The creators of the Charon HPA/3000 emulator are rolling out their community carpet in earnest next month. Stromasys is hosting a HP 3000 User Social on Thursday, May 9 -- one month from tomorrow --  and then training at the Computer History Museum the next day, on May 10.

There is a free lunch. In fact, there's a free social on the evening before the training, starting at 6, where refreshments will be on hand, along with 3000 community members. If you couldn't make it to the first HP3000 Reunion in September 2011, this looks like another chance to reconnect in person with your community.

Spreading his message of hope for disadvantaged communities, newly-appointed Pope Francis gave an Easter address yesterday that offered promise for computer groups beating back injustices. "This is the age of miracles," the Pontiff said in a special high-band broadcast on the new social network Chirpify. Leaders of the HP 3000 homesteading community seized on the proclamation as proof that almighty forces were now at work to turn back the clock of change.

"We're on a mission from god," said 92-year-old Leonard Frapp, the engineer who coined the phrase minicomputer in 1967 after the miniskirt took the world of fashion by storm. "It's a lot sexier than those damn mainframe togs," he said of that creation that made white lab coats passe within a few seasons. "With this, we're using so little server fabric we don't even need a mini -- just a see-through virtualizer. Best of all, I can buy one of these virtual 3000s on Chirpify with my Galaxy phone." While grabbing a spoon, he added it was easiest to buy using the Jimmies with Whipped Cream Android release.

As the Pontiff launched a worldwide tour to spread the message of living on less, the new Pope booked his own reservations for a trip to Mountain View, California, where Stromasys conceived the immaculate idea of hosting the first HP 3000 Social and Stromasys training seminar in early May. Special Emissary for his Holiness Rev. Duce Scholdaduci said the trip will include air travel between New York and the Bay Area on Jet Blue. The pope will sit in the emergency exit row on the trans-American flight, since he's infallible about the safety of  a commercial trip managed by an application created using MPE/iX.

"Hoc genus maxime est via amet," the pope said yesterday from his Twitter account, reaching out to explain why he was breaking with tradition of flying in his own jet in a special visit to the 3000 social. The phrase translates to "This is the most affordable way to go," although it was unclear if the Pontiff was describing the emulator or the coach-class low fares to the Bay Area during May via Jet Blue. The flight will offer a special Vatican Channel on the jet's in-flight entertainment in seat-backs.

Out on the HP 3000 Community of LinkedIn, managers have been apprised this spring of an offering from Beechglen Development called Triple Store. The essence of the advice is sound. Make multiple backups, because it's risky to rely on just one tape -- and too time-consuming to simply make multiple tapes.

(Not a part of the LinkedIn Community for 3000s yet? Join us -- we're well on the way to being 600 members strong.)

Triple Store proposes a primary copy goes to local user volume storage on your 3000. The secondary local copy goes out to a Linux Appliance, as Beechglen calls it. There's a third copy that goes into SSD storage in a cloud which Beechglen hosts offsite.

You can look over the pricing in a single-page datasheet from Beechglen, but it's that Linux Appliance that might be the newest wrinkle in a multi-copy strategy. This particular application encrypts the backup and applies compression. Secure FTP (SFTP) can pass the backups from standard HP 3000 73GB user volumes to this Appliance. For those who unfamilar with the appliance concept, it is a separate server powered by Linux and loaded with an application dedicated to backups.

Brian Edminster, our backup advisor for 3000 operations, keyed in on the Triple Store's appliance, too.

The greatest novelty is having a Linux-driven appliance to act as a secure intermediary. It appears to be to sending backups ultimately to one's own Network Attached Storage (NAS), off to Beechglen's cloud, or onto SSDs (which are being used as the removeable media). I already do backups for the systems I administer in a similar way.

Editor's note: ScreenJet founder Alan Yeo attended the recent Stromasys briefing in Europe, where the company introduced and illuminated its HP 3000 emulator CHARON HPA/3000. Yeo has already covered the spirit and intention of the briefing, as well as the frank examination of the product's prospects. He also points out that the emulator's tech magic does not make it a direct store/restore 3000 replacement. But in his summary, Yeo says the solution is supplying a future for the 3000.

By Alan Yeo

Third of three parts

If you're adopting the Stromasys CHARON HPA emulator for your 3000 operations, you are going to have to do some serious planning on what does and doesn't get moved from your old environment. For example, on the peripheral side: DDS tapes? I don't think so! Your smart new Intel-based hardware isn't going to allow you to plug in that old DDS drive that you rely on for your backups. [Ed. note: In an update, Stromasys CHARON manager Paul Taffel begs to differ. The company also believes DTCs can be integrated, but it is waiting for a freeware customer to test that theory.] What's more, I think the jury is out on DTCs, as serial terminals and printers don't exactly fit with a modern Intel/Linux environment.

So if you're not already doing it, you are going to need to look at configuring and modifying your new HP 3000 environment to use things like Network Attached Storage (NAS) and networked printer devices. All of this may require an advanced level of expertise to configure.

Editor's note: ScreenJet founder Alan Yeo attended the recent Stromasys briefing in Europe, where the company introduced and illuminated its HP 3000 emulator CHARON HPA/3000. Yeo has already covered the spirit and intention of the briefing as well as the frank examination of the product's prospects. He now points out that the emulator's tech magic does not make it a direct store/restore 3000 replacement.

By Alan Yeo

Second of three parts

I think the most important thing I realised at this event is the CHARON HPA emulator isn't a piece of technology that allows you to do a direct replacement of your current old HP 3000 with a piece of new hardware, by just doing a store and restore. The best way that I think I can describe it is: imagine that HP had just launched a new range of HP 3000 systems called the "B" and "O" Class to replace the "A" and "N" and that these new HP servers would only run MPE/iX 8.0. 

That 8.0 analogy doesn't quite apply, as the emulator ships with the final 7.5 version of MPE/iX. But you have to use the supplied 7.5 version, not your own, and if you are on anything earlier then you can think of this as an operating system upgrade as well as a hardware swap. So you probably are not going to get away with a STORE on your old system and a RESTORE with "KEEP" unless where you are coming from is an incredibly simple environment.  

Whilst your CHARON box can retain the same HPSUSAN, it can't retain the same HPCPUNAME — and it is almost certainly is going to be running a later version of MPE/iX for most homesteaders. So you are going to have to do a good inventory of what software and third party products you are running; if they will run under 7.5; and possibly how to re-install them — especially if they have any components that hook into anything in SYS. 

That means you are going to have to do some serious planning on what does and doesn't get moved from your old environment. But your reward could be improved performance.

By Alan Yeo

It was nightime, it was snowing and we were on foot, walking to our restaurant. Not a format for an American HP 3000 gathering perhaps, but we Europeans are a hardy bunch with the prospect of a good meal, beer and wine in the offing. It was February 5, 2013, and once again I was in Germany for an HP 3000 event. The last time had been nine-plus years earlier for the final official European-Middle East-Africa, Hewlett-Packard-organised event. I reported on it at the time in the Newswire, "After Malta founders on rocks, Ratingen rolls." Hence the borrowed title of this article.

Sheltering under a Virtual Umbrella

This time it wasn't HP who had organised the event, but rather Stromasys, the company who nearly a decade after HP sold the last HP 3000 is gearing up to supply new HP 3000s, albeit they are emulated servers. To be truthful it wasn't a pure HP 3000 event. Stromasys have been supplying emulated DEC PDP-11, VAX and Alpha emulators for nearly a couple of decades, and the event was for vendors and customers of those platforms as well as for those interested in the new HP 3000 emulator. But it was interesting to contemplate this situation in the same manner HP via acquisition had gathered together all these platforms under one company umbrella (I could have done with one of those umbrellas on our snowy night.) As HP are abandoning these users, Stromasys are gathering together the users of those computers under a new emulated umbrella.  

The event was a combined introduction to Stromasys and their emulators, plus twin technical tracks, one for the DEC people and one for the HP folks. Those attending the HP 3000 track — approximately 20 had made it, from Finland in the north, Greece in the south, Slovenia in the east and Ireland in the West, in addition to those from more central European countries, and a couple of us from ScreenJet in the UK.  In the group there were a few familiar faces from Ratingen, nine years earlier. 

For the HP 3000 attendees, it was an opportunity to find out from Paul Taffel — the 3000 veteran is now Stromasys's resident HP 3000 expert who had flown in from California — how the development and testing of the HP 3000 emulator was going. How the first live and beta test sites had gone over, and for most to get our hands on a copy of our own personal freeware copy of the emulator.

A refreshing thing these days was the candor with which Stromasys talked about where they are, how they got there, and where they are going.

HP is likely to remain intact for a long time, based on the comments from its CEO Meg Whitman at the latest quarterly report briefing. "The patient shows signs of improvement," she told an audience of analysts and the press. "We did better than we expected we would, and I think we should be encouraged by that."

Even though the company halted its quarters of red ink at two — Q1 delivered a profit of $1.2 billion, compared to the loss of $8 billion in the previous quarter — the top management delivered a dire report on business server enterprises at HP. Sales dropped company-wide by 6 percent to $28.4 billion. Its Enterprise Group sales fell $245 million, led by the continuing troubles at the Business Critical Systems unit.

"Our server business has a particularly strong market position in EMEA," said CFO Cathy Lesjak, "and the economic backdrop of that [region] is still dismal. The Itanium challenges within BCS are also still with us. There are key challenges still out there."

Lesjak said the news from the PC group — which HP said it has no plans to spin off — couldn't even meet HP's hopes. "Frankly, the business deterioration we are seeing in Personal Systems — particularly in EMEA and with notebooks — is worse than we expected."

One analyst on the call noted that the profit margins for the Enterprise Group have dropped for nine straight quarters. He wanted to know why, and Whitman laid the first pile of blame upon Business Critical Systems, the unit where HP sold 3000s until it dropped the server 10 years ago.

"The negative factor is the decline of BCS," Whitman said. "It was a big and profitable business, and you see that it's declined by 24 percent year over year. The good news is that we've got the best product lineup we've had in a long time in [the Enterprise Group.]" Whitman went on to note that HP is making investments behind the Enterprise lineup.

There are at least 60 companies in the world that are still using Ecometry direct commerce software on an HP 3000, according to members of that software's community. Perhaps four times that number have already made a migration off MPE/iX, many taking the road to Ecometry Open on Windows.

But that path might have become steeper than the migrated sites expected since Ecometry's owner RedPrairie decided to join JDA Software. JDA is to logistics software as Infor is to manufacturing: a company with a practice of purchasing other companies. Bigger is better to these kinds of entities.

A deal announced in November to combine the two companies says that RedPrairie is acquiring JDA by purchasing JDA stock, but it's a reverse takeover. RedPrairie is the smaller entity, buying up JDA stock to plow through the regulatory scrutiny if the deal was the other way around. The merger was announced as complete about six weeks later, during the Christmas week where news gets dumped because nobody is supposed to be looking.

A larger owner can sometimes not be looking at the best of interests of smaller, acquired customers. It matters enough that some users say say they're freezing Ecometry projects until they get convinced the software will still exist in a year. The 131 products that are now part of JDA, post-merger, suggest something's got to give -- at least in the software development resource derby. At Infor, plenty of software checks in with an ability to continue to pay for support. But development often slows for these acquired products, such as MANMAN.

There was a time -- and not so long ago -- when Ecometry was the sole focus of its ownership. Those owners included people who'd grown the customer base from its HP roots while the server was rebranded the e3000.

For awhile in the 1990s, George Stachnik was the equivalent of Ed McMahon for the HP 3000 world. He hosted the first set of telecasts, via satellite feed to HP offices, directed at improving the HP 3000 customer experience. You were likely to see him at Interex user group events. And then he had a reprise as HP's voice of migration advice in a series of Webinars, back when that was still a new medium.

This year Stachnik has made his exit from HP, after more than 29 years of service. He has joined the staff at Porter Consulting in the Bay Area. The company develops marketing programs, collateral material such as articles and white papers, enterprise marketing management, and content delivery via websites and mobile channels.

In summary, it's the same kind of work Stachnik did for HP for the past two decades and more. He made a transition from HP support engineer to marketing in 1991 and never looked back. After the era of educating customers via satellite and videotape ended, he trained customers for HP's NetServer Division. These were Windows enterprise servers. To the last of his HP days, Stachnik was an enterprising face in the 3000's cast. One of his wilder moments involved destroying an HP 3000. Or attempting to do so.

In every IT manager's life they'll experience emotions. The ones that come from a deadline beaten, budget broken or program crashed seem most expected, even if managers cannot tell if the news will be good or bad. But the love between software companies, their marriages through mergers, and the breakups of product lines or entire corporations are a different matter to manage.

Software love is evident when two companies make their products work together to complement one another. You don't see as much of this as you did even a decade ago, not on the midrange level. Tick off the list of apps and utilities you use and count the ones that take data or processes from another. The 3000 vendors excelled at this, even while they were competing. That's what you get out of firms where the lab is three coders, and as they used to say in the old days, "sitting in a room across from each other and yelling." Software love comes out of labs at first, is blessed by marketing, then approved by the sales force or resellers at its culmination.

Marriage is everywhere by now, but it usually has little to do with love or with needs of customers. At least not the midrange customers of older products. When one software company acquires another -- like JDA being acquired by Ecometry-Escalate-Red Prairie in a reverse takeover -- not many customers get consulted. Those big enough to be already using products from both suitors get a handful of rice to throw. Users of older, established software get something tossed, too, but it is often at them, or overboard.

Companies acquire each other because the expansion of customers, coupled with retraction of jobs and products, makes the deal look good to finance chiefs and big shareholders or investors. It's too early to tell what's going to come of the smaller, but public, Red Prairie acquiring the larger JDA. One early metric is that this new conglomeration now has 131 products -- and fewer product managers than the former aggregate of these two corporations.

Marriage looks good on financial paper, attracts large customers who prefer large vendors, and triggers big change. In some cases, like when Infor bought MANMAN and dozens of other companies, everything got to live together on a massive product list. Your support-paying experience was uninterrupted, but these things signal the end of new features for old products, in many cases.

Retail users once made up the hottest part of the HP 3000 user base. Hot in terms of their rate of growth, in their visibility by delivering major brands' recommendations about choosing MPE. And hot in terms of handling large data stores and building the most crash-proof applications.

Several dozen customers of the Ecometry multiple Point of Sale technology are waiting to make a switch to another platform. In the meantime, the sector has a lot to teach any manager who's obsessed with uptime and high performance. Few datamarts are larger than those in retail.

The 3000's position in the retail market is shrinking, but the leading edge nature of the sector remains as potent as ever. On Wednesday Jan. 30 at 2 PM EST, data mart solution provider MB Foster shares what they've learned at the most recent National Retail Federation conference. The one-hour webinar intends to pinpoint what mission-critical enterprises are doing with current technology.

MB Foster provides critical technology to leading retailers throughout North America, and Europe. To insure our customers have the right technology and infrastructure to maximize their sales, we review and write about leading conferences in retail incorporating ideas into our vision and roadmap for our solutions.

The National Retail Federation puts on the “Big Show” a conference in New York as a showcase for innovative trends in retail. In this webinar, Birket Foster, CEO of MB Foster, shares his insights on those ideas that retailers can use today to increase customer engagement, build brand, streamline operations, and increase sales.

Registration for the free event is online, as is the content itself. You can have the company's automated phone technology dial your line for the audio portion, of listen to it via a very complete and intutive web interface.

Unlike Hewlett-Packard, Apple reported record sales, record growth, and record profits for its latest quarter yesterday. The company has more than $100 billion in cash reserves. Its latest products are outselling the records set by preceding models.

And Apple just lost $60 billion in market cap in today's stock trading.

These are the rules of stock shenanigans that have kept scuffling companies alive while rocket-ships get pelted by analyst eggs. Nothing is more important than beating the estimates of these students of business. Beat them all, too. So if a company sells only 22.9 million tablets in 90 days -- a quarter-million iPads a day  -- instead of 23 million, that's a "miss." Not just beat the estimates of profits, where Apple posted $250 more than the outrageous $13.55 a share estimate. It needs to exceed all estimates, not just slam out a $13.81 per share mark.

The coverage is being couched in terms of analyst estimates, and they need to protect their “phoney-baloney jobs,” as Mel Blanc’s Governor said in Blazing Saddles. Today’s fallout from the wiseguys’ reports were great news for the analyst clients who want to climb on board the stock at $450, I suppose. There’s been too much hype to withstand the “knock-em-down” counterpunch that always follows a brilliant run-up of anything.

For contrast, recall that HP's entire stock price is $17 today -- and it spent much of the latest quarter priced at the value of Apple's profit per share. HP is looking at a quarterly report in about a month that may determine if the company needs to break up the band. Back in the days of its hits like the 3000, it spun off Agilent and continued to grow. Agilent, the old instrument arm of HP, is where the HP Way went to live and thrive.

What does $60 billion in lost market cap matter? A lot compared to HP. That would be two times the value of all of today's HP cap. Destined to split itself in two, the former rival for personal computing will then have an enterpise business market cap of one-fourth of just what Apple lost today. Just for some perspective, folks.

HP got cuffed around not long ago in the same way by analysts -- but after it announced a fleecing it took in the Autonomy deal, plus reporting record red ink. What matters for any customer is still black ink, and not the kind that propped up half of HP's profits, flowing out of the printer division. Profits fuel R&D, unless a company is buying up its innovation. Even with a $60 billion hit, Apple will still be funding innovation tomorrow after 52 million shares changed hands today.

After enjoying the Inauguration's ceremony, pomp and poetry this morning, we turned to the business of the day here in Austin and elsewhere. Our local paper reports that hometown Dell is taking itself private, a serious change in financing that might spark some recovery for HP's primary PC rival.

Financial recovery will be at the top of the US political negotiations starting tomorrow. There's also recovery to consider in the 3000 community. Some of the businesses that remain as 3000 customers do so because the computer is still the best value for their business plans. Even without vendor participation, a server that works because its OS is stable and the hardware is durable looks like a better investment than making changes.

But some businesses are not so fortunate. A recent article in Computerworld tells the tale of several corporations which build change into their plans. They're in high-competition markets, these customers, the kind where even fractions of a dollar per transaction can help turn red ink to black. One example is Hertz, where the HP 3000 held on for so long that Hewlett-Packard extended high-touch MPE support for years after the official end-date. At Hertz, there was no 2009-10 limited support plan.

The Computerworld story comes from the CIO's office, so it's short on details like legacy servers (the CIOs like to call older systems legacies) such as the 3000. But a few notes stand out on this day when changes in the US are now underway, even while the President's strategies strive to continue vital business growth. Like including more middle-class citizens in a recovery. Ironically, if the US economy launches into a robust recovery, more small businesses might be able to follow in the Hertz footsteps -- and afford to make changes which will fail, which lead to changes that succeed.

CEO Birket Foster of MB Foster has just returned from the largest annual conference of retailers, and he's filed this early report on trends that will help shape IT plans to meet rising consumer activity.

By Birket Foster

Retail has become the economy's recovery engine. That's what the National Retail Federation NRF (NRF) touted as its theme at the Big Show in New York this month. Among other companies, Ecometry sites, including some using HP 3000s, have a strong interest in retail trends. They are in a time of change with the software which they consider an ERP application.

They might be encouraged to make such IT changes because business in retail is on the rise. The 102nd version of the NRF show -- what's new in the retail industry -- reports that the sector is creating jobs, careers, community and innovation. Speakers at the Big Show provided insight into the role retail will play in the economic recovery of 2013.

The retail industry (restaurants included) was touted last year as providing 25 percent of the jobs -- and triggering plenty of the votes -- in America. The NRF became active in addressing US candidates and the legislators to send advocacy messages on policies, ones that advance jobs and growth in the retail sector. These included tax reform, retail fairness, workforce flexibility and even healthcare.

During 2013 it is still about changing America, but this time taking a leadership role. The NRF wants to get retail leaders to take action and make plans to help the economic recovery happen. Some of those plans will involve commitments in IT, in expansions or migrations.

The message is clear: retail needs to take a leadership position and set an example for all of America and get everybody to look at how they can help with recovery. Even Newswire readers can be thinking what they can do -- personal consumption is an easy way to boost the economy. [Editor's Note: There's also local consumption in our IT community to consider -- by shopping local for services and software from 3000-savvy vendors.]

At MB Foster we are tracking the trends, and leading a January 30 Webinar on Retail, all to provide more details.

Journalists like me are always a sucker for trend stories. People expect a message of the future to emerge from analysis, and IT consumers look farther ahead into the future than most buyers. You're expected to be ready for change at the moment it occurs. I enjoy it when somebody else is doing the trending.

That's why it will be most interesting to see what Birket Foster and his team at MB Foster have to say about IT trends tomorrow, January 16, starting at 2 PM Eastern Time. This is the first Wednesday Webinar of the new year for the company. They're reaching out to predict what will happen in a wide array of 10 sectors:

Registration for the event is free, at the MB Foster website. The webinars usually take less than an hour, including questions and answer sessions.

You've probably heard of the artisanal concept. That's a hand-crafted, customized product or service that never intends to compete with commodity options. It's better in ways that only the elite can value. You can buy your cheese from Kraft, or your bicycle from Trek. Or you can get a delicious wheel of Terraluna from the dairy up the road, or ride a hand-tooled bike built in that little shop outside Seattle. This might become the stature for the HP 3000 in the years to follow 2012.

Much of what remains in the homestead community is running custom-crafted code and applications. The pros managing this software and these systems are artisans. These companies are doing business with a computer that's become a re-creation of its original design. HP once stamped out 3000s at factories in Roseville, Calif. and in Boeblingen, Germany. The parts rolled out in an industrial process, and the operating system software was bolted together and tested in corporate labs.

An artisanal offering is an alternative to the processing which is usually viewed as industrial. With no more hardware being stamped out of an assembly line, the 3000 is going artisanal with its emulator -- and the OS is sitting in the cradle of Linux, an open-sourced OS of artisanal heritage. You go old-school with your 3000 computing, using tested and proven technology that is as bedrock as the sourdough bread that's baked with decades-old starters.

Brian Edminster, who's been cultivating a repository of artisanal open source software for the 3000 user, pointed us at a web essay that illustrates how artisanal is more than just a step beyond industrial. It's a step forward into something entering a new stage of life, evolving. "It seems to me," he said, "that the entire post applies just as well to our beloved HP 3000." The essay explains.

Only when a thing is made obsolete can we discover if there was some underlying value — beyond utility — that some people found compelling enough to keep alive or evolve into something new. The horses bred today for “recrea­tion” are dramatically different from the workhorses of the past, but they are still… horses.

While horses don't do the work of transport they once did, there's still a $40 billion a year recreational market in them today, more than a century after they dominated the world's transport. "What else is being made obsolete now," the essayist asked, "that might emerge from the ashes in a new, powerful form?"

Hewlett-Packard stock prices made their way out of the $11 range and back into the $14.50 territory this week. The backing for the vendor which makes the migration target environment HP-UX saw a rally of 26 percent over the last 15 trading sessions. That's the period since HP last made a comment or a report on its Autonomy debacle, or the second straight quarter of red ink overall.

After trading 154 million shares during that rock-bottom November 20, HP's fortunes have risen. But for what reason, the analysts are asking. Not on the strength of the HP Discover announcements in Germany last week. HP didn't push above $14 a share until Monday. Its appointment of new EVP Mike Nefkens to lead HP Enterprise Services emerged a week earlier. Its beefed-up Converged Cloud Portfolio made its debut December 4. No seemingly plausible connection there, either.

HP announced its bedrock quarterly dividend of $.13.2 a share as usual, payable to stockholders of record as of Dec. 12. That would have helped get the cart out of the trading ditch this week. But another rumor about the maker of Integrity-Itanium servers emerged over the last few days. Takeover king Carl Icahn might be purchasing HP stock.

Or not, since the 5 percent purchase of outstanding shares threshhold hasn't been triggered yet. Once a stock gets a buyer at that rate, SEC rules kick in and the curtain is pulled away. Nobody knows if Icahn could make a difference to a company whose printer business has stopped growing and whose PCs are now running behind Lenovo's. And some are asking if the legendary activist investor even wants to shake up HP's board.

At least every other day, a 3000 user calls or emails us to ask about the arrival of the Stromasys emulator's freeware version. To recap just a little, this 2-user version of the HPA/3000 would be free to run on any Intel Core i7 or faster PC. The freeware user would input their own HPSUSAN number to get third party software running.

I have to say would because for the last 30 days the freeware has been stuck in the Stromasys development and approval cycle. It surfaced as briefly as a salmon on a summer stream on November 9-10. Then the too-bountiful bundle that included HP's subsystem products was taken off the Stromasys FTP site. The full-scale emulator is being tested, however, by some customers as well as vendors.

MB Foster's CEO Birket Foster just reported today that "We are still testing it, and just added the disc to get ready for throughput testing." Like the managers at some of the other beta test sites, Foster posted a command line stream that showed DISCFREE operating by way of the emulator. His company which sells and supports software for the 3000 community is looking at how extra disc space would impact the use of the product.

There are also other sites in the community which are doing their own beta tests, probably of the full product. Frank Gribbin of the law firm Potter Anderson & Corroon said he's been doing some limited development. He's impressed with the speed.

I am still using BASIC, some FORTRAN and a little SPL. I like the interpreter for rapid development. The compiled code is fast, even faster on the Stromasys emulator.

Gribbin has been on the trailblazing path with the 3000 before this breakthrough. His company was among the first to put Java/iX to work in its production software. Now the emulator software is looking for a foothold, but the delay in releasing that freeware code might be costing the HPA/3000 some early adopters. The holidays are only a week or so away.

It's taken more than 10 years for all of the votes from the business community to be counted. But after HP launched into a campaign to become the world's largest computer company, by buying Compaq in 2001, the enterprise IT legend that HP's chased has finished at No. 1.

Not in company sales, of course. As Kane's financial manager Mr. Bernstein says in Citizen Kane, "Well, it's no trick to make a lot of money... if what you want to do is make a lot of money." The trick HP wanted was to make a lot of profit while increasing shareholder's value. This week we received two pieces of news about that odyssey to be No. 1. Both suggest the game is over, and HP will need to try to win the next, different game.

First, the bond rating service Moody's has downgraded the value of HP's debt paper to just three steps above junk bonds. HP's debt carries the steepest risk ever at a Baa1 rating. This didn't matter as much when HP held so little long-term debt. That's not the case today. About $25 billion in debt is affected, Moody’s said.

Second, the price of HP's stock has taken a tumble all through 2012. It's dropped so low in company valuation that Public Storage of America, a $1.8 billion storage unit renter, is now just below HP's valuation. Hewlett-Packard is the diving blue dot in the valuation chart, and PSA is the green. HP now needs 330,000 employees and $130 billion a year in sales to keep up with a storage unit company's value. HP lost that valuation that's charted there in a little more than one quarter. There seems little chance of regaining it while HP's built the way it is today. 2013's February 21 looks like a genuine fork in the road. HP reports its Q1 results that day.

In this week's New York Times, an op-ed piece written by a CEO contemporary of the Bill-and-Dave HP says it's time to split up Hewlett-Packard. Not to improve its valuation. To save the company, says Bill George, now a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.

NewsWire Editorial

For the past 11 years I've written a story during the month of November about the greatest un-natural disaster your community experienced. It's shameful and inappropriate to compare the end of 3000 futures at HP, announced on November 14, 2001, as anything like Superstorm Sandy. Lives haven't been lost. But livelihoods have been, at least. More than a decade after that business-only decision, we all are suffering through the changes HP dished out during that fall.

As it turns out, fall was also the season when we launched the 3000 NewsWire. The mashup of creation memories with what HP's always called "end of life" makes for a complicated, bittersweet time. The same energy -- change -- gave the community our printed publication as well as HP's exit announcement just six years later.

But we have survived along with you, although the suffering metaphor to powerful climate change storms will stop right here. It was scary and uncertain in those first months after a suprising announcement that wasn't a surprise to some skeptics. Now everyone is crossing into our 12th year beyond that ill-fated Nov. 14. And this month we are watching a virtual 3000, the HPA/3000, take its first steps, probably into even more years to come.

However, we used to mark our newsletter's anniversary with our October printed issue. Within five years of that HP exit plan, our printed editions evolved to quarterly products, rather than monthly. We have sponsors and readers who prefer to read this vehicle in print. Amazon sells a lot of paper, even in 2012. But the trend is toward online reading. It's why we moved our reporting toward the news blog more than seven years ago. By the time you read this, we will be crossing the milestone of 2,000 stories reported on the blog. That's happened in less than half the time the NewsWire has published.

And today the 149th issue of the 3000 NewsWire went into the US Mail. As they used to say on TV, more to come. 

Stromasys has completed the engineering on its Personal Freeware version of the Charon HPA/3000 emulator. The software is available for downloading will be available from the company's FTP servers once issues with subsystem software licensing are resolved. Several bundles are available -- more on that in a moment -- but even more flexibility comes through assigning an HPSUSAN number for the emulator.

According to the Stromasys CEO Ling Chang, a user who's downloaded and installed the freeware can simply type in the HPSUSAN which belonged to a legal HP 3000. No certified USB keys are required, an element that would've made the freeware a $50 item, according to CTO Dr. Robert Boers.

Chang said that a warning message upon bootup of what it calls the A200 emulator says "The configuration file of this freeware allows you to set the HPSUSAN number. Please know that you should only set the HPSUSAN number to a value that you are legally entitled to." 

Chang added that Stromays would like freeware users to send a donation to the American Red Cross for superstorm Sandy relief.

The packages available include a full 2GB VMware kit, including the A200, which a user can uncompress and open with VMware Player.

A freeware user will also need a 64-bit Linux Desktop distro; the A200 freeware runs under Ubuntu and Fedora (both free) or commercial RedHat 6.2. A smaller set of files, without the VMware Player-ready kit, will also be available.

As I write this the polls have closed in the eastern-most time zone for the US elections. Nearly all of the ballots cast in this election have passed through some kind of electronic device, from a touchpad to a click wheel to other, non-uniform interfaces. You might visit a dozen counties in one state alone and see as many proprietary devices. Proprietary carries a negative vibe, this decade as well as this evening. A troubling report in Forbes related how experimental software patches in Ohio might be on live production voting machines today. Those are likely to produce unintended results, as such beta patches often do on HP 3000s.

But the word proprietary has a root of propriety, and that means proper: according to agreed-upon and accepted processing. You'd never sling out beta patches on an HP 3000 because it's just not proper. Your intention is to produce expected, reproducible and fact-checkable results. The fallout from using a proprietary interface, software or patch is simple: someone who's an insider needs to check it. And in a sinister aspect, knows how to crack it.

Decades ago the steady value of the HP 3000 and MPE was its security, one which flowed from privileged mode code. Then during the '90s it was the system's obscurity, once open-source and open system computers took the IT lead. Few people knew the 3000 well enough organize a serious breach. You were much more likely to be hacked from the inside, according to Eugene Volokh's classic Burn Before Reading. The same might turn out to be true this week, if the worriers from Forbes have conjured up a plausible nightmare about election machines. This evening, the biggest news outlets also fretted about the prospects.

Even during this data revolution, the 3000 is remaining settled in its nest of propriety as it's become ever more proprietary. The solution to the balloting mess is to standardize on devices and open the software. Not because the latter is harder to hack, but because an opened-up system is easier to scan for malware. The HP 3000 didn't need security patches after 2008 because the systems practiced propriety to earn their keep, and they were secure through their obscurity. National election voting systems don't have to meet that bar today. It costs too much, apparently.

As the New York and New Jersey grids battle back to restore power and pump out floodwaters today, we recall the stories of HP 3000s that survived almost anything nature had to dump on them. More than once we've heard tales of systems still running, while plugged in, surrounded by several inches of water. 

We've checked in on several HP 3000 sites in the Tri-State area but haven't heard back from the likes of NPD, Jennison Associates or the Local 237 chapter of the Teamsters in New York. Perhaps out of harm's way, or maybe just too busy reconnecting the rest of their infrastructure -- or waiting for the power to come back on.

But one of the early stories we ran in our blog came in the summer of 2005, while the waters of Hurricane Katrina were falling away, slowly. The advice about recovering a 3000 intact after that flooding still holds true today.

John Saylor, Director of Special Markets for 3000 supplier Quest Software, posted some very basic advice back then about restarting equipment after a water disaster:

If your equipment has gotten wet, take a moment to plan your recovery strategy before you plug anything back in. To begin with, don’t plug in anything if it’s even damp, let alone wet. Make sure that any equipment that has been touched by water is completely dry before turning it on. That goes for battery-operated equipment as well as equipment that you plug in. If the water damage was minor, it might work fine. Even if it’s underwater, you might luck out. I once had a cell phone that went through the washing machine yet miraculously worked once it dried out. Had I turned it on when it was still wet, it would have almost certainly have been permanently damaged.

If your computer is completely underwater, there is a strong likelihood that your hard drive has been damaged. If you have a backup, you’re going to be okay. If you don’t have a backup, you might still be able to recover the data, but it will cost you. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina have been with us for a long time, but in today’s world there are additional things to think about as people begin the recovery process. Even if you don’t live in hurricane country, you still run the risk of another type of disaster, fire or just a run-of-the-mill power failure.

Then there was the 3000 left standing, still servicable, when the rest of a company's building burned all around it.

November 7 is more than just the day after the US 2012 elections. It's also the morning that the CAMUS user group is holding a call-in webinar to explore cloud-based ERP solutions to replace hosted software. Some of those hosts might be HP 3000s, if representatives from INFOR and Kenandy score any votes.

The meeting which starts at 9:30 PST (12:30 EST) will be open to anybody who registers at a page at Signup Genius. Over the following two and a half hours, the founders as well as the current holders of ASK technology will show off technology combos which want to eliminate the need to manage servers at manufacturing locations.

Warren Smith of INFOR will demonstrate SyteLine, a cloud-based application offered by the company which now holds the licenses for MANMAN, among several other ERP systems. Rob Elliot of Kenandy will take the Kenandy Social ERP for a spin via the web. Kenandy uses designs and systems architecture from ASK founder Sandy Kurtzig, who first developed MANMAN in the 1970s for an appreciative 3000 customer base rolling its own MRP solutions.

These software solutions rely on faith in offsite servers and secure bandwidth, elements which have become more proven in the years since Salesforce.com became a business standard. While INFOR draws itself into the cloud world by way of its installed MANMAN base, Social ERP relies on the force.com cloud reputation. Both companies claim to be able to eliminate local IT resource requirements, or at least the largest ones which demand veteran pros.

The HP 3000 had detractors and opponents from the day of its birth. It was not an HP-style product, this computer, said Bill and Dave. It started out too slow, or crashed, or relied on software so expensive people had to write their own. Later on it got slammed because it used proprietary operating software. It didn't speak in Unix, collaborate with Windows, communicate with computers on standardized LANs. It didn't FTP files like other computers. It didn't have a modern user license. It didn't use low-cost peripherals. It wasn't the Digital VAX, the IBM AS/400, the Compaq ProLiant or even an IBM mainframe.

But for all of its failings, the HP 3000 did as much as Hewlett-Packard's best to keep up. It did even more when the customers' love was allowed into its designs. Its flaws run back to the business managers, MBAs, engineering leaders and finance officers curating the 3000's future. What this business system finally was not results from choices that its customers made, choices led by the computer's creating vendor.

I am thinking about this today as Apple announces a new generation of computers, revamped with things like a Fusion Drive, ranging from its hottest mobile products in iPads to its least sexy systems in desktop iMacs, skinny laptops, and stacking-small Mac Minis. For every one of these improved machines, snarky commentators brayed out the missing benefits during Apple's worldwide introduction of five distinct computers -- six, if you count the stack-and-rack Mini version that companies use as business servers. I don't believe it's fair to call Apple a company selling to consumers alone. Businesses are filled with pocket-sized iPhone computers and tablets -- the kind of devices that the business-focused HP tried and failed to sell.

At the end of 90 minutes of Apple's parade of advances, its detractors spewed their opinions. Something everyone has, like a certain body part. No matter what a vendor does to try ries to improve a product, these kinds of gimcrack mavens have their juvenile sport. Not a one of them ever shepherded a product like an A-Class server through battles with finance VPs or focus group disciples or engineering leaders who wanted designs that were only successors. In spite of all of that blathering drool, people will love their new iPads and Mac laptops and the same way your community still reveres the concept -- if not the execution -- of the Series I shown above.

Or how loved its 9x9 3000s -- and then finally lusted after that first A-Class unit that Dave Snow carried under his arm to the front of a hotel meeting room at a conference. (Watch at the 20-second mark; somebody in the room wanted to buy that demo unit right out from under Snow's arm.)

That 3000 didn't run Unix, cost twice as much as a Dell server, and it undercut the value of computers HP had sold just six months earlier. People wanted it, no matter what the know-nothings said about value.

The final class of HP's 3000 design was unfair to anyone who bought a 9x9 in 2000. But it advanced the art of MPE business servers. Customers suffer when they purchase too close to the future. But whether they buy a server on the eve of its futures, or an iPad this spring, they suffer on our behalf. The cost of not advancing the art can be seen in a collapse of a vendor's futures.

Allegro Consultants has released what appears to be the first iPhone/iPad app which will monitor any servers running HP's Unix, Sun's Solaris, Linux or the Mac OS. iAdmin has a few more operating environments that it will touch, according to Allegro's co-founder Stan Sieler.

"Of course, we're working on adding MPE/iX support, as well as Windows," said Sieler.

iAdmin is an app that allows you to view the status of your servers  from anywhere your iOS device has connectivity.  At the moment,  you can view your disk space utilization, drilling down through  your file systems and directories, to see where your disk space  has gone, and also, get a glimpse into your CPU performance.

If you have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch and one or more servers  running HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS, or Solaris, you might want to try out  the app. You can find it via http://www.itunes.com/apps/iadmin or by clicking on the App Store icon at http://iadmin.allegro.com.

Details on the server and setup for the app -- it also works on the iPod Touch -- are at the allegro.com website address above.

Last week Ray Shahan, a 3000 programmer at Republic Title in the Dallas area, asked about virtualizing MPE/iX. Could it be done, and how, and who has done it?

I was asked the question, "Can the HP 3000 be virtualized," and of course, I have not a clue. My intial thoughts would be no, it's not possible (or it would have already been done). But I don't know that it hasn't already been done.

For the benefit of the casual reader of the NewsWire, I'm pleased to report not only that MPE/iX plus an HP 3000 can be virtualized. It's been done, too. An interview yesterday with the new CEO of Stromasys (Ling Chang) and the company's founder confirmed that two customers have gone live with the Charon HPA/3000 virtualization engine. Many in the community know this as The Emulator.

HP 3000 emulator maker Stromasys named a new CEO this week, with the current chief executive retiring Oct. 1. The privately-held company, still headed by its chairman and founder Robert Boers, named Ling W. Chang as CEO after her 13 years at Compaq and then HP.

Chang, who holds an MS in Computer Engineering as well as business education from the Wharton School, said she's excited to be joining Stromasys "as it embarks on a higher-growth journey." She added that the company's products such as the Charon HPA/3000 virtualization engine "offer a bridge to the future where customers can leverage the cost savings for new initiatives such as cloud services and big data."

Boers thanked Jean-Paul Bergmans "for his contributions as COO and CEO over the last years, which has seen a strong growth in sales as well as new products that are about to enter the market. Jean-Paul will assist Ling with the transition and remain on the board of Stromasys."

Stromasys said Chang's group at HP, the Integration and Technical Services unit, "partnered with Stromasys to increase our mutual share of customers for several years." HP revived its contacts with Stromasys in 2008 regarding the 3000 emulator, which Stromasys had to delay due to a lack of HP technical cooperation. Chang will make her office in New York City, but Stromasys will retain its headquarters in Geneva, along with labs based in Moscow.

The company will proceed with its project to release the Charon HPA/3000 product for emulation in a personal freeware version, Boers confirmed.

Ask around to discover how large the 3000 world grew to be, or when it all began. You're likely to get a couple of stock answers. The size of the world counting every system ever sold might be reputed to be more than 50,000 servers shipped. Its genesis is regularly quoted at 1972, so this November would mark 40 years of the 3000's lifetime.

That genesis is only correct if you count the 3000s days of gestation. An out-of-print book by one of the longest-termed 3000 veterans, Thomas Harbron, tells a story of a often-patched, crashing computer. In Thinking Machines, Harbron reports that so pot-holed was the 3000's start that the delays gave HP enough time to rename the system the 3000CX, instead of the System/3000. As has been reported all over, the start was so flawed that HP's founder vowed no HP product would ever be announced before it could be demoed.

Harbron shared a section of his book with us that explains why HP needed the lengthy delay. (We'd love to bring Thinking Machines back into e-print, especially as part of the 3000 Memoir Project.)

After all, is it still a 3000 without a database or a business langauge? He says neither IMAGE or COBOL were ready to demonstrate until mid-1973. BASIC and the 3000's unique SPL were the only languages a customer could use to create software for most of 1973. (And creating your own software was the only way an application suite could go into work in the early 1970s on a 3000.) HP limited access to its lab 3000s in 1972 to communication via teletypes.

Harbron also reported that the first 3000 training seminar of two weeks in California was "classes that were mostly taught by Bob Green," the founder of Robelle. Even at the 3000's start, familiar faces of today were there spreading its seeds.

Reaching out for a way to let the 3000 community experience its emulator, Stromasys will be delivering a free, personal copy of the software as a download. The personal experience could be starting as early as this month.

The Charon HPA/3000 freeware will be fully functional but trimmed back in its horsepower. It's the same kind of model the company has used for many years in the Digital marketplace, where the Charon product has built its reputation. Charon is powering MANMAN sites in the world of DEC servers. Some IT managers there have testified during CAMUS meetings about the success of using an emulator.

Stromasys director Jean-Paul Bergmans invited the 3000 NewsWire to host these downloads, which would be the first program ever to come off a NewsWire web host. There is no competition in the world for a product built to emulate the HP 3000’s hardware.

"People will be able to play with it, test it out, and even run small archival solutions," said Stromasys director Jean-Paul Bergmans. The freeware emulator will have a 1 e3000 Performance Unit rating -- equivalent to a Series 918 -- and it will be limited in its number of users. Details were still being arranged about how to handle support questions arising from using the freeware . But Stromasys has already managed a similar program for the VAX and Alpha hardware emulators in the Digital community.

Bergmans also announced there will be "more granular price points" for HPA/3000 in the near future.

Hewlett-Packard gave notice this week that its job cut program will run 2,000 employees larger than forecast back in May. The total reduction in HP's workforce will run to 29,000 by the end of fiscal 2014, according an Securities and Exchange Commission filing. HP has already seen more employees take enhanced early retirement (EER) than it expected.

Those early retirements are part of HP's workforce reduction plan. Some of the enterprise talent is being forced out, while others are taking HP's EER offer. Bob Chase, an experienced Business Recovery Specialist in HP Support, started his own consulting practice after a WorkForce Reduction. Chase counted 16 years of HP experience including years of 3000 support. The company expects to spend $3.3 billion on workforce reductions through October of 2014.

At the same time these fresh cuts were announced, analysts expect to demote HP out of the top spot in computer shipments. Although HP has been left far behind in computer company measurements of market cap, as well as total sales (both figures eclipsed by Apple), until this month HP had shipped more computers per quarter than any maker.

But the IBM spinoff of its PC business, Lenovo, is poised to take first place from HP. Even as HP tries to capture and retain the 3000 migration server business, its biggest revenue generator has slipped. HP shipped more than 13 million business servers and PCs in the second quarter of 2012. The September figures for PCs will change that, confirming a slide that Dell has also been experiencing -- even as HP tries to retake some sales with Apple-like designs.

After spending almost a year and a half telling the world that HP's Integrity servers are doomed, Oracle has changed its message. In the face of Hewlett-Packard's win in a lawsuit against Oracle, the database vendor looks like it will back off the warnings and continue to service the future of HP's Integrity users. Those users include customers running HP-UX, a frequent choice for HP 3000 migrators.

A second phase of that year-long court battle begins soon. A jury will decide what damages to award HP, if any, in reparations for that 18-month campaign against Integrity. When a preliminary decision went HP's way on August 1, Oracle continued its campaign, promising to appeal Judge James Kleinberg's ruling in the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara. The ruling became final August 29. As of a Sept. 4 statement, Oracle has dialed back the doom.

Previously, Oracle announced that it would stop developing new versions of its software on Itanium microprocessors. For example, that meant version 12c of the Oracle database due out in early 2013 would not be available on Itanium.

However, a judge recently ruled that Oracle has a contract to continue porting its software to Itanium computers for as long as HP sells Itanium computers. Therefore, Oracle will continue building the latest versions of its database and other software covered by the judge's ruling to HP Itanium computers. Oracle software on HP's Itanium computers will be released on approximately the same schedule as Oracle software on IBM's Power systems.

IBM and HP are Oracle's leading competitors for non-Linux business server installations, so the "as soon as IBM gets it" timeline might be a fresh way to drag development feet. Oracle hasn't started to campaign against IBM's Unix and OS400 platform hardware, Power. However, you can still find Oracle's pot-shots about Itanium on the corporate newsroom webpages.

Allegro Consultants has released the latest in its lineup of HP 3000 software tools. PassPCI2 is software which scans HP 3000s for unencrypted credit card numbers.

But to return to that lead for a moment: This is new software which runs on MPE/iX. That's a item all by itself. The 3000 has become a highly stable environment to use in business computing. But part of that stability flows from the lack of change to the system's ecosystem. We haven't seen a new app in awhile.

Security and audits drive PassPCI2. Allegro's president Steve Cooper said the product grew up from a customer's need to pass audits on a 3000, security inventories which are needed to protect credit card numbers in IMAGE databases.

The latest PCI2 compliance requirements demand that credit card numbers reside in one of two states on a 3000: encrypted, or off the server completely. "There are lots of ways to do encryption on the HP 3000," Cooper says. The new product ensures that everything in every field of every record can be scanned for the 13-to-16-digit signature of a credit card. Encryption is a matter for other tools. Removal of the numbers from the 3000 is a more likely resolution.

Over the last three business days, the world's investors and computer customers have watched results of a radical slenderizing program. Hewlett-Packard is taking its early steps on the treadmill to becoming a leaner provider. Its most radical move just resulted in shedding all of its profits for the quarter that ended in July. HP's going to sweat out its extra weight, one 90-day period at a time.

This time around it was HP Services that forced Hewlett-Packard to drop pounds. The vendor had been eager to jump into lucrative outsourcing business since early in the previous decade. After the board of directors killed off Carly Fiorina's plan to acquire Price Waterhouse Cooper, a few years later EDS became a part of HP, at a price of $14 billion. Writing off $8 billion of that outsourcing business as lost goodwill just pushed HP's earnings into the red.

HP's numbers showed that it was  the first time in more than a decade that HP put red ink on the bottom of its balance sheet. It was the largest loss HP ever recorded in a single quarter, and only the third in the company's history. But the $4 per share loss was a sign that HP's slenderizing is serious. Its CEO Meg Whitman has said the company needs to do less, in the hopes of doing what remains even better. 

These are the kinds of reductions that have been overdue at HP, a company which still wants to supply the 3000 migrator with a Unix -- or increasingly so, a Linux -- replacement for MPE environments. If there are customers out there who remain undecided about their migration details: target environments, deadlines or even architectures, then the slenderizing is important. A company getting thinner in the enterprise business, for example, would not be a secure choice while making a change. IBM's not reducing its enterprise measurements, for example.

But you do want a leaner HP, if you're sticking with this vendor. You just don't want it to lose the muscle of enterprise computing, the datacenter tech business, while it gets smaller. Today HP's stock closed at $17.21. You have to go back more than nine years to find a close that's lower, back in the 2002-03 era when the business world was digging out from 9/11's disasters. HP's market cap has slimmed down to just 5 percent of Apple's, and 15 percent of IBM's.

In 2012, it's a tougher world out there for an IT pro. We’ve heard from business analysts that the best thing for any of us over 50, upon getting furloughed, laid off, or Work Force Reduced, is to open our own business. For some, it's a better chance to work than to be hired again. 

HP’s cutting 27,000 jobs over the next two years. Some extraordinary skill in HP enterprise business servers is leaving the company.

Bob Chase started with MPE in 1987 and came to HP in 1996. He extended his skills to land a place as an HP Business Recovery Specialist, part of HP’s support group out of the Atlanta area. “In 2010 I was offered a position as a hardware BRS for Superdomes, blades, and all the Integrity and PA-RISC platforms,” he says. “It was quite a challenge, as I took 35 internal HP hardware courses over four months and began working calls." But after making a transition to Superdome and HP-UX support, he’s had to leave his employer.

After 16 years at HP, I was Work Force Reduced in early June. I loved supporting the 3000, as my first computer job was as a Computer Operator making $4 per hour at my dad's employer. I was 19 years old. It was a Series 68. 

Considering the IT world of today compared to the late 80's, I have great doubt that my career path could be realized today. Off-shoring, consolidation and mergers make it a greater challenge than ever before.

Chase has opened up Chase for Hire, an independent consultancy. He believes that MPE “was an OS that left the enterprise too early.” And regarding prospects for Itanium and HP-UX, an industry-standard path to the future, away from Integrity, seems clear. There's an echo of MPE's later lifespan in the future for Unix. HP has spread more talk of Linux for the enterprise now.

Industry Standard Servers are the future as of 2012. Commonality for the enterprise seems to be paramount, more than a vendor specific/proprietary OS solution. Linux flavors will be the benefactor from this. 

By Steve Hardwick, CISSP

Second of two parts

Once you have created good passwords, your next challenge is how to remember them all. Some of the passwords I use I tend to remember due to repetitive use. The password for logging into my system is one I tend to remember, even through it is 11 characters long. But many of my passwords I use infrequently -- my router for example, and many have the “remember me” function when I log on.

What happens when I want to recall one of these? Well the first thing is not to write them down unless you absolutely have to. You would be amazed how many times I have seen someone password taped on the underside of their laptop. A better option is to store them on your machine. How do you do that securely?Well, there are several ways.

One easy way is to use a password vault or password manager. This creates a single encrypted file that you can access with a single username and password. Username and password combinations can then be entered into the password vault application together with their corresponding account. The big advantage is that it is now easy to access the access data with one username and password.

The one flaw: what happens if the drive crashes that contains the vault application and data? If you wanted to get started with a password vault application, InfoWorld offered a good article that compares some leading products.

Editor's Note: Security is one of the limiting factors in adopting cloud computing. HP, as well as its partners, will tell you that cloud computing and similar remote access is a forward-thinking alternative to HP 3000 centralized on-site computing. But there's that security thing.

More than 30 years ago VEsoft's Eugene Volokh chronicled the fundamentals of security for 3000 owners trying to protect passwords and user IDs. Much of that access hasn't changed at all, and the 3000's security by obscurity has helped it evade things like Denial of Service attacks, routinely reported and then plugged for today's Unix-based systems. Consider these 3000 fundamentals from Eugene's Burn Before Reading, hosted on the Adager website.

Logon security is probably the most important component of your security fence. This is because many of the subsequent security devices (e.g. file security) use information that is established at logon time, such as user ID and account name. Thus, we must not only forbid unauthorized users from logging on, but must also ensure that even an authorized user can only log on to his user ID.

If one and only one user is allowed to use a particular use ID, he may be asked to enter some personal information (his mother's maiden name?) when he is initially added to the system, and then be asked that question (or one of a number of such personal questions) every time he logs on. This general method of determining a user's authorizations by what he knows we will call "knowledge security."

Unfortunately, the knowledge security approach, although one of the best available, has one major flaw -- unlike fingerprints, information is easily transferred, be it revealed voluntarily or involuntarily; thus, someone who is not authorized to use a particular user id may nonetheless find out the user's password. You may say: "Well, we change the passwords every month, so that's not a problem." The very fact that you have to change the passwords every month means that they tend to get out through the grapevine! A good security system does not need to be redone every month, especially since that would mean that -- at least toward the end of the month -- the system is already rather shaky and subject to penetration.

There's a broader range of techniques to store passwords securely, especially important for the 3000 owner who's moving to more popular, less secured IT like cloud computing. We've asked a security pro who manages the pre-payment systems at Oxygen Financial to share these practices for that woolier world out there beyond MPE and the 3000.

By Steve Hardwick, CISSP

There has been a lot in the news recently about password theft and hacking into email accounts. Everything needs a password to access it. One of the side effects of the cloud is the need to be able to separate information from the various users that access a centrally located service. In the case where I have data on my PC, I can create one single password that controls access to all of the apps that reside on the drive plus all of the associated data.

There is a one-to-one physical relationship between the owner and the physical machine that hosts the information. This allows a simpler mechanism to validate the user. In the cloud world it is not as easy. There is no longer a physical relationship with the user. In fact a user may be accessing several different physical locations when running applications or accessing information. This has led to a dramatic increase in the number of passwords and authentication methods that are in use.

Somehow, HP expects to manage to take a declining PC business and an $8 billion writedown in the same quarter, pay for early retirement benefits while it cuts jobs, and then report profitability of about about $1 per share. It takes a sharper accountant's head than this business writer's to tote up PC sales reductions plus billions in a writedown and sum up to profitability. If HP hits its marks, the company would register more than $1 billion in profits for the period.

But that's still likely to be the lowest tally of earnings ever since HP purchased EDS for $13 billion and began to call it HP Services. News media company Berzinga published this forecast of HP's Wednesday afternoon numbers.

HP is expected to report that its fiscal third quarter profit fell 10.9 percent year-over-year to $0.98 per share. That EPS estimate inched up a penny per share in the past 30 days. Analysts have underestimated HP's EPS in the past seven quarters. The Palo Alto, California-based company, like Dell, has faced dwindling PC sales, and analysts on average expect revenue for the quarter to total $30.1 billion. That would be a year-over-year decrease of 3.5 percent. The company is scheduled to share its quarterly results late Wednesday.

Whether there will be red ink on HP's balance sheet for the first time in more than three decades, the company's reach into every aspect of computing looks like it's draining the profits pool at a record rate. Decisions to purchase Autonomy at almost $11 billion, plus that abortive entry into tablets with last summer's TouchPad have taken their toll -- all while the concept of selling datacenter-grade hardware into customer shops keeps losing traction. Cloud-sourced IT, or the near-shoring of computing, is sweeping into longer term planning. With its buy-ups and expansions, HP has become the largest IT datacenter company in the world. As one 3000 vendor who believes in the long term view says, "When you're the biggest, the only place you've got to go is down."

HP has pushed hard to entice the enterprise to make the cloud a new home for business data. While evaluating the pros and cons of making a cost-saving move from classic HP 3000 datacenters to the cloud, this guide of what's to be managed will help. Our security analyst Steve Hardwick looks closer at the challenges a manager must resolve if their onsite storage and systems can be replaced with remote infrastructure.

By Steve Hardwick, CISSP
Oxygen Finance

There has been a lot of buzz around cloud-based solutions. There is a lot to be said for moving to this architecture, especially the lower operating costs. However, a lot of the press has been sourced by suppliers such as HP -- the same people who provide the cloud solutions. It is no surprise that the picture they paint is very rosy. Fortunately, if done well, a cloud transition can be a very successful endeavor. But what are some of the challenges in embarking on this adventure? Let me give you some background on the type of security challenges you are going to face. I will also offer a set of free resources that are invaluable in tackling this migration.

First of all, a little security 101. In the security world there is a very common acronym, CIA. It is not what you may think. It stands for Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Confidentiality is the part of security that is concerned with ensuring that only authorized users can view or copy information. This is the first thing that comes to mind when most people think about security. Integrity is concerned with the accuracy of the data, only authorized users can create and change information. Finally Availability addresses the ability of authorized uses to perform these actions upon the information.

A few examples help illustrate these concepts. Confidentiality: a password protected encrypted file. Only the user with the password can access the data. Integrity: a password protected public web side. Although many people can view the data, only authorized users can create or modify it. Availability: data is backed up to a remote storage service. If there is a drive failure, an authorized user or IT manager can still get access to data by getting a copy of the backup.

Like any journey it is important to understand your point of origin. Let's take a look at some of the inherent security controls in an on-premise solution which is already in place.

While I'm researching the meaty bits of the 3000 for its autobiography, I found another rich resource in a chat with Birket Foster. Like few other vendors, he's celebrated 35 years this year of 3000 business. Yesterday he pointed me at a few dreamy links of HP concept videos.

These are the fond wishes of companies looking toward the future. The video of 1995 was broadcast to the press and the public during the year 1988, when the NewWave office communication products were just released. Ideals in this video -- which is full of office drama about winning a big contract -- include interactive agents tracking schedules and taking voice commands to create reports, plus presentation tools automated by spoken commands.

Everything was connected in an "all-in" concept using HP's NewWave foundation. The HP 3000 had a NewWave role, providing the data to make reports from a well-connected database. I thought 1995 was lost to dusty VCR collections, but Birket tracked it down via YouTube. Concept videos can be unintentionally comic. You can tell from this one it was written in the era of suspenders, white shirts and ties in the office. That's just about the time of the start of HP's shift-to-Unix campaign. And the HP 3000 and other product names are never used. Unlikely to be named, the 3000 just works.

This just-works ideal still lives in the 3000's heritage. A couple of interviews from industry veterans like Ron Miller of Amerigroup and Paul Edwards referenced that reliability pledge. Both said that when the 3000 just worked, the computer was demonstrating its strongest asset. Compared to the alternatives at the start of 3000 service, the MPE ideals must've seemed as far forward as a 1995 vison which was devised in 1989.

As 3000 users move out of their protected and obscure MPE/iX, they encounter more virulent environmental waters. Never mind the malware and spyware aimed at Windows and Macs. (Yes, Apple systems are targets, although few have been hacked en masse). This weekend's big story from popular blogger Mat Honan revealed he got his Gmail swiped, his Mac and iPad wiped remotely, his Twitter account heisted, and his iPhone hijacked. All in a matter of minutes because one password, off the new Apple iCloud, was stolen.

This kind of perfect storm happened because the blogger had plenty of computing systems protected by a single password. By coincidence of course, HP released an the HP Technology at Work IT business eNewsletter that suggests some good password practices. But it starts out with bad advice.

"Try putting your hands on the keyboard and just typing randomly -- a gibberish password can be very secure." This sort of consumer-grade instruction bypasses two of the three security requirements for passwords in the industry.

"There is an acronym in the security world: CIA," says Steve Hardwick, a CISSP pro whose current mission is security for the pre-payment systems at Oxygen Financial. "That's Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability. So the HP advice is true on one count, but not all of them. This is a very common security mistake."

 

 

Over at the headquarters of HP's Business Critical Systems division, the streamers and sighs of relief float in the air this week. A court of California has ruled that Oracle must continue to do business with HP just as it always did. That threat of killing off its database for use on the Itanium systems -- as therefore, HP-UX -- was an empty one if Oracle follows the law and the ruling of a judge.

The HP 3000 had a similar close call more than once in its life. During 1993 and 1994 HP was hammering away at the core of the 3000 customer base. It used R&D managers and GMs to convince leading app vendors they'd be better served by porting to HP-UX. By the spring of '94 Adager organized a Proposition 3000 movement (like the California propositions, all numbered) complete with fine embroidered t-shirts. We wore them to the Interex Computer Management Symposium and lashed at the HP managers on hand.

Soon enough, sense seemed to prevail at HP. A revival of the tech investment began that brought out a better database, moved the system into the open source and Internet world, attracted new customers through the likes of Smith-Gardner ecommerce, and generally swung the sales meter upward. In the middle of this trend we started the NewsWire to spread the word about that year's renaissance.

But HP was a vendor with its own mission. A success in rebooting HP's 3000 business was certified by new sales, right up to the year Hewlett-Packard sounded its swan song for 3000 futures. We had won the battle with HP, but the damage was done with an internal wound. And so goes the same song for Oracle and HP-UX, and probably the future of that operating system inside HP this time. Oracle backs away with this court ruling. But this week's win delivers no proof there's a healthy future for Oracle's HP relationship. You cannot force a company to do business differently, not even if there are tens of thousands of customers who desire the same kind of love they've had for decades.

After more than a year of accusations, secret document dumps, and a glut of suits and countersuits, HP has a victory in its lawsuit against Oracle to save the Itanium servers. Hewlett-Packard didn't paint the suit in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County California as a battle for Itanium's future. But in winning the ruling from Judge James P. Kleinberg, HP will force Oracle to keep selling and porting its database for Itanium servers. Oracle believed that a clause in a lawsuit which settled hiring away Mark Hurd didn't force Oracle to stay in the HP market.

Oracle said it will appeal the ruling immediately. The next step of the lawsuit is to bring the matter in front of a jury to determine damages Oracle must pay HP. Hewlett-Packard estimated it would have lost $4 billion in HP-UX and Integrity business if Oracle had won. Much of it was calculated in support fees.

Legal and industry analysts, as well as members of the 3000 community, are not completely convinced this settles the future for Oracle on Itanium. The judge noted that Oracle and HP were once close partners. Kleinberg noted in his ruling that both companies made a lot of profit for many years working together. It all began to unravel in the spring of 2010, after the former HP CEO Hurd was cleared to take a systems leadership job with HP's rival Sun/Oracle.

Oracle must port its products to Itanium servers without charge, the judge ruled. Oracle said it decided to dump Itanium and HP-UX because it believes the chip is approaching its end of life. Oracle didn't say that about HP-UX. But the operating system only runs on Itanium servers by now, unless a company's got older, PA-RISC-based servers.

Alan Yeo of Screenjet, a provider of tools and services to modernize legacy interfaces on the 3000, believes HP isn't going to extend the HP-UX lifespan very much as a result of a court ruling. "HP don't want to be in the operating systems business anymore," he said yesterday. "That's not where they're going."

By Brian Edminster
Applied Technologies

I follow far too many blogs, in my vain attempt to stay informed on the state of technology (software, hardware, and other). When Apple released its state of the art OS today, I kept on researching. As a byproduct of those attempts, I happened on an article from Information Architects, Mountain Lion’s New File System, and found it quite interesting.

In short, it appears that Apple -- in working to move away from a many-leveled folder hierarchy to 'force' a two-level hierarchy in its file-systems (iOS, and now in OSX) -- is now basically moving towards where MPE was from the beginning.

In MPE's case, it's Account and Group, rather than Application, and folder within Application. But the resemblance is striking.

Ten years ago this summer, the 3000 community was riding the angry rapids of change. Bedrock technology for mission-critical systems was being pounded by HP's waves of the future: Business servers on Windows and Unix were moving forward in HP's plans. MPE/iX was not.

In a few months' time, the community would gather in LA and face off with HP for the first time since that announcement. During the weeks leading to that annual HP World conference , some vendors were spreading the word that the 3000's days were not being numbered -- not by HP, at least. Robelle issued a press release that established the company's course for the post-HP era of the 3000. CEO and founder Bob Green set the lifespan of 3000 relevance at "a long time."

I started on the HP 3000 before the first system was shipped from HP, and I plan to be there long after the last 3000 is shipped. The 3000 and the people who know and support it will be around for a long time. Robelle along with other committed friends of the HP 3000 like The 3000 Newswire will continue to act as hubs for 3000 information.

While Robelle has remained steadfast, there's more to the company's mission than protecting 3000 investments by homesteaders. This month, demo copies of SuprtoolOpen -- the cross-platform Suprtool which now runs natively on Red Hat Linux -- are available at Robelle for downloading. The company's also extended its MPE futures with successful testing of Suprtool on the Stromasys HPA/3000 emulator. Development is looking to expand the 3000 lifespan at the same time that it will bridge any migration onto Linux.

One month ago this week, the latest generation of Internet protocols celebrated a kickoff week. Another one. IPv6 never made it onto the MPE/iX playing field. But some of the sharpest network gurus for HP 3000s say that the new Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard isn't being baked into enterprise network name management. The fact that there's no IPv6 doesn't matter to 3000 managers -- at least not yet.

It's been a long time since IPv6 started its march to relevance. The Internet was built from its roots in the 1980s on the 4.3 billion IP addresses of IPv4, but the IETF estimated that 2011 would be the year when every address would be used up. So this next-generation IP standard was first approved about the time HP was releasing MPE/iX 5.0, in 1998. It's reasonable to think 14 years would be enough time for the world's computing community to embrace a crucial extension of IP addresses. But in the real world, IP addressing is a lot like HP 3000 deployments: What's in place isn't broken for many people, so there's no clamor to replace it.

Jeff Kell is a wizard of networking for the systems at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga that host the 3000-L mailing list. He notes that "the 3000 of course will never do IPv6, short of some major overhaul patch -- and due to the extent of it, that seems impossible." But he adds that enterprise servers, from HP 3000s out to the ubiquitous Linux PCs, aren't making a move to IPv6 in any significant number.

Other than some of the much-publicized "World IPv6 Day" experiments, most of the "server" side of the network remains IPv4. To account for the imbalance, most IPv6 client areas have some sort of gateway, emulation, or tunneling solution to maintain connectivity with IPv4 services.

Quest Software, makers of HP 3000 software since the late 1980s, has agreed to be purchased by Dell for $2.4 billion, according to company reports. Quest shareholders must vote on an offer to purchase company stock outright at $28 a share. The company was committed to a purchase by Insight Venture Partners at $2 billion. Quest will pay $37 million to back away from that deal.

Quest's CEO Vinny Smith, who owns one third of the company's stock, has agreed to vote in favor of the Dell acquisition. Dell will double the size of its software business by purchasing Quest, which makes the Bridgeware data migration solution being sold to HP 3000 shops both migrating and homesteading.

The history of 3000 software companies purchased by larger partners has had spots both high and low for purchasers and customers of existing products. Quest's got a massive business running in software to help with database management, principally Oracle. The HP 3000 products such as the data-mirroring NetBase (which was once sold as SharePlex by HP) or NFS/iX is a fraction of the revenue Quest generates.

A $2.4 billion acquistion is small compared to the $5 billion IBM paid for Cognos. Speedware sold itself to Activant for $114 million in 2005. Five years later Speedware took itself back from Activant, after the purchasing company didn't fully value the future of the Speedware Ltd. segment of the company. Activant was an ERP company interested in the ERP holdings of Speedware.

The Powerhouse products at Cognos have lost their profile in the much larger IBM software operations. One customer said their license was changed without any notice from IBM. Accuride was also receiving an IBM notice by email every 15 minutes about the need to renew a support license. A day's worth of search was needed to find an IBM staffer to turn off that noise.

The European Union Court of Justice has ruled that authors of software can't oppose the resale of used licenses for that software. One member of the 3000 community believes that there's a chance this could open up the exchange of MPE/iX licenses through legitimate sales -- with no HP participation required.

HP still operates a License Transfer operation for shifting MPE/iX installations from one server to another. The fee is a $400 charge. What's sometimes tougher is documenting ownership of a server to HP's satisfaction. Used hardware has been tied to MPE/iX software instances by HP even since a civil lawsuit determined in 1999 that the OS was like a license plate: attached to the iron registered to it until HP certified otherwise.

On July 3 the EU Court of Justice issued a legal interpretation against Oracle in a lawsuit that seeks to block UsedSoft GmbH. UsedSoft markets licenses that it has acquired from users of Oracle's software. The UsedSoft license buyers then download the software directly from the Oracle website. The EU court's directive defines "the legal protection of computer programs." The language below from a court press release seems to show that European courts register only a first-sale right on software. 

The first sale in the EU of a copy of a computer program by the copyright holder or with his consent exhausts the right of distribution of that copy in the EU. A rightholder who has marketed a copy in the territory of a Member State of the EU thus loses the right to rely on his monopoly of exploitation in order to oppose the resale of that copy. In the present case, Oracle claims that the principle of exhaustion laid down by the directive does not apply to user licences for computer programs downloaded from the internet.

"I wonder if this has any effect on the Stromasys and CHARON licensing program?" asked Tracy Johnson, former OpenMPE director, manager of 3000s for Measurement Specialties, and curator of the EMPIRE 3000 server. "If MPE licenses can be bought and sold, there may be some who will hold onto their licenses for a better deal."

Seven years ago this week, the 3000 NewsWire's blog opened for business. During that week of June that I consider historic, I reported on the Sun initiative to make its operating system an open source item. Seven years later, Sun's Solaris software (hawked by Oracle and former HP CEO Mark Hurd) is pushing Hewlett-Packard into a no-win situation with HP-UX. (We were also looking at customer uptake on HP-UX as a migration target. Trailing Windows, even then.) Back in 2005, the prospects for Solaris looked like a lipsticked pig, as one recently-fired Oracle executive said of the OS and hardware. Given seven years, pulling Oracle's futures out of HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop (via Itanium) will cost HP $4 billion in profits through 2020, according to the HP lawsuit against Oracle.

Seven years ago during that summer, Interex entered its last throes of existence by closing its offices and websites virtually overnight. An organization with three decades of activity and service on the books never created a history of itself. That's an omission that Bill Hassell, the former Interex board member and HP-UX expert, noted for us today. Wikipedia believes the former user group has been only a European-MidEast-African (EMEA) venture.

Looking around the Web one day, I typed in "hp interex" to see what showed up. Wikipedia defines Interex as EMEA-HP. Wow -- 30 years of history undocumented, at least at Wikipedia. Have you got any references and history for Interex? I started attending with the San Jose HP 1000 conference in 1980 or 1981. There’s a lot of misinformation about the beginnings of EMEA.  

I made a comment one time in Wikipedia to clarify a term used in serial port communication, but I got critiqued for not having references ('net or paper) for most of my comment. The HP 3000 and the 1000 seem somewhat well-covered, but the history and legacy of Interex seems lost to the Internet.

Not lost, perhaps. But since there's no Interex archives online, you have to piece together the history of the group from accounts such as ours in the NewsWire -- starting with the '05 meltdown and working backwards. We have stories of the user group on the Internet that date back to 1996. Summertime used to be an important meeting point for your community, thanks to that user group. Its legacy is online, but scattered.

While the HP Discover party animals rock out to Don Henley and Sheryl Crow tonight, a swan song rings in their ears. HP CEO Meg Whitman sang off the grow-to-be-big era of Hewlett-Packard at the annual show of HP and its partners. About 10,000 were on hand in Vegas, but only a modest fraction of them heard the notes of a coda to consumerization strategy. HP will pivot to IT pros even while its consumer operations retract. It will be quite an act to observe, worthy of anything in the zoo of Madagascar, to see the needed cash emerge for overdue R&D.

HP will still sell its products to the world at large. Whitman said he loves HP's printers, and she decided to hang onto the PC unit after HP tested the concept of a spinoff. But she's calling a tune that leads Hewlett-Packard back to business computing. The company is so far off that track that Whitman is calling the new strategy a turnaround, one that's going to take years to finish. Longer than your average Dreamworks animated feature takes to draw and render, using HP's systems.

Meg's keynote, complete with a finale from a cartoon lion, wasn't viewed live by all that many working on the busy expo floor, each trying to connect with as many prospects as the three days would allow. CEO speeches are given for big customers who don't need to see things at an expo, the analysts who tell these customers what to think and buy, and user group officers and volunteers. They shouldn't expect overnight change, which may disappoint the investors who put money behind a company that has been getting bigger for being the sake of No. 1, ever since Carly Fiorina became the first non-HP CEO in 1999.

"Most turnarounds in American industry are anywhere between four and five years," Whitman said. "And we’re at the beginning of the journey, not the end of the journey." HP's been bleeding new business and seen its stock at five-year lows at the start of that turnaround. The shares are down 8 percent since she took over nine months ago. This was her first HP Discover keynote.