1. THE POSTER IS NOW 98% COMPLETE
The poster is now 98% complete (as far as both printing and taping). We
expect to finish the poster on July 25 or 26 -- and leave for Anaheim on the
morning of August 1 by rent-a-truck. It has been a race, but it looks like
we're going to cross the finish line in plenty of time.
2. THE ASSEMBLY SITE
The assembly site remains at Loara High School, in Anaheim. The athletic
director of the high school, Marty Johnson, has been extremely gracious about
the project -- if not truly enthusiastic.
To get to the high school, turn left on Katella when you exit the north side
of the Convention Center and proceed four blocks west to Euclid. Turn right
(north) on Euclid and go one block. The high school is on the next block, at
the corner of Euclid and Cerritos. We will assemble the poster on the
football practice field.
I expect that the practice field is located wherever you'd normally put a
practice field at a high school. If you don't mind, use your imagination to
find the field (Ken & Jeanette Nutsford and Shawn Gordon have each now been
to the field; perhaps they can provide a better explanation of where to go
when you get to the high school). Marty did request that people park in the
parking lot and walk to the field rather than drive onto the field itself.
3. CURRENT SCHEDULE
We will meet on the field at 7:00 am (that's 10:00 am, physiological time for
people coming from the east coast) and begin assembly no later than 8:00 am.
The current plan is to have the poster assembled somewhere between 11:00 am
and noon. Photographs will be taken of the poster and lunch will be served.
Disassembly of the poster will be begun at about 2:00 pm and we will clear
the field by 4:00 pm.
Marty Johnson asked one condition to our use of the field -- which we
certainly want to honor: The Junior American All-Stars use the field every
afternoon at 4:00pm, so we need to be clear of the field by that time.
4. VOLUNTEERS
We need all of the volunteers that we can get, even if you can come by for
only 30 minutes or so. As to what task you'll be performing, this is
on-the-job-training for all us :-). And if you merely want to watch (or
supervise), you're more than welcome to do that too.
If you only want to observe, clearly, the best time to do so will probably
begin around 11:00 am and continue on through lunch. The helicopter will fly
over about noon to take its pictures.
Lunch is being prepared for about 250 by the Loara High School Booster Club
(the food bill is being subsidized by the HP3000 News/Wire), as are coffee
and doughnuts earlier in the day. Anyone is welcome to come by, eat, and get
your picture taken from 500 feet up. This whole event is not supposed to be
all that serious, so be sure to wave.
As Tony Shepard of Harvard said, it seems that this is going to be "the place
to be" and "the thing to do."
5. AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
We have contracted with Charter Copters of Santa Ana, CA to provide a
helicopter (basically on demand, but hopefully sometime around noon) to
provide a photographic platform.
We originally asked if the pilot can land at the school and pick people up so
that they can both participate in the assembly and photograph the poster as
well, but that was denied by the school district for the reasons of
liability, which is perfectly reasonable.
The helicopter will now fly from John Wayne in Irvine to the Fullerton County
Municipal Airport, which is only a few miles away, and load those who will
take photographs so that the photographers may still participate in the
assembly of the poster and fly on the helicopter.
6. PRINTING & TAPING
Printing of the poster began on June 28. It will be finished on July 25 or
26. Taping will be finished perhaps one day later.
Just a few statistics: the poster will weigh approximately one-half ton. It
will be composed of 66,764 billion pixels, spread over 2650 3-foot x 4.5-foot
panels. The image was generated wholly on the HP3000 (a small Micro XE) and
was printed from that machine to one HP755CM printer, connected as a simple
term type 18 printer. The image was downloaded from the Micro two thousand
six hundred fifty times (more actually, if you count the screw-ups) over a
19.2Kb serial port.
Taping the 2650 panels together has been the real backbreaker (literally).
Three people have worked non-stop, eight hours a day, for the past three
weeks to tape together the poster in strips of 26 panels each, so that they
can be unrolled at the assembly site. This has to be done on the floor, so a
good portion of the people here are now walking around in a permanently bent
over, u-shape. The poster strips are being taped together with carton sealing
tape -- and as just one more small statistic to indicate the size of the
poster: we've been using $40 worth of that tape per day for the last three
weeks running.
7. SOUVENIRS
Several people have said that they would like to have a piece of the poster
-- perhaps a whole strip or so -- and said that they would be pleased to
contribute to the cost of the poster for the priviledge of taking it home
with them on the airplane. We decided not to charge anybody for helping to
"recycle" the material. Thus anyone who wants a strip from the poster can
have one -- but please sign up at the site for your selected strip(s), after
you've selected it (them). The disassembly of the poster has to be as orderly
as its assembly.
Whatever's left over after everyone's had their pick will be taken to a local
recycler (We had thought of having one of the high-school clubs pick up the
paper and get whatever dollar value they could for it at the recycler, but
current estimates of its recycled value are only 9 to 15 dollars, not enough
to warrant doing anything else but just driving it over to the recycler).
As to obtaining your own personalized copy of the poster, the HP Peripherals
Division has a very aggressive program to loan peripherals to members of the
Peripherals Developer Group (which we are) for use at trade shows. Thus HP is
kindly providing a second HP755CM for the HP World show, and Adager has
graciously agreed to allow the device to be connected to their HP3000 in
their booth. Thus you will be able to get a smaller (24" by 36") duplicate of
the giant poster (suitable for framing) at the Adager booth -- along with a
selection of other HP3000-generated art. [Most people, of course, would say
that they didn't know that the HP3000 could generate "art", but they just
haven't been looking at their HP3000-generated invoices and reports in the
right light or from the right angle)].
8. WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
A number of people have asked, "Why the heck are you doing this?" Part of the
reason, certainly, is just to have a good time. Another part of the reason is
make a gentle point. ComputerWorld says we're doing this because we're
starved for attention from HP. They could be right. The poster seems to be
kind of Rorschach inkblot test, you see whatever you want to see in it.
As to specific reasons, I can only answer for myself -- and a good portion of
my personal reasoning is due to my faith in the HP3000.
ComputerWorld, when they mention the HP3000, almost always puts some
adjective such as "proprietary" or "legacy" in front the name. And HP has
teetered on the edge of calling the machine "mature," which, as we all know,
is a death knell for a product line.
I don't believe any of that. If anything, I rather tend to see the HP3000 as
the machine most representative of the future, as the inevitable design that
all commercial computing platforms must become. Utlimately, all technology
becomes simple and reliable. It happened with vacuum tube color television
sets, it happened with xerox machines; it will happen with commercial grade
computers. Whether or not the HP3000 survives, all commercial database
platforms will become simple to use and manage, very robust, highly
resilient, and highly productive, precisely in the manner that the HP3000 has
been for the last twenty years.
Productivity is the key: the productivity gains that were promised in the
1960's and 70's, for the most part, haven't been met. Commercial computers
are harder to use, more complex and more unreliable than they should be -- by
one or two orders of magnitude. And that lack of ease of use, simplicity, and
reliability has had a direct and profound impact on their productive use in
most organizations. Moreover, no machine, no matter what it might be called,
that requires the presence of group of mechanics hovering over the machine,
adjusting this or that, can be called a productive and useful device. Rather,
the necessity of the very presence of such mechanics is an overt sign of a
design failure.
The HP3000 has been a persistent exception to these conditions. The vast
majority of our customers run their machines without (much of) a data
processing staff. The system manager is most often a person that was either
assigned to the task, or had a natural penchant for the computer, or whose
desk was merely closest to the machine when it was moved in. Yet these people
tend to make their HP3000's sing. They know their businesses very well, so
they intrinsically know their databases well -- and they know how to get to
their data.
Unfortunately, satisfied customers who are as pleased as the average HP3000
customer rarely make much noise -- which is why ComputerWorld's comment about
us being starved for attention reminds me much of Jesus' parable of the
prodigal son that appears in Luke 15 of the New Testament of the Christian
Bible (I've included the full text of the relevant part of Luke 15 below).
In this parable, a father had two sons. [The father figure here is obviously
HP corporate -- and the two sons are equally obviously MPE and UNIX]. In
Jesus' parable, one of the two sons demanded his inheritance and left home to
become a citizen of another country, whereupon he wasted his inheritance in
extremely non-productive activities and nearly starved to death. When he'd
had enough of living with harlots, bright lights and nights filled with
endless streams of technical jargon, and could endure no more punishment, he
abandoned his wasteful behaviors and came home.
Upon his return home, his father greeted him with open arms, threw his best
robe around him, killed a fatted calf, and made merry.
This unexpected reaction of the father made the good son, who had long
quietly toiled in the fields, and who had been extremely productive for all
these years, very angry. He said (paraphrasing a bit), "Look, Father, I'm
the one that's kept this family afloat. I'm the one who's actually getting
all the work done -- and you never killed a fatted calf for me. Not even a
goat. I can't even get you to advertise my superior qualities to your
friends."
The obvious moral to the story is that good work is rarely rewarded,
especially if you keep your head down and do the good work, but you certainly
can't give up the good work, regardless of who might temporarily be the
center of attention. Perhaps you just have to go out once and while and
advertise yourself a bit (with some phrase such as "MPE Users Kick Butt --
Productivity-Wise"). And if in the doing of that, there comes a chance for
the good children to kill the fatted calf (or at least some fat-free hot
dogs), and advertise the qualities that they find truly significant in the
HP3000, and make merry for a day or two -- and set a new world's record in
the process -- then those all seem sufficiently good enough reasons to put a
poster together.
Wirt Atmar
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LUKE 15:11-31
11) And [Jesus] said, A certain man had two sons:
12) And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion
of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.
13) And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took
his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous
living.
14) And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and
he began to be in want.
15) And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent
him into his fields to feed swine.
16) And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did
eat: and no man gave unto him.
17) And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my
father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!
18) I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have
sinned against heaven, and before thee,
19) And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired
servants.
20) And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way
off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck,
and kissed him.
21) And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in
thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.
22) But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put
it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:
23) And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be
merry:
24) For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.
And they began to be merry.
25) Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the
house, he heard musick and dancing.
26) And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.
27) And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the
fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.
28) And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and
intreated him.
29) And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve
thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never
gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:
30) But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with
harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.
31) And he said unto him, Son, thou ar ever with me, and all that I have is
thine.
32) It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother
was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.
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