Jeff Kell continues to write truths:

> The more I think about this... I've decided that it's a marketing ploy
>  (well, that part is obvious), but the number of Oracle, SAP, Baan, etc.,
>  consultants has reached critical mass such that job security and
>  financial rewards are a huge contributing factor to keeping these things
>  cryptic, complex, and labor-intensive.
>
>  If there was indeed a 3000 solution a lot of people would be out of a
>  job :-)

There's more truth than poetry to these comments.

Rather than see the HP3000 as a "legacy system," I've always been prone to
describe it as the first of the truly modern machines. Things will get simple
in the near-term future -- and the Priests of Complexity will disappear. They
always have in the past.

There's a very easy way to distinguish fundamental design failures in a
device: that's by the price of the people that the system requires to keep it
running. A system that is fundamentally flawed has extraordinarily high-priced
people running it. A system of extraordinary design, on the other hand, can be
run by an ordinary human.

I've mentioned before that I worked for RCA Service Company from 1959 to 1963,
the years that color television was being introduced to the United States. The
people I worked with were the brightest, most able electrical engineers I've
ever dealt with. And we were so busy that you felt as if this were a
profession that would go on forever.

But now color TVs are self converging, autoadaptive devices that seek out the
available channels and automatically tune themselves to present the very best
possible image, all without the viewer having to move much more than a thumb
on the remote control. Moreover, the sets have gotten so cheap and so reliable
that a complete industry has collapsed. TV repair people have completely
disappeared because it's now more economical to repurchase a new set than
repair the old one.

The same is true of the corporate Xerox repairman. Forty years ago, in most
large corporations, Xerox repair people actually took up residence in an
office. The early devices were complex enough and sufficiently fragile that,
if you had enough of them, you needed a permanent staff member on site to keep
them up and running, and even then, only producing marginally acceptable
quality copies.

But now, Xerox devices recapitulate color TVs. We just bought our newest Xerox
machine from Office Max a few weeks ago for $550. It produces the highest
quality copies I've ever seen from a xerox device. It has a three-year
warranty -- and yet is cheap enough to throw away and repurchase if anything
really goes wrong.

Computers will inevitably follow the same path. At its core, all an HP3000 is
doing is recapitulating an office filing cabinet, filled with paper records.
There is no reason that it necessarily has to be any more complicated than the
original file cabinet. Ultimately, it won't be.

Wirt Atmar