Cortlandt asks:

> The interesting question is why such a collection never grew up in the HP
> 3000 community as freeware as it did in the UNIX world.

My theory is that its because the 3000 has always been a friendlier machine,
with a more powerful and fully featured operating system.  In short,
you don't need the tools as much, so they don't get developed.  For example,
you could always get a "listing" of a file on your terminal via FCOPY,
ugly as it was, so no "cat" had to be developed ... because *everyone*
had FCOPY.   We didn't need a user-supplied non-standard backup tool
like "tar" or "cpio" because we had STORE.

(I'd seen this before, coming from Burroughs B6700/B7700 with MCP, to the
3000 ... in 1979, MCP was more powerful than MPE, but lacked as many
user developed tools!)

Where we didn't have OS-supplied tools, they did develop.  In some cases,
the Contributed Software Library spread them (like PSCREEN), in other cases
vendors did (ADAGER, MPEX).

Of course, there's also the "target audience" ... 3000s tended to be in the
hands of professionals who programmed for a living, not students (sure, there
were exceptions).

And, sheer numbers.  There's a lot more Unix machines out there than 3000s,
unfortunately.

--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html