Hi Friends,

We are probably more than a few years away from MPE/iX will be labeled a hobbyist OS by its creators. OpenVMS got this prized badge long ago, when DEC still controlled its fate, before Compaq and before HP and before HP Enterprise. It was a better deal than HP ever gave MPE.

Charon gives your PA-RISC new life, beyond HP iron. I’ve seen reports on a skunkworks, back-door, not-licensed version of Charon out there. You can practically see the Jolly Roger sailing in the signature line for these guys herding the skunks. "Preservation for posterity" is the same kind of motto that’s being used by the Internet Archive to swipe tens of thousands of books that are allegedly “in public domain.” The New Zealanders are cutting loose of a lot of books they don’t want in their libraries, “donating” them to the IA.

Except the authors still hold rights to their books and the copyrighted material therein. If you think of the code in MPE/iX like an original work — and why not — then the IA is a lot like those Charon pirates. The pirates are plain enough to ask for recent reverse-engineered copies of the four versions of Charon. There’s also freeware versions (quite dated) of Charon out there with MPE/iX bundled in. 

There’s not much chance of MPE/iX going missing with these Charon versions still around, stored on drives or in tapes. Although I’d recommend not relying too heavy on a tape in your hobbyist exploits. That’s probably pretty old mylar in that cassette.

People have a right to ask for these things — but from the owners, who have to walk away from the future of commercial payment regarding their creations. It's actually not impossible to imagine HP getting this compensation. It would take a lot of email, but you could probably send license money to HPE to transfer a valid MPE/iX license. Only the ardent sticklers would do that now. But you have to consider there are companies in the world — many more than dozens, to be sure — still logging transactions of purchases and service payments using MPE/iX. Perhaps using servers that would be old enough to vote in the US (18 in most states).

Those 3000s certainly aren’t too young to vote, so to speak. They’re not antiques. Despite some close contact, the Computer History Museum hasn’t built an exhibit to show off the HP 3000s that are in its storage facility.

Hobbyist licenses haven’t harmed HPE in its OpenVMS ownership. But then, OpenVMS received all kinds of special treatment once it was inside the HP fold. First, it got the vaunted porting project to the then-new Itanium processors. Then, about 12 years later, another special consideration. This one was sending OpenVMS into a new company, an independent staffed by former HPE (and mostly DEC) engineers. They were to become the future of OpenVMS. VMS Software Inc. was born. By now it’s selling OpenVMS that runs native on x86 servers. It’s still very new, but a fresh generation of VMS will be sold (and upgraded) by VSI.

During the same time that HP was spending millions to get OpenVMS onto fresh hardware, the MPE/iX community wanted to set up a venture quite like VSI did for VMS. HP upper management of the time had no clue of how to write a business agreement that would put MPE into the hands of future-focused engineers and executives. Or rather than being unable to figure out how to do that, people couldn’t come to terms. 

Maybe HP was unwilling. Doing that transfer of MPE to oh, say a company named OpenMPE, would have jeopardized the remaining five years of hardware sales (counting the 3000-specific peripherals). It also would have given the tens of thousands of 3000 owners a way to skip the purchases and training for a new platform. Neither of these things, not to mention the next 10 years of HP support revenues the it collected for service, would have been much needed with a new MPE/iX on the way. VSI went into the support business for OpenVMS with HP’s blessing last year. HP quit OpenVMS support. VSI has also proven you can take up to six years to build a ported enterprise OS — because it’s taken them that long to get OpenVMS running on x86.

But at least they got that chance. Maybe they did because there was a different way of relating to legacy customers at DEC than the way the MPE customer was regarded after Y2K. VMS was a purchase for life, at least the life of the business using it. MPE became a community to be shuttled into new OS and fresher iron. MPE came to stand for transition, eventually, and unfortunate re-investment. At least it’s not declined to the point that anybody with a hard drive has a right to use it — sort of like a book being shuttled off to the Jolly Rogers of the Internet Archive.

If you’re simply after a copy of MPE/iX, people remain active and in-touch in the 3000 community who can slip a tar-ball of the whole OS into your Dropbox. Nobody’s taking about that kind of thing on the up-and-up, though. There’s still more than six years of life in the calendar facility in MPE/iX. Maybe a hobbyist push will get the okay from HP closer to Dec 31, 2027.

All the best,
Ron Seybold
3000 Newswire <https://3000newswire.blogs.com/>3 <https://3000newswire.blogs.com/>000 Newswire

512-657-3264

We’ll get through these viral times. Together, with respect, and without fear.



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