On Saturday Neil Harvey said:

> Well, this progress indeed.

Yes;  if confirmed I believe it would be major progress.

> Will the license will be an unlimited one?

As far as the *HP* MPE license for an emulator, that is
what I expect (subject again to formal announement by
HP).  How the emulator companies might "package" their
charge(s) for an emulator license is up to them;  and
other than what was publicly discussed at the OpenMPE
session at HPW-LA I don't believe there has been any
substantive additional info yet on that score...  My
guess is that (quite reasonably) the emulator companies
are waiting to see what HP finally comes out with before
they go further.

> Will it be possible to run this version on
> "unsupported" A and N series HP9000's for as long as
> they are available?

As Jeff Kell already noted, at least for the next four
years there will already be HP-supported PA-RISC boxes
on which to run MPE;  i.e.:  HP e3000 hardware...  :-)
And by the time an emulator is production-ready, the
newest 9000's may all be running on Itanium processors.
So in the long run it's probably not very attractive to
create PA-RISC emulators to run MPE on PA-RISC hardware;
much more efficient just to run MPE directly on MPE
PA-RISC...   HOWEVER:

There is one option which I hope the MPE user community
will continue to "maintain visibility" on;  that we can
revisit with HP after end-of-HP-sales:  The user request
that HP eventually allow MPE to boot on HP 9000 PA-RISC
hardware.  Y'all probably remember that at HPW-LA HP
said they have "no plans" to allow this.  But after end-
of-HP-sales or at least as we approach end-of-HP-support,
maybe they would be willing to reconsider.  If HP *did*
change their minds on this issue, it would result in a
huge increase in the "pool" of used PA-RISC hardware
that could run MPE.

> And finally, will the hated crippling software be
> carefully removed before packaging? ;)

This is one problem that AFAIK will automatically "go
away" with an emulator:  I believe the crippling code
is in firmware (it survives all reboots, updates, etc.).
So if you buy an MPE emulator and slap in on your latest
and greatest 3.0+ GHz Pentium IV or follow-on Intel box,
just from becoming "un-crippled" you should get back a
lot of the performance penalty that emulating MPE will
incure...  Since I believe latest independent consensus
on worst-case "crippling factor" for the A-Class 3000
CPU is on the order of "x 7" instead of the nominal
"x 4", that alone will be a non-trivial improvement...

Ken Sletten