> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Mark Landin
> Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 1:51 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: MPE strengths (was: Return Codes from CREATEPROCESS
> 
> 
> Marketing and mindshare. With UNIX, you had Sun, IBM, HP, and others
> touting UNIX as a great OS for business. Once any one of those
> companies convinced a buyer that UNIX was a good choice, all three
> major flavors from those vendors had a fighting chance at a sale, so
> there was a good deal of cross-marketing going on. Further, even if
> someone did choise, say, IBM's UNIX servers, 4 years down the road HP
> might be able to get that customer to transition to HP-UX on HP
> servers.
> 
> HP would have had to bow out of that entire cross-bred arrangment as
> their HP-UX became less and less like UNIX and more and more like MPE.
> Further, convincing vendors to rewrite their software to act more
> MPE-like instead of UNIX-like would have been a very difficult
> proposition. Once a vendor has an AIX version of their package,
> porting it to SunOS and HP-UX is a lot easier than porting to
> something like MPE.
> 
> And if vendors didn't rewrite their code to be more MPE-like, then
> customers wouldn't be using the MPE-like features, and would wonder
> why, if they were just using UNIX features, they couldn't use IBM's
> UNIX, etc. As you deprecated and removed UNIX features that conflicted
> with MPE features, you would alienate more and more customers who
> would be more likely to switch to SunOS or AIX than switch to the more
> unfamiliar (and thus more risky) MPE-like OS.
> 
> Lastly, MPE just isn't strong in some of the things UNIX is good at,
> as others have already pointed out. Think about how disruptive adding
> the POSIX and UNIX-like networking capabilities were to early versions
> of MPE. Didn't you feel like MPE's reliability took a step backwards
> in that time? Didn't you feel like there were more system aborts in
> those days? And wasn't it almost always networking stuff that came in
> from the POSIX port? The MPE-POSIX relationship was always a strained
> one.
> 
> 

I was not suggesting that MPE take over HPUX. Just that they could have
created an emulated environment that allowed MPE apps to run while
giving the MPE shops access to a full featured Posix environment for
future development. This way they would have been able to LEAD a larger
number of customers to convert to HPUX, moving a piece at a time as
their business allowed, as opposed to trying to PUSH them off MPE
through a program of intentional neglect.

And yes, the addition of Posix did destabilize MPE. This was the main
reason that I stopped upgrading at 6.0. Most of the changes being
applied to 6.5 and beyond felt more like hacks than actual planned
enhancements, and I just did not trust them.

Comments are my own, not my employer's... etc.

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