On the day this blog started, I was just 48 years old. It was a June afternoon in 2005 and the HP 3000 had its future still well in play. The community was gathered in a more significant way during the third year since HP's exit announcement arrived.

Less than a month later the 31-year-old user group closed its doors suddenly. Millions of dollars were lost and a conference with a decades-long heritage was gone. We had big news about a big departure. Nothing but a blog would have told that story so well.

The experts had not departed from the 3000 community, not by any means 14 years ago. The 3000-L was still lively with content, even with enough traffic on the mailing list to accommodate political screeds and jokes. We were never going to be able to replicate that kind of wisdom. A blog, though, was a relatively new thing in a small IT community like MPE and the 3000. The old journalist in me loved the prospect of making a story show up in a matter of hours or minutes.

It can be argued that a community relying on a computer no longer being manufactured might not need a more immediate news resource. A blog seemed like just the thing at the time, to me, a way to encourage the community to stay in touch because something recent was usually worth reporting.

I just began to collect Social Security benefits this month, so it's been a while since that Publish button on Typepad was a new thrill for me. Typepad has kept its head up while many other choices for blog platforms rose around it. I've been through Joomla, WordPress, and now Squarespace for other projects. Typepad still has enough utility to get the word out to a community that's accustomed to reading on a laptop or a PC. We've kept up here with video and podcasts. The blog has done all of the information duty since the spring of 2014 when our printed editions wrapped up. 

Blogs are a way to gather a curated collection of expert reports. I've been lucky to be able to report and write over this one over these many years. We've marked a few losses during that time, but most of the 3000 experts are still lively and familiar with what's unique about MPE and its platforms. Seven years after we launched the blog, Stromasys came up with a new platform for MPE/iX. Seven years since then, there are still things out there to be discovered. Cloud computing, blockchains for data — more of it than you might imagine lies on the horizon.

After 3,257 posts and 403 comments, there's a pulse in here about the never-ending life of MPE and its experts. Thanks for reading and passing along what you have learned.