>David Kalfus asks:
>
>
>?And does anyone remember MPE A, B or C?
>
>I remember MPE C. I don't recall MPE A or MPE B. However, I was with my
>original company only about 2 months before they upgraded their Pre-CX
>to a CX. I can't really recall much about the pre-CX other than the desk
>with the maintenance panels and all those flashing lights. I recall
>floating point switching from 3 words to four words back in the early
>days, but I think that was MPE C to MPE II and the next upgrade to a
>Series II. It all blurs together now.
>
 
    I remember reading (don't recall exactly where- some old
Interact or conference proceedings maybe) that MPE B was
buggy and never released- or just released briefly.  And MPE
A may date back to the initial release of the pre-CX machine (in
1973 or so?), which was (I think?) withdrawn from the market
for a short period because of hardware or software problems.
So anything earlier than MPE C may have been short-lived.
 
    Back at NYU, around 1979, I remember hearing someone say
that the *original* HP3000 operating system had 3 categories
of processes- jobs, sessions and "tasks".  "Tasks" were
intended to be some sort of real-time background process, but
the performance was too poor for them to work and they were
eliminated.  I also dimly recall (or did I dream this) that,
when I got a glimpse of the MPE IIB source code (which apparently
largely duplicated MPE C source code), the source code for
the "Showjob" command had some sort of provision for displaying
"task"-related info.  Aso, the logos on the original hp3000 manuals
(of which I never possessed a personal copy- how I'd like to
have one!) had a sort of triple-arc design- which I was told
represented the job-session-task orientation.