John Korb writes:

> Wonderful!
>
>  In an era where:
>     o  name brand PCs
>     o  with nothing but the best hardware,
>     o  with no home-grown applications,
>     o  only off-the-shelf applications from major vendors,
>  are "stable" if they run for 24 straight hours without rebooting,
>  it is nice to see that given reliable power system (no long-term,
>  multi-hour power outages) a system can stay up and running for a year or
>  more.
>
>  Kudos to HP for providing such reliable hardware and system software!

I wasn't going to respond to this thread simply because such threads tend to
degenerate into one-upmanship, but John's comments have changed my mind.

This last week I taught a training class for our product and I used one of our
local customer's machines for a part of the class. The company, GenCon Ltd.,
is a construction management company. They've been a customer of ours for
nearly 20 years now, originally signing on as a time-sharing customer. They've
had their own 917 now for about five years, moving up from a Micro XE, and
before that a Series 33.

There are only eight people in the company, and none of the three officers
ever touch anything associated with any of the computer equipment, so an
eight-user license is more than enough for the organization, given their
situation.

Pat Davis, the person from the company that attended the class, is relatively
new to GenCon. She's only been with GenCon for three years and nine months --
but in that time, she has never seen the HP3000 down.

I pointed out to the class that the current session numbers are now in the
2700's -- and GenCon only performs one or two or three new session signons a
day.

I personally act as system manager for this machine -- but I touch it only
once every two years or so. Otherwise, they do all other system management,
which as Bruce says, is nothing more than feeding it backup tapes and
replacing paper in the printer. I've kept the machine on MPE/iX 4.0. There's
nothing about POSIX that would be of any value to these people -- although the
arrival of network printing -- and most especially b-trees -- may cause me to
soon upgrade their machine.

Every technology eventually gets simple and reliable. The mechanics that were
previously necessary to hover over earlier versions of the machinery,
adjusting this and that, always ultimately disappear. It happened with color
TV repairmen. It happened with on-site xerox repairmen. It will happen with
computers, too.

Rather than see the HP3000 as a "legacy system," it is a far better and a far
more accurate description to say that it is the machine of the future. I know
of no other commercial-grade platform that is currently more like what all
computers must eventually become than the HP3000 is now.

Bruce's and GenCon's stories are the way the future will be for all computing.
It's just that we got here a little earlier than most -- and HP is to be
sincerely congratulated for that.

Wirt Atmar