Tom writes:

> This is way cool, and answers criticism voiced on this list about the
>  really poor marketing pieces HP put together earlier.
>
>  I liked the bit about unlimited user licenses.

I not only agree, I think the unlimited user licenses is going to be more
important to the continued success of the HP3000 than any other item
mentioned.

Psychologically, people don't mind upgrading when they've obviously run out
of horsepower. But the costs of upgrading -- as they were, with artificial
limits being imposed -- to simply get one or two more users were very
difficult to swallow.

But more importantly, user licenses were becoming irrelevant under any
circumstance as everyone was going to the trouble socketizing their
applications -- and generating a great deal of work for themselves. Rolling
your own socket-based applications is not easy, and it obviously generated a
significant hinderance to further application development on the HP3000.

By getting rid of the user licenses, applications can be built greatly more
simply using the standard TCP/IP protocols of telnet, ftp, etc. and not
having to worry about exceeding a specific user license.

Wirt Atmar