This is a re-posting of a note I sent yesterday which never showed up
anywhere (HP3000-L, comp.sys.hp.mpe, or DejaNews). If this winds up being a
duplicate, my sincere apologies. The reason that I'm reposting this note is
my AOL e-mail has become quite unreliable in the last week or so. I know that
AOL lost a number of my incoming and outgoing messages during the last week.
The problem is that you never know how many. On the whole, I've been very
pleased with AOL, but this is enough to make you a little grumpy.

Wirt Atmar

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Ken Sletten writes:

>And then on the serious subject at hand:

>>I can't think of a better way to accomplish that than to
>>have a simple, high-speed, reliable language like BASIC
>>be available to everyone, especially if the alternative is to
>>simply abandon both of the languages.

>Per Heather Goudey's last post and the "Category C" list
>on HP's web site, support for BASIC/V and a long list of
>other CM systems on MPE/iX will be ongoing...

I may be completely misunderstanding the chart -- as I said in my first
posting -- but the way that I read the chart is: all support for BASIC/V, SPL
and MPE/V will end on September 1, 1998 for MPE/V machines. "Support" will be
ongoing for those people who have previously purchased BASIC/V or SPL on
MPE/iX boxes, but -- and this is the big but -- there is no product number
listed for these products on MPE/iX, as there are for TRANSACT/V and COBOL
II/V, thus there would soon seem to be no way of ordering either BASIC or SPL
after this date, even if you wished to purchase them. I consider this state
to essentially represent abandonment.

Secondly, as a practical matter, on-going "support" for BASIC and SPL is now
down to being able to purchase whatever stock of manuals are left. No
modifications to either product, to my knowledge, have occurred in quite some
time.

However, as I also said in my first posting, the value of these products is
far from non-existent -- they are actually jewels in the HP3000's crown --
and each represents a mechanism to help foster additional applications
development, even if those applications were restricted to relatively minor,
totally home-grown applications. Anything that helps an individual user
obtain significantly greater benefit from his or her HP3000 helps us all.

HP is soon going to be faced with one of two choices: complete the phased
abandonment of SPL and BASIC and say, "That's it. It's over. We aren't going
to support these languages any longer and you can no longer buy them." At
that point HP erases the discs on which they're stored and throws the
remaining manuals in the trash. Or they can distribute them as freeware and
say, "Here they are, kid. You're free to use them as you wish. Just don't
call us for support. Talk to your friends, instead."

The first is a lose-lose situation. The other is win-win. A no-brainer,
IMO.**

Wirt Atmar


**Marketing-speak. Translations into English available upon request.

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