Hello Friends:

I just stumbled on Google's renaissance of the DejaVu postings -- a
wonderful feature of my favorite search engine that lets you read 20
years of the history of the computer era. And darned if there aren't
some history lessons out there for a 3000 community considering how
to carry on, beyond HP.

In one message I found a CSY spokesman -- speaking for himself --
explaining why porting IMAGE and VPlus to HP-UX wouldn't buy you
much, at least not that he could see in the fall of 1993:

Even if HP did port VPlus (and TurboIMAGE and the whole MPE intrinsic
library) to HP-UX, what would it buy you? I'd be *very* surprised if
an HP 9000 equipped with an HP 3000 "shell" would be any cheaper than
a "plain vanilla" HP 3000. It   certainly wouldn't be any faster. And
it wouldn't buy you any more "openness" because instead of being
"locked into" MPE, you'd be "locked into" HP-UX, (at least until HP
decided to port the MPE "shell" to half-a-dozen other UNIX-based
platforms as well, which seems unlikely at best).  Again, speaking
only for myself....

The same posting includes an amazing 1992 letter from VP Wim
Roelandts of HP, explaining why the HP 3000's benchmarks (HP actually
ran some that year, alongside the 9000) were so much more accurate --
because the benchmark standards were based on block mode
transactions, something the 3000 did all the time, whereas Unix
applications of that day performed mostly in character mode.

1992 was a momentous year for the 3000, and there's no point in
trying to change decisions made back then. But in the clarity of
hindsight's bright light, getting the database ported across onto the
platform which HP was pushing hard would have retained MPE
application suppliers, and so kept the "ecosystem" so much healthier
for the 3000 -- where IMAGE was born and bred.

1992 was also a time when HP was considering both platforms to have
potential for sales as general-purpose computers, and the 3000 was in
open competition with other HP platforms. I can't help but wonder
what might have happened if IMAGE had gotten moved onto HP's "open"
platform, and then HP marketed it like Oracle hawked its software. A
truly open platform, and the database power of IMAGE, and marketing.
The combination might buy you a lot, even eight to 10 years later.

--

Ron Seybold, Editor In Chief
The 3000 NewsWire
Independent Information to Maximize Your HP 3000
http://www.3000newswire.com
512.331.0075 -- [log in to unmask]

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