Hi Jim,

Assuming there are used 9x8s available, including small 918s, what
prevents you from buying a 9x8? Is it a capital outlay issue (even
though I'd guess the prices to be pretty low), or a s/w licensing issue,
or something else? 

If you were to buy a used 9x8 of equal or lower performance than your
current development 9x7, do you still face significant hurdles?

Last, I assume your development 9x7 is not "locked down" such that you
would not be able to update the OS to 7.5 if it were available.  Is this
correct?

Thanks,
 Jeff Vance, vCSY

> Although we consolidated our production environment onto an 
> N-series box three years ago, I still have a 9x7 system 
> sitting idle since MPE/iX 7.x won't load or run on it. Our 
> production N-series runs 7.5 (while the 9x7 won't), so our 
> ability to test new patches (both beta or otherwise) before 
> putting them into production is rather limited.
> 
> While I'd like to assist in testing beta patches and getting 
> them to GR status before HP abandons their support of the 
> platform, I simply can't justify doing so on our production 
> system. Allowing the 9x7 to run 7.5 would open up this 
> opportunity for us and the rest of the HP3000 community.