3000 warehouse opens on distributor's shelf
October 29, 2018
National Wine and Spirits has been using an HP 3000 to track inventory and shipments since the 1980s. Now the N-Class server at the distributor based in the Midwest is opening a new information shelf for its COBOL application.
Michael Boritz counts his HP 3000 experience back to the 1990s. The independent pro has a new project at NWS, implementing a data warehouse for the in-house application.
"There's some Suprtool here, and some ODBC network interfaces that I'm not involved with," he said. "I'm strictly on the HP 3000 side: TurboIMAGE, Omnidex [for fast indexing], ViewPlus."
The development is happening on HP's 3000 iron over a nine-month contract for Boritz. There might be another six months of engagement at NWS for him, too.
New development on HP 3000s is not the typical reason to hire a pro of more than 25 years at a 3000 shop in 2018. Much of the time the professional engagements are in support of leaving MPE/iX. Companies need the experienced hands at IMAGE and VPlus screens while they make the transfer.
At NWS the methodology has been forward looking for a long time. In the summer of 2000 Kim Borgman was a manager there and wanted more training available from HP. And not just in classes about IMAGE, either. The newest technical capabilities were on her wish list.
There's more advanced technology on the N-Class. A few years back the company in Oak Brook, Illinois was using Hillary Software's byRequest to move its email and PDF from the 3000 to computers in the rest of the IT environment. byRequest is built to extract and distribute reporting from any HP 3000 application.
"We use it to e-mail all our reports now," Borgman said. "Hardly any printing happens on the line printer anymore." byRequest will support secure FTP as well as standard FTP.
The fate and future of the 3000 application has been in flux. In 2012 another NWS official reported that the 3000 app was being moved to Windows Server. The code was headed to NetCOBOL at the time.
Dwight Demming, the VP of the company's IT operations, kicked off the new data warehouse project last winter. Demming said the work might possibly be leading to full-time employment. A year's worth of HP 3000 work starting in 2018 is a prospect few people could have forseen when HP turned off the lights in its MPE/iX lab almost eight years ago.