Heather Goudey writes:

> Item Subject: cc:Mail Text
>      HP 3000 Customers:
>
>      I'd like to update you regarding the support status of the Classic HP
3000
>      MPE/V systems and CM products.  The following statement details this
>      status.  Please look to the July issue of the HP 3000 Advisor and to
>      http://www.hp.com/go/vintagesw for further details.

[snip]

>      **MPE/V Operating System and Software Subsystem Support**
>      Licenses for the MPE/V operating system and most MPE/V software
>      subsystems will be available for purchase until March 1, 1998.
>      Support on the MPE/V operating system and all MPE/V software
>      running on the Classic HP 3000 MPE/V system will end on
>      September 1, 1998.

Heather,

I took a look at the web page as you suggested -- and like old wine --
some of the products that are being discontinued actually remain quite
valuable. If I understand the chart correctly, BASIC/V can no longer be
purchased from HP and will lose its support Sept, 1998 on MPE/V
machines, but will continued to be supported on MPE/iX boxes.

The question that I have is: Has HP abandoned BASIC/V? If so, can it be
freely distributed among the users now? Has it essentially become
freeware?

The reason that I ask is because of our experience with SPL twenty years
ago. We were unfortunate enough to buy our first HP3000 just a few
months after SPL was unbundled from the FOS and put onto the corporate
price list. When we found that out, we didn't purchase SPL. Just a few
years later, HP changed their mind about SPL and announced that it had
abandoned the product. At that point, our local HP office gave us a copy
(which I have always since considered a true and legal copy). A year or
so later, HP reversed itself again and reinstated SPL as a supported
product -- which it has since again abandoned (more or less).

But the value inherent to both SPL and BASIC/V have not disappeared,
even in an MPE/iX, RISC-based world. BASIC still remains the easiest
language to build complex,  easy string-manipulating software that must
interact with IMAGE databases. HP originally expected that the vast
majority of the application programs written for the HP3000 would be
written in BASIC, thus HP invested heavily twenty-five years ago in
putting together an extremely well designed language.

Moreover, once BASIC is compiled and octcomp'ed, its performance is
nothing to sneeze at. When BASIC is used as a database inquiry and
update language, whether the code is written in a native-mode,
RISC-based language is relatively unimportant. The code is, for the most
part, simply calling the IMAGE intrinsics and that's where the CPU is
burning its cycles.

If HP has abandoned BASIC, it would be an extraordinary gift to the MPE
user community to make it and SPL legal freeware. It would probably have
to be on the terms that "you find your own manuals and don't call us",
but in today's environment where information can be so easily and so
cheaply distributed, that should not be much of a problem.

Wirt Atmar