Julie Bixby wrote:

> Coming from the non-tech point of view, may I suggest the letter in a large
> font, followed by the logo/slogan in a smaller font thusly (I've made some
> minor adjustments to the text):
>
>         "Dear Carly:
>
>         We like the HP e3000 that Hewlett-Packard
>         invented 25 years ago so much that
>         we took out a full-page ad in
>         The Wall Street Journal to tell you.
>
>         Signed,
>         MPE/iX users worldwide*
>
> P.S.  Your turn next:  Don't be bashful
> about telling everyone how the HP e3000
> uses MPE/iX and Image/SQL to run their
> online retailing and credit unions, and
> sells them their airline tickets.  Tell
> them they can find more information
> at  http://www.hp.com/go/3000.

What about car rentals (Hertz still with us?), Health Claims (Amisys), not
to mention the corner drug store (Longs), various Universities (us
included), Manufacturing (MM/3000 follow-ups, Exegesis?).

And yes, Posix, gnu, sendmail, bind, Apache, perl, python, Java, etc.
and more on the way (JDBC, ADBC, ODBC, Samba, etc).

Granted it takes an MPE-centric porter to do the job, but it can only
take them an afternoon to know if it is trivial, a big deal, or not yet
possible due to Posix smoothing issues.  Third parties see this as a
nasty proposition (special porting problems, plus need for a testbed
which isn't that cheap) and possibly consulting, but it can be done.
More and more ports are being resubmitted to the base distributions
of the successful ports that it is almost non-trivial, provided you
have someone "in-the-know" to setup the environment.

A possible side note would be those of us that tried to migrate over
to the "trendy" solutions but returned for economic and functionality
reasons.  But I would agree with a prior statement that it takes the
System Manager to make these environments available and push for their
use in the current (traditional MPE-centric) staff experience.

I suppose it would be difficult to sway an installed un*x base site to
invest in the HP3000 as a new platform given the caveats involved with
even the installed base, let alone the real installed base.  It isn't
as straightforward as native un*x, but it can be done.  We have to
sway our experienced staff to at least look at Posix (6.0 and above
for fairly stable, low-maintenance efforts) but they are little more
than installing a un*x product tarball from scratch.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>