My future brother-in-law wrote:
> Before Berkeley sockets were adopted by HP-UX and MPE/iX, there
> was....
>
>     "Sockets for Software Integration"
> a product from HP, which ran on the 9000 and 3000.

Actually HP Sockets isn't that old.  I'm pretty sure BSD Sockets already
existed on MPE when hp created the unfortunately named "HP Sockets".  You
may remember an old 3000 product from HP called "Net Delivery".  HP Sockets
is very similar.  I believe ~3 customers bought Net Delivery during its
lifetime, and HP Sockets is probably doing at least as well :-)

Moral: Beware of proprietary middleware which has no user base.  You may
       find yourself the only customer, which can be a drag if you've
       built your whole application around it and the vendor decides it's
       no longer worth maintaining.

G.