Early this morning the new-ish HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, was connecting with its customers in an old-school way. The HPE Discover conference has been unreeling since Monday and today was the final day of three in Madrid. These kinds of events were once so remote it took a week or more to learn what was said. Now there's a live-streamed component the vendor mounts on browsers and over phones anywhere.

Whether there's anything worth a live stream depends on the C-level of the viewer. How to Tame Your Hybrid Cloud and The Future and Ethics of AI might be best absorbed by a CTO or some other CxO. On-the-ground solutions don't show up much in HP's livestreams. The most practical lessons usually came during sessions of the 1980s and '90s held in rooms where indie software vendors delivered chalk talks. Down on the expo floor the instruction was even more focused. A manager could get advisories on their specific situations.

That's part of what Stromasys is doing at Madrid this week. An application demo isn't a novel experience most of the time. Making commonplace hardware behave like proprietary systems can still be a revelation. Over in Hall 9 this morning, managers at Discover will see demos of a Charon solution that's got more than 7,000 installed sites, according to Stomasys.

More of those 7,000 sites are MPE/iX emulations than ever. The demos will operate on both on-premise servers as well as from the cloud. Stromasys likes to remind the world that its Charon emulates VAX, Alpha, and SPARC systems as well as the HP 3000. The vendor does this reminding in person at conferences in places like Madrid, like the Middle East, and it demonstrates its virtualization at VM World in the US, too.

Conferences like HPE Discover were once run by user organizations and funded by booth sales. It was a personal business in those days before the Web gave us everything everywhere. Today the personalization arrives at vendor booths with demonstrations for those who've traveled to ask questions. Having an expert on hand to answer them shows a committment to keeping new solutions on display.

It's been many years since an HP 3000 appeared on a datacenter's budget. That's only true of the capital expenses for Hewlett Packard's hardware. It's been so long since the vendor billed for MPE/iX computing that the Hewlett-Packard corporation which sold 3000 iron has a new name. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has been creating capital expenses by selling hardware that will be a legacy. Companies which continue to use HP hardware, even for MPE/iX, have faced expenses to maintain it.

Legacy iron form MPE/iX has become a lesser expense to purchase, but the cost to own is on the rise. Fewer support providers can service the hardware, a factor that can limit choices to assure uptime. Owning a classic computer like any PA-RISC machine can look like a value until something breaks down. The reports from this year's 3000 Reunion showed that the power supply issues are so yesterday. The latest crash point is magnetic storage media. Tape is trouble waiting to happen.

Although emulating HP's 3000 iron has been an option for more than six years now, the solution is still reaching for more traction among installed base customers. Stromasys is devoted to winning over datacenters one manager at a time. The company is putting up a webinar broadcast next week to show how legacy hardware expense can be reduced through virtualization.

The miracle of this virtualization is that HP's PA-RISC designs can be emulated without specialized hardware. In the earliest days of the emulation dream, one company set its sights on emulating 3000s using HP-built processors. Strobe Data had a Kestrel line that used HP chips as plug-in boards inside Intel PCs. A similar 3000 plan didn't get into development. Stromasys pursued the problem from an all-software aspect, since the company already had a Charon emulator working in Digital customers' datacenters.

On December 6 at 1 PM EST (a Thursday, register here)  the company's head of field engineering Dave Clements will present a plan for achieving a one-year return on investment using Charon. That ROI relies on reducing excessive operational expenses. For system owners like those in the Oracle Independent User Group, that translates into hardware upgrades and system vendor support contracts. In the MPE/iX market, those expenses are redundant HP system components and the expertise to install them.

The MPE/iX datacenter in some companies is running out of runway to keep the data departing and arriving as expected. Any additional expense calls out MPE/iX with the kind of attention no platform needs. "What do you mean we need a replacement HP box?" is just one step away from considering how to eliminate the MPE/iX applications that seem to need legacy iron. It doesn't help enough that a replacement N-Class server costs less than $5,000 in today's market.

Editor's note: We're taking Friday off for some holiday R&R during the Turkey Day weekend.

Homesteading customers who rely on HP's 3000 hardware have complete systems waiting to backstop their production operations. This month some discussion on a 3000 newsgroup reminded us all that batteries, frequent startups, and sometimes constant power is essential to keeping such old HP iron ready for use.

Series 9x7 3000s are nearly the oldest computers that will run MPE/iX. First shipped in the middle '90s, some of these systems are holding the line at a few companies or in support providers who backstop 3000 customers. HP called these Nova systems when they were first released. The computers have a pair of batteries that are likely to have failed by now, more than 20 years after they first were put into service.

Those batteries are dug deep into the 9x7s. A battery on the board is integrated with the system's clock. There also is an internal battery as part of the power supply. In a 3000 this old, that second battery was tasked with keeping the system running for short periods without power.

Replacing batteries like these can require a Dremel tool, applied to an intergrated circuit that's soldered-in, rather than seated in a socket. Without the repair, any 3000 of this vintage waiting to be called into action in a disaster could fail with a message like "PDC TOD read failed."

Surprises like these are not limited to the antique hardware of the 9x7 lineage. The Series 9x8s also have batteries that can expire. These 3000s sit in readiness but need to be powered up every 90 days or so just to be sure their batteries will answer the bell. Others will need to be kept powered up at all times.

Long ago the HP 3000 was faced with a problem at HP. The vendor wanted the system to fit in. Fit with customer expectations of compatibility. Fit into the ecosystem of open systems, those touted like HP-UX as uniform enough to accomodate many applications.

Stromasys applied itself to this issue to make the MPE/iX hardware more open. Charon takes a well-powered Intel server and gives it the ability to host the 3000's OS. Linux, such as Red Hat, is essential.

People outside of HP were thinking about this problem, too. Not long ago after we published a story about overlaying Red Hat onto MPE/iX, we examined possible ways to make a 3000 more Unix-ready. We referenced the HP MOST project, which invited customers to try a system that ran both HP-UX and MPE/iX. It wasn't the only concept HP scrapped without much of a field trial.

That Red Hat overlay onto MPE/iX from our article "is somewhat misleading jargon," according to Stan Sieler of Allegro. "HP could probably have made the Posix stuff cleaner—closer to say HP-UX." The Posix extensions that turned MPE XL into MPE/iX were licensed from MK Systems and were to have made the 3000 more compatible with open systems.

"HP also could have said, 'Let's junk our networking and grab the code from HP-UX with some changes,' " Sieler said. "That's particularly so because they'd been saying for years that the two systems had 'shared drivers.' "

I had proposed to HP managment (and key engineers) a different solution, albeit one that probably required more HP-UX-like networking support: Allow HP-UX binaries to be transparently run on MPE/iX.

Because of a key (but minor) difference in the ABI (Application Binary Interface) for the two platforms, you could fairly easily support running both kinds of binaries at the same time with relatively few changes. If I recall correctly, I received no response.

Steve Douglass of United Technologies Aerospace Systems writes, "We have an A-Class 400-100 machine that would only stay up about an hour before it autobooted. This machine was simply used for archived data lookup from an old ERP system. After trying simple fixes like reseating memory and checking connections we still had the same problem."

"We had no support agreement, and no one wanted to pay for a third-party support company to perform a diagnosis and fix, so we powered the system off. Of late there is interest in resurrecting this machine, and someone may be willing to foot the bill. We've researched and found Pivital Solutions and the Ideal Computer Services Group. Are there other recommendations?

John Clogg reports

We currently use Sherlock Services and are happy with the support they provide. I have also used Ideal Services and can recommend them with confidence.

Jim Maher of Saratoga Computers adds

We still service all of the HP 1000, 3000 and e3000 systems. Call anytime.

We replaced a printer recently and we can't get the new one to play nice with the 3000.  It's a LaserJet M608. When sending output to it, it prints a page or two and hangs. The spool file remains in a "print" state. The only way to reset it is to do a STOPSPOOL followed by a couple of ABORTIOs. The next time I start the spooler, the same thing happens, regardless of what I'm printing. What things should I check?

Tracy Johnson says

Try adding SNMP_SUPPORTED = FALSE (or TRUE)  You have a 50/50 chance either way. Sometimes you just have recalcitrant printers that won't cooperate with the HP3000. Consider getting Espul from Richard Corn or Minisoft's licensed version called Netprint.

Jim English adds

We use Netprint and eFormz from Minisoft. The eFormz is installed on a Windows server. Not all of our printers go through Netprint, just the ones that print forms or barcodes. We recently installed a newer HP printer and had the same issue you did. I set it up in Netprint and eFormz and it works great now.

Netprint by itself may solve your issue. I set up the printer in eFormz to print receipt travelers, which may have barcodes on them.

Is there a support matrix document that shows the HP 3000 boxes and what versions of MPE they can run? I'm trying to find all the 3000 boxes that support MPE/iX 6.0.

Donna Hofmeister reports

All 9x8, 9x7 and 99x boxes support 6.0. No A-Class or N-Class 3000s support 6.0.

You can use shorthand and say "November 2001." Or you can say the day that HP's 3000 music died. November 14 still marks the start of the post-HP era for MPE/iX as well as the 3000 hardware HP sold. It took another two years to stop selling the PA-RISC servers the company had just revamped with new models months before the exit-the-market announcement. PCI-based N-Class and A-Class, the market hardly knew ye before you were branded as legacy technology.

For a few years I stopped telling this story on the anniversary, but 12 years ago I cut a podcast about the history of this enterprise misstep. (Listen by clicking the graphic above) HP lost its faith in 2001 but the customers hadn't lost theirs and the system did not lose its life. Not after November 14 and even not today. Not a single server has been manufactured since late 2003, and even that lack of new iron hasn't killed MPE/iX. The Stromasys emulator Charon will keep the OS running in production even beyond the January 2028 date MPE/iX is supposed to stop keeping accurate dates. 

Red Letter Days were so coined because they appeared on church calendars in red. They marked the dates set aside for saints. In 1549 the first Book of Common Prayer included a calendar with holy days marked in red ink; for example, Annunciation (Lady Day), 25th March. These were high holy days and holidays. The HP 3000 came into HP's product line on a November in 1972. November is a Happening read the banners in the HP Data Systems Division. No day of that month was specified, but you might imagine it was November 14, 1972. That was a Tuesday, while the 2001 date fell on a Wednesday. A total of 1,508 weeks of HP interest.

Something important happened in that other November of 29 years later. Hewlett-Packard sent its customers into independent mode. Those who remained faithful have had a day to mark each year, logging the number of years they've created their own future. It's 17 and counting as of today.

This club side of UT's stadium only rose with the 3000

We came together at the UT Club last month. I had lunch at the University of Texas alumni club, deep in the heart of Darryl K. Royal Stadium, to talk with Chad Lester about something older than the football palace's official name: the way that MPE has been sold to the world. 

"Here we are in 2018 sitting at the UT Club, still talking about MPE and how we can go infiltrate those accounts" he said. Some of the reason third parties still find 3000 budget this year is that HP didn't position its business strategy around back-end revenues for the server. HP wanted its money up front. The up-front money meant that by the late 1990s the 3000 division at HP was sending a SWAT team of presales experts to talk at user group meetings or with IT managers who had trouble getting an order approved for a newer 3000.

HP 3000 SWAT team members like Vince Clapps were a proud addition to the sales effort. Now it looks like that push to place new hardware and earn the revenue up front for a system replacement was a fatigued concept. SWAT members locked down new customers doing ecommerce, but many times they'd speak at spots like a RUG conference to save a customer from migration.

Third party application vendors roadblocked the future for market growth, too, because they needed their revenue up front, too. Vendors like Cognos learned to create pricing that prohibited the upgrades of systems. Every boost of power threatened to ripple tens of thousands of dollars of software upgrades because the vendors were allowed to clamp on like pilot fish to the leviathan of buying a bigger 3000.

"They were reversed on how they handled licensing," Lester said over lunch. "In the channel today, these vendors make all of their money off the back-end rebates from Microsoft and the security companies out there. That became the new norm while HP was still on the front side of the sale."

Lester's employer Thomas Tech wants to educate the 3000 community that another generation of storage can be integrated with MPE that runs on HP's systems. HP-built computers are still the predominant hardware platform the MPE computing that will head toward 2028.

This back side of the newer revenue stream is what keeps vendors providing newer components. It's not about the computer gear as it was in those SWAT days. By 2018 the value lies in support and the opportunity to access the datacenter's non-MPE systems. To win the battle to keep 3000 resources on the market, new strategies are in play.

NewsWire Classic

Editor's Note: In October of 2001 the world worked in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks. Our Worst Practices columnist Scott Hirsh wrote this advice about the need to test for disasters. Another crisis was going to rise up for 3000 owners just a few weeks after this article appeared, this one triggered by HP. Regardless of where your datacenter is focused, it's always a good practice to test.

This Is Not a Test

By Scott Hirsh

For those of us in the United States entrusted with a company’s information resources, the events of September 11 changed everything. Before our business continuity or disaster recovery plans were primarily concerned with so-called “acts of God.” But we must now plan for the most improbable human acts imaginable. Who among us, prior to September 11, had a plan that took into account multiple high-rise office buildings being destroyed within minutes of each other? As you read this, the insurance industry is revising its assumptions. Likewise, we must now reconsider our approach to managing and protecting the assets for which we are responsible. Never before has the probability of actually needing to execute our recovery plans been so great.

As of this writing there have already been numerous business continuity and disaster recovery articles in the computer press. By now we understand the distinction between keeping the business going – not just IT, but also the whole business – and recovering after some (hopefully minor) interruption. And we’ve covered the issue of risk, where all the trade-offs and costs are negotiated. This whole topic was explored anew in the last few months, but it is still worthwhile to emphasize some early lessons of the attacks, from which we are still recovering.

It Had Better Work

Worst Practice 1: Trying to Fake It — I was visiting a friend’s datacenter recently, where I was told about a recent audit. This friend’s company spent the whole time trying to fake all the audit criteria: disaster recovery preparedness, security, audit trails, etc. At the risk of sounding like your parents, whom does this behavior really hurt? An audit is an ideal opportunity to validate all the necessary hard work required to run a professional datacenter. And should you ever be subjected to attack, electronic or otherwise, you know that your datacenter will survive.

If you didn’t get it before, you’d better get it now: Faking it is unacceptable. Chances are, at some point you will be required to do a real, honest-to-goodness recovery. And if you think you’re safe just because there may not be very many hijacked planes running into buildings such as yours, think again. The threats to your datacenter are diverse and numerous. And, by the way, violent weather, earthquakes and other natural disasters are still there too.

Worst Practice 2: Not Testing — Once you’re serious about continuity and recovery, not only will you plan, but you’ll test that plan often. There are lots of reasons to test your recovery capability often. Among them are: the ability to react quickly in a crisis; catching changes in your environment since your last test; accommodating changes to staff since your last test. A real recovery is a terrible time to do discovery.

Worst Practice 3: Not Documenting — One of the biggest problems with disasters is no warning. That’s why so many tests are a waste of time. Anyone can recover when you know exactly when and how. The truly prepared can recover when caught by surprise. Since you won’t get any warning – except, perhaps, with some natural disasters – you’ll want to have current, updated procedures. Since you’ll probably be on vacation (or wish you were) when disaster strikes, make sure the recovery procedures are off-site and available. If you’re the only one who knows what to do, even if you never take a day off there still won’t be enough of you to go around at crunch time.

Ten years ago this month HP was advising its customers to get free software while it was still online. HP said that its Jazz web server was going dark because its 3000 labs would end operations on Dec. 31. Maintained by HP's lab staff, Jazz was being unplugged after 12 years. The software played an essential role in getting the 3000 into the Internet age. Eventually HP learned to market the server as the e3000.

Bootstrapping development fundamentals such as the GNU Tools, the open source gcc compiler, and utilities ported by independent developer Mark Klein had a home on Jazz for a decade. More than 80 other programs were hosted on the server, some with HP support and others ported and created by HP but unsupported by the vendor.

The software is still online 10 years later. Fresche Solutions, which began as Speedware, continues to host Jazz programs and papers at hpmigrations.com/HPe3000_resources. HP was clear in 2008 that customers had better grab what they needed before Jazz went unplugged. HP wasn't going to move the downloadable programs onto the IT Resource Center servers to doc.hp.com.

"Anything that people will need they should download before Dec. 31, 2008," said business manager Jennie Hou. "That's our recommendation."

The list of programs online is long and worth a visit for a 3000 manager looking for help to keep MPE/iX well connected to their datacenter. HP created more than a dozen open source programs which it even supported as of 2008. The list is significant.

• Apache
• BIND
• Many command files
• dnscheck
• Porting Scanner
• Porting Wrappers
• Samba
• The System Inventory Utility
• Syslog
• WebWise

Over the past few months we've talked about the 3000 veteran John Clogg. His name is written all over the 3000 online community, as well as in the histories of companies that continue use MPE/iX for manufacturing. He's been helpful to us in telling the story of the end of his career, one that reaches back to 1974.

He was a part of the NewsWire blog from the very first week we pushed it online. In June of 2005, but HP's exit-the-3000 decision less than three years old, Clogg wrote this about the future of access to MPE/iX source code.

HP has had three and a half years since its 3000 EOL announcement — and who knows how long before — to consider the source code issue. It is no longer a credible claim that they have not made a decision. Instead, they are are simply keeping their decision secret for whatever reason.

To me that says one thing: the answer isn't the one we want. Either HP is hoping to kill off interest in non-HP support for MPE by delaying an announcement to the point that no one can afford to wait any longer, or they want to wait to further alienate the HP 3000 installed base until they are no longer serious prospects for other HP servers. In either case, homesteaders had better not base any of their plans on being able to obtain future enhancements to MPE. The handwriting is on the wall -- in flourescent paint! I just wish HP would admit it.

Postscript: HP never did the right thing by releasing the OS source to the community. Seven support companies and developers (including Pivital Solutions) got read-only access. But on a brighter note, like a lot of 3000 pros, Clogg's personal life is about to get richer after all that he's left to his employers and the community. We asked what his retirement by the end of this year is going to bring. 

For the last 44 years I have been on call virtually 24/7/365. I haven't had a New Year's holiday in a few years, and for the first time in 25 years I have a job with only two weeks of vacation. Mostly I just look forward to having time: time to play, time to explore, time to develop new interests that remain unnamed at this point. I have a good job with a good company, but I am simply burned out.

In the longer term, I know I will need something to keep me busy and engaged. I have been asked by my employer whether I would be available for part-time work, so I expect there will be some of that.  I might offer my services to friends and others who need help with PC issues.

My wife and I are going on a cruise shortly after my retirement date as a sort of celebration. As an interesting window into how retirement changes things, when we were looking into airline schedules for getting to and from the embarkation point, we realized we have as much time as we want.  We can drive there and enjoy sights along the way, and on the way back. It was a revelation.

NewsWire Classic

The MPE/iX Transaction Manager for IMAGE does not guarantee logical consistency of your data. How do you ensure logical consistency? Use DBXBEGIN and DBXEND calls around all the DBPUT, DBUPDATE and DBDELETE calls that you make for your logical transaction. Yes, the definition of a logical transaction is up to the programmer.

There can be a lot of confusion about logical consistency, mostly because IMAGE kept adding logging and recovery features over its years of development. Gavin Scott gives a clear explanation of the state of affairs.

It’s amazing how much superstition exists surrounding this kind of stuff, and how many unnecessary rituals and sacrifices are performed daily to appease the mythical pantheon of data integrity gods. Real broken chains are supposed to be impossible to achieve with IMAGE on MPE/iX, no matter what application programs do, or how they are aborted, or how many times the system crashes!

The Transaction Manager provides absolute protection against internal database inconsistencies, as long as there are no bugs in the system and as long as the hardware is not corrupting data. No action or configuration is required on the part of the user.

Logical inconsistencies (order detail without an associated order header record, for example) can easily be created by aborting an application that’s in the middle of performing a database update that spans multiple records. Of course, IMAGE doesn’t care whether your data is logically correct or not, that’s the job of application programmers.

Using DBBEGIN/DBEND will have no effect whatsoever on logical integrity, unless you actually run DBRECOV to roll forward or roll back the database to a consistent point every time you abort a program or suffer any other failure.