Hello Friends,

This thread has enlightened and entertained me 
already. (There are some who say the former is 
not all that difficult, and on some of my duller 
days, I'd agree.) It's got me thinking, a good 
thing considering I haven't had my coffee yet 
today.

First to my friend Wirt, who's completed a 
remarkable engineering project to evolve a 3000 
product so it can enter a much bigger 
marketplace, kudos. Nicely done to the exacting 
standards of a computer scientist.

To balance that point, I must disagree with 
Wirt's fundamental law that the HP 3000 died in 
2001.  To disagree I go back to his own point in 
this thread, responding to the mess we see in the 
Windows world, post-XP.

"One of the most unfortunate aspects of this 
business is the tendency of people to exaggerate, 
to try to protect whatever nook and cranny 
they're comfortable in, rather than look at the 
situation as the way things are."

"The way things are" is not an empirical, 
unassailable point of view for the 3000 
community. As Alfredo Rego said in his keynote at 
the recent GHRUG conference, there are many 
perspectives for the HP 3000 users to use in 
viewing their world. Wirt builds software from 
the viewpoint that the 3000 is long dead. IT pros 
like Michael (Anderson) of J3K Solutions see a 
Windows world that grows more deadly and blinding 
with each release. Meanwhile, Shawn Gordon and 
Craig Lalley assay alternative solutions and 
compare the 3000's successful designs with 
younger products on the Windows platform.

Is the 3000 dead? Is Windows a life-blood-sucking 
platform? Does all of this Windows enterprise 
design remind you of something you bought for 
your HP 3000 10 years ago?

The nook I am comfortable in is obvious: 
historic, legacy in the sense of legendary, and 
realistic about the ultimate demise of everything 
we hold dear. Prepare for death and the life that 
follows. You will know when death arrives, so 
don't worry on that score. I just believe it's 
still too early to write that obituary for the HP 
3000, even while creating alternative solutions 
for the problems which that great platform 
continues to solve.

But boy, if anyone can move a product from MPE/iX 
to Windows better than AICS, I'd sure like to see 
them try. Especially in keeping the 3000 hosting 
capabilities inside the evolved product, like 
QCReports does.

La vie a notre évolution,

Ron Seybold
3000 NewsWire
<http://3000newswire.com/blog>

>On one hand you might ask why spend any money on a dead platform, and
>that's certainly a reasonable question. But on 
>the other, if you're intending on
>staying with MPE for a little while longer, QCReports would be a way to
>significantly upgrade and modernize your capabilities with the HP3000. And, if
>and when you do migrate, if you move to a platform which Eloquence
>supports, your total migration time for your 
>database and reports will honestly
>be only a one or two hours. Other than changing the IP address of the new
>host, you'll never notice a single difference.
>
>Wirt Atmar

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