Well, I guess its war story time.

My introduction to the HP3000 came in 1977 with the Series II (I knew
I could gray-hair you guys).

The HP OEM I worked for used HP1000's in its application.  A retail chain
initially turned us down for a system implementation because we were small
and they wanted somebody with proven "stability".  They chose Singer.  Well
guess what, Singer got out of the retail business within six months.  We
 were back in.  They liked our approach, with one modification - they wanted 
COBOL capability (they never did use COBOL, ironically).  We put our heads 
together with our HP sales rep (remember them?) and came up with an
HP3000 Series II.  

I was assigned an HP SE, Bob Chafin.  I believe he still works handling the
huge amount of equipment at the HP Atlanta facility. Our design involved
custom hardware.  Our HP rep introduced me to Bob and we told him what 
the application involved - on line Point-of-sale terminals attached (some
remotely) to the HP3000 through the custom hardware.  At the time the only
inter-system communication was to use the HP1000 as what was called from the
3000 end a "programmable controller".  Our design involved making our
hardware look to the 3000 like a 1000 (the programmable controller).  "How many
terminals are we talking about?" asked Bob.  "About 200" we said.  Bob 
literally took three steps back and said, "You want to do what?"?  Once he was
over his shock, he put us in touch with the right HP lab people.  We were one of
the first to create processes.  

In the meantime, the MIS manager (Mr. BIG Blue) said it would never work.  The
rest is history.  Although we came on line a little behind schedule it worked fine.  The 3000's went down only once in years, Because of a lousy fan that we  learned to start manually 
(with the end of a pencil) until it was replaced.  TheBIG BLUE manager resigned under
 pressure and in a huff.

The story has an interesting subplot.  For on line credit card verification the Chain 
management negotiated a deal with a bank.  We had to be compliant with
their specifications, part of which involved among other things, the chain
taking responsibility for credit card losses when the 3000 was down, which
the bank had no doubt we would be more than their equipment.  
After all, didn't they employ the best - IBM equipment.  They were quite
arrogant about that.  Well, they did go down and we didn't (or very rarely-
due to some obtuse software bugs, not hardware).  I took great delight in calling
them and innocently asking Are you guys down again"?  

By the way, the president of the OEM was Rick Sharp - now the president of
Circuit City.  This system was the prototype for Circuit City's on line POS
system.

War stories are long, aren;t they?

Nick Demos  [log in to unmask]