After me last night, Karsten Holland [log in to unmask] said:

> This is good news!

Hopefully that will be the general reaction...

> I'm happy to hear the openMPE board is looking out for
> it's users with regard to the long-term.

We're trying...

> An important consideration for us in this, is the time to
> market. Every month that goes by without a prototype of this
> emulator, is another month of searching for a migration
> solution.

You are exactly right:  Without even a "coming soon" vaporware
announcement in the public domain, it's hard to make any kind
of a plug for an emulator in a "future plans" pitch...

> An existing prototype and a plan for making it available for
> purchase, could be the defacto long-term solution for those
> who have not already made heavy investments in migrating to
> another platform. How long do you estimate before a viable
> product exists?

The $64,000 question...  that I'm afraid only the prospective
emulator companies can answer...  And it will depend on your
definition of "viable product";  i.e.:  An initial prototype
that you can run (slowly) and say :HELLO to might be available
relatively quickly.  OTOH, a "production-ready" version tuned
and tested to the point where you can run your business on it...
well, that's going to take a longer...  I know:  "Relatively
quickly" and "longer" are words of matchless elasticity;
sorry I just can't do any better than that right now.

The first critical step after the announcement comes out will
be for the three prospective emulator companies to confirm or
not that the licensing terms are acceptable to them (at least
there are three that I know of).  Since the idea of an MPE
emulator has generally been "out there" since shortly after HP
made the end-of-sales and end-of-support announcement, they
have had a lot of time to think about preliminaries already, so
I'm hoping that once the HP announcement hits the street that
the emulator companies will already have their answer in large
part "pre-loaded".

Then said emulator companies will have to factor the licensing
deal in with all other business considerations, and decide
whether or not they are going to proceed.  THEN if answer is
still "yes", hopefully said emulator companies will be able to
make some public comments on projections for beta availability.

...  It was such a simple, straight-forward, and reasonable
question:  "How long before a viable product exists ??"...  I
wish I had a better answer right now;  but I'm afraid I don't.
...  However, I am hopeful that initial "go" - "no-go" feedback
from the emulator companies will happen in short order once HP
goes public...

Ken Sletten