At  11:49 AM 5/3/2002, Wayne Brown wrote:
>And in the case of the HP3000 migration, you have to do all this to solve
>a problem that HP created in the first place.

HP didn't create a problem.  They created a solution to lots of people's
problems.  It's called MPE and it used to be a great OS.  These days it's
getting pretty long in the tooth and it doesn't seem nearly as spry and
lively as it did 20 years ago.  The rest of the computing universe has
caught up with most of the big advantages MPE once had (stability,
reliability, price/performance, TCO, etc.) and they've left MPE practically
standing still in the areas where they excel (like developer tools,
flexibility, commodity pricing, etc.).

>When someone decides unilaterally to tear down your house, it's a little
>difficult to feel grateful to them for free advice on building a new one.

Oh please!  HP isn't tearing anybody's (computing) house down!  They've
just said they're not going to build this model of (computing) house
anymore (starting two years from when they mentioned it)... and three years
after that they'll not be taking support calls on it either.  That doesn't
mean that your (computing) house is going to fall down or that it's going
to be repossessed or anything of the sort.  If you want to run it until the
bits wear out (or until 2028, whichever comes first) that's fine with HP
and fine with the rest of us.  In fact, Beechglen and some other folks
outside HP would, I presume, be quite happy to take your MPE support
dollars and will (from what I gather though I've never been a customer of
theirs) do a quite reasonable job of making you as happy as HP support
has.  I'm also under the impression they aren't the only such software
support providers around.

And likewise, there seem to be many hardware maintenance and/or refurbished
system vendors all over North America (and I presume most of the rest of
the world) who will be happy to provide you with working hardware for the
foreseeable future.  (And for everyone who's buying an extra system or two
for spare parts, there's going to be at least a system or two being sold by
someone else who's migrating to other hardware, whether they're changing OS
or not.)  The number of Nova boxes HP has shipped over the last 10 years
has got to be huge... and don't forget that includes the 8x7 HP9000
systems.  SS_config issues aside (and that is a real issue for post-2006)
there's no reason that reasonable precautions can't be made very
economically to ensure replacement hardware is available for as long as you
want to run an HP3000.

The real reason (Okay, it's a complex set of reasons and I'm being
simplistic.) the HP3000 is being discontinued is because HP built systems
that were so robust and scaled so well and were so easy to use that many
(most?) of their customers were *one*time* customers.  A company would by
an HP3000 or three (or three hundred...  [Hi, donna!  ;] ) and then manage
to make those systems "get the job done" for 10 or 15 years.  That's not a
"customer", that's a "former customer".  (And perhaps the business model at
HP where the support organization and CSY don't share revenue exacerbates
the problem, but that's the reality.  And upper HP management [since long
before Ms. Fiorina arrived on the HP scene] has dictated it would be
thus.  Blame it on the stock market, or the analysts, or the investors, or
Capitalism, but that's reality in large high-tech corporations.)

P.S.  I've been a software developer and/or sys-admin on MPE for the vast
majority of the last 20 years, since November 1980.... and I'm still
working on software for MPE.  But over the last 10 years I've gradually
gotten more and more exposure to HP-UX, BSD, Linux and other flavors of
unix... and believe it or not, I actually find software development on MPE
to be obtuse now.  Take editors as a case in point:  I've been fluent in
Qedit [took the manual home to read over the weekend sometime back in the
very early 1980s when I first had access to it], Quad, Voodoo (HPedit
before it was lobotomized for sale) and at various times in various
companies have used each of them on a day-in, day-out basis.  I can get
around in Editor and WhisperTech's Programmer Studio.  But the editor I
prefer above them all is vi.  Yes, lowly oft-scorned vi... present on every
flavor of unix (including Linux), available on Windows (as vim and gvim),
and even on MPE [where the half-duplex nature of terminal communication
makes it something of a painful experience].  If you've tried vi on MPE and
decided you didn't like it, try it on anything else... and take the plunge
long enough to get over the first day's learning curve.  Once you know vi,
you can dance your way through the unix shells.  OTOH, if you're one of
those folks who runs Qedit and/or MPEX and never exits until the end of the
day (or even the next reboot ;), then perhaps you'd prefer the exact
opposite of vi, emacs, the program that comes bundled with it's own Lisp
interpreter for scripting, is able to do everything including wash the
dishes, and (some say, "in a pinch" ;) can edit text files.

--
Jeff Woods
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