Bill Lancaster asks:

>  I am curious how different sites are creating letters on the 3000
>  destined for laser printers.  Are people using Fantasia, and other
>  like products?

Let me apologize in advance for mentioning QueryCalc again so soon on the
list, but since Bill asked :-), the answer is approximately 50% of QC users
use their HP3000's to write letters (quite often, massive number of letters),
on either stationery or plain laser paper.

Several years ago, we adopted PostScript as our standard printing language
for the HP3000. I don't think that we've ever made a wiser decision.
PostScript allows us to encode logos as vector graphics requiring only a few
hundred bytes to download (0.1 second at 19.2Kbaud). Speed is extremely
important when printing ten thousand letters. But equally important is
quality. Because we transmit a mathematically perfect image, the logo never
shows jaggies, even if blown up to the size of a football field. And the
logos can be dynamically colored in any manner that the user wishes.
Moreover, PostScript provides absolutely superior text printing capabilities
at virtually zero CPU cost.

If you don't mind, let me use just one example of someone using QueryCalc on
the HP3000 to print large numbers of letters (and other assorted documents)
-- and one that most you are probably already receiving. If you're an Adager
customer, all of the material that you receive that looks like it might have
been printed on an HP laserjet was -- in QC, wholly on the HP3000, in batch,
completely automatically, with your names and vital information drawn
directly out of Adager's databases.

Because QueryCalc is spreadsheet-oriented, creating a letter is actually duck
soup. A spreadsheet can look like a financial spreadsheet. Or it can look
like a letter. Stick a logo at the top and a signature at the bottom and fill
the bulk of the text with sentence-long text labels and you have a letter.
But because QC is primarily, in its heart of hearts, a report writer, it is
extremely simple to put query questions in individual cells within the letter
and directly extract (i) the name and address of the intended recipient, (ii)
the length of time that they have been a customer, (iii) the size of the
order, or (iv) whatever other information that you might want to include (up
to and including full-color, wholly personalized pie charts, bar charts,
etc.).

All of this is done completely on the HP3000. More importantly, there is no
magic associated with any of this. Your fingers never leave your hand -- and
the data never leaves the HP3000. No downloads to PCs, no ODBC, no client
server is required. Not even much human interaction. Just straightforward,
simple (and unfortunately boring) MPE batch.

Rene Woc, General Manager of Adager, is an extremely adept electrical
engineer and is as technically knowlegeable about the HP3000, IMAGE, and MPE
as anyone I know. But Rene is also an excellent business manager -- and he
runs Adager in as productive a mode as any business I've ever seen. Part and
parcel of this efficiency is maintaining high-quality customer communications
as easily and efficiently as possible.

At Adager, even the UPS mailing labels (UPS-approved bar coding, Adager logo,
and address) are printed on a bank of laser printers directly connected to
the HP3000 simultaneously with the remainder of the customer's packet, all
within the same QC job. An address label may not seem much of a report, but
it's only one step up to add withholding and earning information to make it
into a W-2 report, and one step more to make it into a complete division
financial profile.

Moreover, Adager makes extremely good use of the PostScript fax option
available for some PS laser printers. If you've received a
better-than-average-looking fax from Adager, it quite likely came from the
HP3000 and QC.

Because so many of our customers do use QueryCalc for creating and printing
letters (although it wasn't an activity we originally planned for QC), in
1998, our development schedule now has listed the creation of a new text
object that will allow QC to become essentially a full-function desktop
publishing system, not unlike FrameMaker or Ready, Set, Go!  -- but one that
can reach directly into an IMAGE database and retrieve information directly.

Denys doubts that an HP3000 could ever be truly useful as a 1-2 user PC. I
would tend to agree -- if the role that it were to play were restricted to
its traditional OLTP role. But there is no overt reason that the HP3000 must
be restricted to its traditional roles. Being easily able to integrate large
databases of payroll and customer data with order acknowledgements, faxable
purchase orders, reminders-to-pay, all automatically generated is no small
thing, especially when the HP3000 -- more than any other system out there --
can be run without a data processing staff, reliably, for years on end.
Adager, for one, doesn't need a 100-user license to support their customer
communications activities. A two user-license would suffice quite nicely.
This is a use of a "908" beyond of that of mere development usage, but this
general form of activity won't easily become common until a large number of
developers are out there trying to develop truly good applications software
on inexpensive HP3000s.

Wirt Atmar