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It can be surprising to see how much value remains in an operating system that's not been altered in almost a decade. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has 3000 documentation on its website that is still behind a paywall of sorts. Users access this info by validating their HP Passport credentials — the ones that indentify the user as being current on a support contract.

Xerox has been trying to buy the part of HP left over after the vendor's split up in 2015. The latest $33.5 billion offer, rebuffed by the HP Inc. board, is going to get pushed out to the HP Inc. shareholders. "It's a better deal that you're getting now" is the message to the thousands of HPQ stock managers. Voting shares for or against a merger has a spot in the 3000's legacy.

This is also the outcome that helped cement HP's exit from the 3000 world. In 2002, HP's acquisition of Compaq got pushed out to a proxy battle. Xerox says HP is defying logic by refusing to be acquired. That's the kind of resistance HP loyalists — the HP blue, they were called — tried to muster around Bill Hewlett's son, who was an HP board member.

Without that successful buyout, HP would've had no Digital VMS customer base to court and invest in to feed a business-focused Itanium operating system. HP-UX was a lock for Integrity, to be sure. The 3000 and MPE/iX were there, ready, but just too small for HP's designs on being Number 1 in all of computing. The Compaq PCs were going to make that a reality.

However, about three years after HP rammed through the Compaq merger through a proxy battle, the spark of that deal Carly Fiorina was forced to resign as HP CEO and chairman. PC growth had not contributed to significant HP market dominance. At the same time, the health of its enterprise business began to slip ever so slightly.

Another CEO pumped up HP's sales, even while its ability to sell OpenVMS and HP-UX faltered. Enterprise computing with HP-built operating systems was in decline. HP became an all-Windows enterprise supplier when full business server sales were measured.

The juicy fruit that HP's board dangled in front of uncommitted shareholders was Compaq's roaring PC business. A combined company would be No. 1 in market share almost immediately. That was promised, anyway. The fortunes of OpenVMS seemed secure, heading into the portfolio of a technology giant that had enterprise legacy to match Digital's.

By 2016, OpenVMS was in the chute toward ex-product status at HP. The coup de gras took place this year when VMS support customers were told the future was in the hands of VMS Software, Inc. OpenVMS users, as well as the MPE customers who were the casualty in that 2002 merger, can look at Xerox and watch the conflict knowing it won't change their fates.

Those were set in motion by the last proxy battle. The juicy fruit that HP's board dangled in front of uncommitted shareholders was Compaq's roaring PC business. The fortunes of OpenVMS seemed secure, heading into the portfolio of a technology giant that had enterprise legacy to match Digital's.

MPE customers were sent down the path where Tru64, another Digital creation, sits today. Formal support ended for them. However, MPE/iX was more than a new edition of Unix. It built a community around vendors. There was no other choice once that proxy war was lost.

Mergers are a good way to see where the soul of a company resides — if there's an open fight. Of course, there wouldn't be a shadow of the old HP to fight over — printer-PC HP Inc. — if the Compaq acquisition had failed. HP might be in the position of seeing itself absorbed and erased. A new afterlife seems unlikely for a company founded on something as common as Windows and printers.

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Twenty-four years ago we started unlocking Hidden Value for HP 3000s: Commands that only the veterans know, plus the processes that have been plumbed to bypass MPE's blind alleys.

Some of the value is specific to a 3000 process like using EDIT/3000. It's antique, that editor, but it's on every HP 3000.

I use cut and paste with EDIT/3000 to enter data to batch files.  It works well except that I am limited by the size of the scratch file. Can I change the size of this file so I can paste more at a time?

Immediately after entering Editor, enter "set size=######" to give yourself more space.

For other tasks, like finding forgotten passwords, and keeping them fresh and the 3000's data secret, more elaborate answers have surfaced.

A system manager pitched his plight.

"My operator, in his infinite wisdom, decided to change passwords on manager.sys.  Of course he forgot, or fingerchecked... I don’t know.  At any rate I need some help. Any suggestions, other than a blindfold and cigarette?"

Several versions of help involved the use of utilities from security experts VEsoft. "Do you have the GOD program on your system? If so, it has PM capability, and so it can give the user who runs it SM capability. So it will allow you to do a LISTUSER MANAGER.SYS;PASS=

(That's why GOD should be secured, by the way. A randomized lockword will do the job, visible only to users who have SM capability. When VEsoft installs MPEX, for example, it installs a randomized password to MGR.VESOFT, and to GOD.PUB.VESOFT.)

Paul Edwards, ever a source for HP 3000 training, ran through the backstop methods every system manager should practice to avoid such a dilemma.

1. You run BULDACCT prior to each full backup so you can look in BULDJOB1 for the passwords 
2. You have another user on the system with SM capability and a different password as a backup in case this happens  
3. Your operator used LISTUSER MANAGER.SYS;PASS just after changing the password to verify the accuracy as spelled out in the Operations Procedures section in your Systems Manager Notebook   
4. You have a Systems Manager Notebook

  Then Duane Percox of K-12 app vendor QSS opened up a clever back door:

If your operator can log onto operator.sys:
file xt=mytape;dev=disc
file syslist=$stdlist
store command.pub;*xt;directory;show

Using your favorite editor or other utility search for the string: "ALTUSER MANAGER  SYS" You will notice: PAS=

, <passwd> which is your clue

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It's usually a good practice to keep passwords fresh. A 3000 development manager once posed a question about how to do this while staying inside the bounds of MPE/iX. He had the usual limited budget associated with HP 3000 ownership.

"Management wants users to be forced to change their passwords on a regular basis. Also, certain rules must be applied to the new password. I don't have budget for the good tools for this, like Security/3000, so I need to write something myself, or see if there's any contributed code to do the job."

Homegrown and bundled solutions followed. When Jeff Vance worked in the 3000 lab at HP, he offered the pseudo random password generator as a solution. It's in the HP Migrations webpage hosted on the website of the company formerly known as Speedware. These HP Jazz solutions that used to be on the HP website are still available at Fresche Solutions.  

There are UDCs on Jazz which force a password to be supplied when using NEWUSER, NEWACCT and NEWGROUP CI commands. These required passwords can be random (uses the script above) or user entered with a minimal length enforced.

Then Vance added as an afterthought, a strategy to program your own password system:

I haven’t thought about it much, but it seems you could have a password file (maybe a CIRcular file?) for each user on the system. This file would have their last N passwords, and the modified date of the file would be the date their password was most recently changed.

A logon UDC could detect if the password file for that user exists. If not create it and require a new password right then.  If the password file exists then get it’s modified date and compare that to today’s date. If greater than X days then in a loop prompt for a new password. Validate the entered password against previous N passwords and your other rules. Maybe run a dictionary checking program to make sure the password is not common, etc.

Update the user-specific password file with their new password, and then logon the user.

From the user community, Donna Hofmeister weighed in with this advice:

If you have no choice other than to develop your own software, then I’d certainly model it after what VEsoft has already done. That is:

Based on a system-wide UDC, examine all sessions (it is just sessions, yes?  By the way, a DSLOGON from inside a job is still a session....) against a ‘database’ (By the way, just how secure is this database?  A real database needs passwords... Who’s going to maintain that? A flat file could be lockworded... but that’s not a slamdunk answer.) which is looking for the ‘age’ of the password (By the way, are you going to provide an advance warning period?). 

If it is time to change the password, get the ‘new’ password from the user... but writing the rules is a pain, and keeping track of reused passwords is just annoying. Auditors in the states love when you can say the password is one-way encrypted.  Dunno what your management is saying for encrypting an MPE password.

You remember where you were, perhaps, on the day you learned Hewlett-Packard was done with MPE/iX. You might have been in a meeting, or checked your email before heading home. You might have been installing something a 3000 needed to keep serving your company, or even ready to order a new server to replace the old 9x8 box. Some unlucky vendors were holding orders for new systems.

People did all of that and more on the day HP revealed its 3000 era was on its way to a finish. By 2003 the community was calling the new era The Afterlife. The lifespan of building new HP 3000 hardware was ended when a box rolled off the line at the Roseville plant in early November that year.

And so, on November 14 of 2001, the afterlife of Hewlett-Packard's lifetime started with dismay, anger, and then resignation. The five stages of death proceeded through discussions in a lively 3000 newsgroup. Taking a cue from the horrors of 9/11 in that season, programmers and vendors howled about the relatively unimportant death in their lives.

Doug Greenup was leading Minisoft in that November week. The CEO of a software company whose products were on thousands of systems, he became aware of the HP pullout with just one day's notice.

Alvina Nishimoto from HP called me. She was in charge of third parties with HP at the time. She asked me to sign a non-disclosure which she'd just faxed me. She said she had important news. I signed it and faxed it right back. She called to tell me HP was announcing they were discontinuing the HP e3000, and that HP-UX was their future direction.

HP might have been worried the story was going to get into the world without its influence. The news had been roiling through the 3000 community for more than a week before I learned about it. I'd been away on a vacation in Europe when I got the call from my partner Abby. HP wanted to brief me. Wirt Atmar, the founder of AICS and a 3000 stalwart, threw off the lid 10 days earlier about the pullout by posting to a developers' mailing list.

I spoke to two of our oldest, most trusted customers yesterday, one a ten-year customer and the other 15 years, about this upcoming announcement. Their first reactions were that it simply sucked their breath away. When I told them about HP's proposed plans of migrating their applications to HP-UX — which as an option has all of the practicality to them of trying to establish a penguin colony in Death Valley — their second reaction was "the hell with HP. If we move, it will be to anything but HP." I think that that's going to be the general reaction.

HP learned a great deal about ending a product line with the lessons that began 18 years ago. Earlier this year the company made a graceful transfer of responsibility for OpenVMS, sending the software as well as support opportunities to an independent firm, VMS Software Inc. HP won't sell any more OpenVMS licenses, although it continues to build Itanium servers that will run the apps created for that OS.

This was a vision that the HP 3000 community took to heart during the first of the 18 years that followed. A similar group of OS experts, organized and led by Adager, wanted HP to transfer the future of MPE/iX to new, independent stewards. HP didn't know how to do this in 2001 or in 2002. The offer took another form in the OpenMPE advocate organization, but eight more years had to slip past before HP's source code made its way into independent software labs.

A new history began 18 years ago today, a chronicle of a group of customers who kept their own counsel about walking away from a corporate computing asset. The next two years or so will show HP Enterprise customers what might have been possible had MPE/iX found a third party home. VSI is predicting that it will have production-grade OpenVMS ready for a late 2021 release on Intel hardware.

This is more than a shift away from the HP Enterprise resources. VSI is carrying OpenVMS to a new chipset, a commodity home. In 2001, Atmar told HP's business manager for 3000 operations, Winston Prather, such a move was what the 3000 customers deserved.

Opening MPE up and migrating it to an Intel platform offers at least some real hope for a continued and bright future for MPE. More than that, it keeps a promise that most customers believe HP has made to them, and that is very much the nub of the moral and ethical question that faces you now, Winston.

Migrating MPE to Intel hardware would have permitted MPE to run on inexpensive but high-quality servers. Earlier this month, VSI announced a timeline for such a thing to happen with OpenVMS. A different HP paved the way to that decision—a vendor perhaps chastened by the past—than the corporation that launched the 3000's afterlife.

In the beginning, the launch of this server took place during this month. The slogan at the HP 3000 lab in 1972 was "November is a Happening." Nothing can change what happened nearly 30 years later. But the VSI transfer shows the decisions over what to do with a loyal enterprise customer base have changed in the years since 2001's happenings.

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Almost all MANMAN sites have the original ASK FORTRAN source code, but a few have lost track of some of their mods. It seems hard to believe for some analysts, but source code for applications can go missing, too.

It's easier to believe while considering the age of this software. A 3000 which first booted up a manufacturing site for TE Connectivity in 1978 recently got powered down for the last time. The software had outlasted a half-dozen servers, until finally the need lapsed for a host of an application launched 40 years ago.

TE has its source code for every 3000 instance it continues to run to manage manufacturing across North America and Asia. You can imagine, though, how much care it takes to keep that corporate asset in good working order from the era before PCs until today.

Managing the modifications is the other essential piece of the lifetime-extending effort for MPE/iX ERP solutions. No app suite is as often customized as ERP; the term itself is an extension of the Manufacturing Resource Planning of the 1980s. What was once MRP is now ERP. The planning always needs custom code, tailored to the business processes.

Terry Floyd, the founder of MANMAN support resource The Support Group, said most MANMAN sites — and there are under 100 by now — own and manage their own source code for the main application set. His company deals with modifications for its clients, too. Without the mods, using such apps is a matter of being frozen in time for features. It's like trying to take out a pair of pants without enough material.

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Plenty of writers and customers get confused about the HP of 2019. Back in 2014, the corporation split into two units, operations that align on devices and datacenters. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise now sells datacenter products and services. It's the arm that created HP 3000s in the 1970s. HP Inc., the part of the company that makes printing, imaging, and PC products, received an offer this week to be purchased by Xerox.

HP Inc. acquired 55 patents from Samsung for business printing not long ago. Now the corporation is being courted by a suitor whose printing legacy is wired deep into the DNA of Hewlett-Packard's spinoff. Patents for LaserJet tech, the engineering that in 1984 took HP into the realm of resellers farther removed from HP than any 3000 VAR, are part of what Xerox is bidding for.

The offer, which HP Inc. confirmed it has received, would sign up Xerox for more than $20 billion in debt, financed by Citigroup. The appetites of the HP which created the 3000 and then cut down the vendor's future in the MPE/iX market helped to spark that 2014 split. HP was striving for an overall Number One status as a technology supplier in the years just before it announced its takedown of its 3000 business.

Management at the vendor aligned on growing sectors of business. While the 3000 had enjoyed a nice revenue increase for several years leading up to Y2K, HP saw the unit as one whose growth had a limited future. "If it's not growing, it's going," one 3000 vendor said he'd heard in reports about HP's future.

This was in the era when PCs were soaring on the HP balance sheets and printer products were being sold in groceries. The corporation had just acquired Compaq and Compaq's Digital group, so while there was a future for OpenVMS and its growth, cutting back on enterprise products became essential in HP's strategy.

Xerox developed the first viable graphical interface technology in its Star systems. The Palo Alto Research Center's tour for a young Steve Jobs at Apple led to the mouse interface becoming an essential part of the Macintosh release. 

In a move that proves there's always value in technology that outlasts its creators, there's now a deal in the market to return some of HP business technology to a corporation that's been a part of business computing history since the 1980s. It can be hard to tell what's going to survive in computing and where it will land. HP Inc. recently announced it will be cutting 9,000 more jobs. Betting on good management is at least as important as betting on good technology. As 3000 owners know, technology like MPE/iX is able to outlive the interests of its creators.