Mark writes:
> Just to be clear, a company would be paying significant money for an
> emulated version of an HP3000 and not a version of the OS.

From one point of view, the platform emulator is about the hardware, not the
software.  A primary reason for a platform emulator is to have supported
*hardware* going forward.  Getting MPE to run a laptop is just a cute
side-effect.  At least initially it appears as though the software (MPE) and
the emulator it runs on are completely independent from each other (as far
as future enhancements go).

One reason you might want a platform emulator rather than a closet full of
eBay-acquired $100 9x7 boxes is so that you can report to your company
management that there is someone responsible for the computer if it breaks
(the hardware that is).  You could buy your own spare parts (or machines),
or contract with a 3rd party hardware maintenance company (to the degree
that they're available and affordable) but these options may not make
everyone comfortable (of course others will be more comfortable with a
"worn-out" 3000 box than with an emulator because psychology is a factor in
all of this).

Besides being able to call HP out to fix the box you're running your
emulator on, the emulator can continue to support *new* hardware and
peripherals (by translating their interfaces into something MPE understands)
so in the future you can have MPE support your Ludicrous-SCSI IV 8TB tape
drives and 1TB/second sub-ether network interfaces.

Of course, because of this, much of the need for *software* changes to MPE
vanishes, since much of the work in the past five years has been in the area
of support for new platforms and peripherals.  MPE itself is a quite stable
and mature applications platform and there's only so much room for
improvement.  There are areas that could be improved, but none of them is
critical to keeping MPE viable for many years to come.

Even for places where MPE needs enhancement, it may be easier to add this
functionality via the emulator rather than trying to change and rebuild MPE
from scratch (assuming you could get the source code).  The emulator can
augment and alter the behavior of MPE in ways that would be difficult or
impossible to do in MPE itself.

So besides getting supported hardware, you can end up getting most or all of
your software needs met as well.

> One would load a current SLT if I understand.

That will be subject to whatever the HP license allows, but from a technical
point of view that's correct.

G.