge solutions and the user communities of these systems.

By Bruce McRitchie
VerraDyne

Time — it marches on. We can measure it, bend it and try to avoid it. But in the end the clock keeps ticking. This is true for owners of the venerable HP 3000. In its day one of the top minicomputers ever manufactured, it went head-on against IBM (mainframes, AS/400, and System 36), Wang and Digital - and won many of those battles. And many HP 3000s are still running and doing the job they were designed to do. They have been upgraded, repaired and tinkered with to keep them viable. But when is it time for them to retire?

There are options. Many vendors have been working diligently to provide a transformation path to move from the HP 3000 to a modern platform and language. By making such a move these organizational risks are reduced:

• Hardware failure.
• Personnel failure - aging programmers.
• Software failure.

So why aren't the remaining HP 3000 owners flocking to newer technology? Is it because they know the technology so well — and it works? Have they been through large ugly development projects and never want to go through the pain again?

Whatever the reasoning, the arguments for staying with HP 3000 must be wearing thin. There are options, and to a greater or lesser extent, they all do the transformation job. Today's technology will allow companies to move their whole HP 3000 environment to a new modern environment, with or without changing language and operating system elements. Of course, with the different paths there are trade-offs that must be considered. This article briefly explores some of the options available to transform your HP 3000.

Emulation

At first glance this can appear to be the cheapest and easiest solution. A company picks the supplier of the emulation software, installs it, then puts their code on top and voila—their system is running as it always did. 

But is it? You may now have an emulator interpreting instructions from your HP 3000 and the new operating system you'll use to run the emulator. Is that interpretation always correct?