Marco Zamora wrote:

> > As I once told Wirt here: At the risk of sounding corny, this list
> > is a nice little community.

I would not only agree, but suggest that the sense of community partly
stems from the reliable, user-friendly platform, itself!

In the San Jose, California area (where I began programming on HP3000s)
everyone that worked with 3000s usually knew one another, or had a
common acquaintance.  The same seems to hold true in the Portland,
Oregon area, as I am currently working with 3 other programmers that I
knew from other companies (I actually am responsible for getting 2 of
them hired here), and know of at least 6 others.

Richard Gambrell added:

> CSYs [oh no, should that be CSY's or CSYs] customer focus...

Wow!  It seems my grammar lesson the other day had some effect!
Actually, since the "customer focus" *belongs* to CSY, it's possessive:
i.e. "CSY's customer focus."  :-)

And since we're on the nice little community topic, I'd like everyone to
know how much I appreciate the supportive and often humorous replies I
received from that "grammar" post last week!  Wirt was even concerned
that I was offended by his humorous reply:

> I would think that anybody who is "anal retentive" about grammar
> would care much more about his colon, or perhaps his appendix, than
> his apostrophe :-).

That still makes me laugh!

Back to Richard:

> I suspect that one of the challenges many of us feel in moving
> into client/server, distributed/networked, multi-vendor computing
> is going outside this computing and technical support community.
> We are grounded in MPE and the Image DBMS, even while we argue over
> languages and clients.

Again, I agree (I'm really just an agreeable kinda guy).  The non-3000
world is sometimes scary, sometimes unreliable, and sometimes not
supported very well.  I think we're all pretty spoiled by HP and the
3000, even with the downs-and-ups of it's future.

Okay, back to work!

  +------------------------------------------------------------------+
   My mind is my own, as are my ideas and opinions.
   My heart, body, and soul, however, all belong to others.      Tim.
  +------------------------------------------------------------------+
   Tim Ericson             tericson    DenKor Dental Management Corp.
   Sr. Programmer/Analyst   at denkor   (aka Willamette Dental Group)
     (& Systems Manager)     dot com   (503) 526-4440 (direct number)
   Programming HP3000s since 1983!    http://www.teleport.com/~dental
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