Harmik writes:

> What makes you think HP has to worry about migrating away from HP3000? They
>  made the machine. They can stockpile unlimited supplies of parts and run
the
>  machines for ever - or at least until 2027. *We* are the ones who have to
>  worry about end of support.

Let me address the 2027 problem. It is not the end of the world, literally,
figuratively, or numerically. The CALENDAR intrinsic returns a 16-bit date
value in the form year:day. Nine bits (values 0 to 512) were assigned for the
day value, 366 days being larger that eight bits. The remaining seven of the
16 bits are allocated for the year (values 0 through 127).

The MPE code that calls the CALENDAR intrinsic currently presumes that the
base year is 1900, thus the maximum date that can presently be displayed is
2027. However, sometime in the next few years, the base date can be changed
to 2000, adding a hundred years to the timeout.

If this were done in perhaps the year 2025, the bit patterns 100 to 127 can
be made to still map to 2000 to 2027 so that you could look backwards 25
years, but the patterns 0 to 99 would map to 2028 to 2127 so that rollover is
simple and easy. The process could be extended indefinitely, in the same
fashion another 100 years hence, just sliding the time window as necessary.

While it would easier to do this kind of modification with the source code
available, it isn't that difficult a task to do if you only have the object
code available to you.

Wirt Atmar

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *