Gavin writes:

> As a WAG, let's guess for the moment that an emulator license costs $4500,
>  making the total software cost for an emulator plus an MPE license $5000.

As a follow-on WAG, let me suggest that at that price, the total sales of the
emulator/MPE combination will be less than 50 copies. There is simply no
market for an emulator at that price, especially when genuine HP3000 hardware
will be readily available at a fraction of that cost for a great time to come.

In my estimation, for MPE to live another life, renewed and reborn, the
combined cost of the emulator and MPE needs to be at or below $500. At prices
ten times that cost, the most ardent supporters of MPE will tend to simply
sit on their current HP hardware for as long as they can, perhaps buying one
to several spares, until they find suitable replacement business software for
whatever type of services they're now running, and then simply move to that.
There's very little incentive for them to move to something that is
substantially less proven. But most importantly, a ten-times price will
attract no new users to the platform, and thus MPE dies, and the older
customers will know that as well as anyone, further discouraging their
adoption of an emulated solution.

Wirt Atmar