Pardon me while I digress. I've been told that I should join Interex,
and after we get this system up, and they stop asking if I'm going to be
in Saturday AND Sunday, I will get the ball rolling on membership,
hopefully a 'company' membership or whatever it is called, at company
expense.

But first, I want to borrow back my copy of The Legacy Continues, and
look over Mike Yawn's analysis of the definition of an open system, and
how closely the 3K fits that definition. For instance, it is my
understanding that the source code for SOME of the software that makes
up a 3K is available for developers who want to work with it. But even
more important from my perspective is how the 3K integrates with a
heterogeneous, and perhaps distributed, system. What role can we
envision for the 3K in an mixed environment? Can we convince others that
a (new) 3K is the right box for the (new) job?

I don't know how many of us are distributing processes, but I think a
good slice of the pie chart is moving data between databases either on
3Ks (we are putting up an Oracle data warehouse on the 3K, and I am
pushing for us to look at using ANSI SQL and IMAGE/SQL for that instead)
or between platforms (we have incoming and outgoing 'data feeds'). Say
you have output from one box being processed as input on another box,
which produces another output of data in some form other than a report,
which in turn goes back to the first system, or on to a third. Does this
'conversation' count as distributed processing?

To ask a previous question a different way, if we are moving data from a
3K to a 9K or an NT box, how about also adding 3Ks to UNIX and NT
environments that don't have them? As I understand things, the 3K offers
POSIX compliance, which can integrate with NT and with UNIX, and offers
MPE, whose praises we know: stable, performant, mature...

>----------
>From:  Chad Gilles[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent:  Monday, September 15, 1997 8:53 AM
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject:       Re: [HP3000-L] The makeup of the Interex Board
<snip>
>Even me, the HP3000 die-hard is getting this experiance. My shop is
>starting to surround our HP3000s with HP9000s and NT systems to do
>specialized tasks. Our systems managers, me included, will be expected
>to fully support all of these platforms, and probably some others as
>well.
>