I was involved in installation of 2x 2000 Access system on Christmas Island
(Indian Ocean) late 70s. HP was only vendor who would offer contracted
maintenance there. System did accounting, payroll,stores inventory etc and
some mine planning for Phosphate Mines. The two identical systems were
connected together and were able to use each others printers (no spooling). 
Hp quoted the systems with 100MB of disk each (2 x 7920), but when it came
to the wire on specs, it turned out that Access could only reach 33mb of
each drive , and there was no space or time to mod the op sys to fix this,
so in the end HP had to add a couple more drives FOC. 
One of the drives failed once, and since it was 10 days before engine could
get there, local electrician diagnosed the fault over the phone to HP,
localized it down to an open circuit resistor, found a usable one in the
stores, soldered in to the board and got the system up again.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the systems was featured on a stamp issed by
the Island, with the operator I knew seated at console in T shirt and
shorts.

When HP was on site (fly in one week, cant get out until next week), as long
as they were working on systems, it was part of contract; as soon as they
ran out of work, HP charged T&M rates, while engineer played golf and
propped up the bar....IIRC the system ran into the late 80s.

We converted the Basic code from Access to Basic/V on MPE (on a Series
I/CX!!) and some aspects of the system may still be in use.....  :-)

jp

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Jeff Kell
Sent: Thursday, 14 September 2006 11:51 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Any old HP computer Pictures?

Gary Nolan wrote:
> Got you beat by 1 year. I took Fortran in high school 1976 and we used the
> local technical school's computer if I remember correctly it was a series
II
> also. Dam I am old.
I started on a 2000/Access in the Fall of 1975 (UTC had one of, if not
the, first Access systems delivered).  We got our 3000/II in the Fall of
1976.  Some of our initial documentation was CX material, and my first
episode of tearing my hair out over learning SPL was trying to get the
CHRONOS intrinsic to work.

(The handful of you that knew anything about the CX -> II "migration"
are probably having a private laugh :-) ).

Ironically, that was one of only two "object code" incompatibilities of
user-mode code I ever ran into in the life of the 3000.

Jeff

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