Dear Ram

I would like to open this e-mail message to you with the understanding that
I have always had the highest regard for HP,  their management and staff who
I've had the distinguished pleasure of working with over the past 25 or so
years.  For much of those 25 years I have centered my career under the
HP3000 umbrella.  It is this umbrella that has provided many days (and
nights) of shelter from what ever storm passed my way.  However one storm
blew the umbrella inside out.  That storm being the one that stated "This
decision was mine and mine alone" (quoted from HP World 1/2000
edition..Winston Prather).  In the weeks and months following this unwelcome
atom bomb Winston who needless to say is not on my number one top ten list,
I have tried to make sense of the "decaying ecosystem" that has been
referred to many times over,  I have tried to make sense of how one person
can have so much power over thousands of peoples lives.  Even at one point I
referred to Winston as the person flying the plane into the WTC or in this
case the bomb that hit the HP3000 community.  Does he really know what he's
done.  Then to aggravate the situation even further,  HP places restrictions
on an emulator, source code, licenses etc etc etc.  And if that wasn't
enough I read about an interview you gave stating "everything has quieted
down" about the 3000 community's reaction to EOS"  How can you say that???
It is unimaginable that you can be so much out of touch with reality.

Well my dear Mr. Appalarju,  I have a bit of a news flash for you,  nothing
has quieted down at all.  Quite the opposite,  we the people who live and
breathe life to the HP3000 are getting over the shocking events that Winston
has bestowed upon us (on 9/11 ... I mean 11/14) but we are not by any
stretch quieting down.  If anything we are coming together and getting
stronger than ever.  We're raising our flags (in this case OpenMPE) and
showing our solidarity.  OK take the 3000 away from HP but let it go....let
it go to someone who will care for it,  upgrade it, patch it and develop it
better than HP can or ever wanted to.

I am just a lonely Senior HP3000 systems administrator,  however I suggest
you take a firm look at the OpenMPE forum.  Read what others are saying then
and only then will you be qualified to issue educated statements to Computer
World.  I leave you with a poem I once read way back in high school I feel
is most apropos here:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth (Act V, Scene 5)



If you or your colegues care to e-mail me a response please feel free to do
so however I would imagine you would not be so inclined.  Please spare me
any "canned" responses



Respectfully

Zelik Schwartzman

-----Original Message-----
From: F. Alfredo Rego [  <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 1:27 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] Trademarks


At 2:27 PM -0700 10/4/02, Stan Sieler wrote:

>Brian posted a note about a trademark he noticed recently.
>I followed the link and found MPE-IMAGE.
>
>I see that Adager trademarked MPE-IMAGE" two days after the
>cancellation announcement.
>
>Reading between the lines, the way Alfredo taught me, I
>think I see a couple of other things:
>
>    - even then, Adager was committed to the future of
>      IMAGE, MPE and the HP 3000.
>
>    - the trademark was filed after the public announcement,
>      so they didn't violate any NDA or trust if they had been
>      told about the announcement ahead of time by HP.


I was trying to keep this whole thing quiet but I see that
my friends Brian and Stan are very resourceful with their
Internet research mechanisms.

Then, I saw Ron's message:

>As for the "unlimited press access to HP officials," I spoke with
>Computerworld's reporter about his interview with Ram Appalaraju, the
>Director of Marketing for HP's E-Services Software Environment. Ram
>introduced himself to me as "the person who Dave Wilde works for."
>The Computerworld reporter said that Ram told him "everything has
>quieted down" about the 3000 community's reaction to EOS. While we
>sat in the press offices, the reporter grinned. "Everything was fine,
>of course," he said. The news is always good from Marketing. Similar
>high spirits were observed from Ann Livermore, he added.

I have no clue regarding HP's feedback mechanisms, but my own
feedback -- directly from real-life MPE-Image customers -- differs
radically.  What's going on?

Apparently, Ram Appalaraju (whom I have never met, but who seems to
be the HP-UX marketing director) has not heard from hp3000 customers
such as Estee Lauder.  Fair enough -- why should he, after all?

Perhaps Ram Appalaraju <[log in to unmask]> should have a friendly
email exchange with Zelik Schwartzman <zschwart@estee"RemoveThis".com>
at Estee Lauder to get some non-academic feedback from a real-life
hp3000 user in the trenches.  Zelik is a tough -- but fair -- customer
who does not have any patience for sloppiness.  I am honored to be
able to count Zelik as an Adager user.  He represents hundreds (if not
thousands) of other MPE-Image users who face the unpleasant prospect
of having to downgrade to a different platform.

Hopefully, this post will not cause any trouble for Dave Wilde
(for instance, I can imagine Ram admonishing Dave: "Your charter
was to isolate me from all of those obnoxious hp3000 people" --
or words to that effect).

But I digress.  Back to the MPE-Image domain.  As soon as HP
publicly announced its decision to kill the hp3000, I loaded my
toothbrush and my bike on my car and headed for California, to
visit several friends (HP and non-HP).  During the drive, I burned
about 12 hours of cell-phone time (hands-free, of course) and
I spoke with several people who have access to significant
financing.  I told them, "Finally, HP has decided to get out
of the way of MPE-Image and this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance
to jump-start a file system (and its tightly integrated DBMS)
that, as HP's best-kept secret, beats the pants off the
competition in terms of reliability, OLTP speed and
number-of-concurrent-users, as well as total cost of ownership".

I described the worldwide hp3000 community, as represented by
the thousands of Adager customers and friends who have graced
us throughout the years with their trust and loyalty -- a trust
and loyalty that I feel morally compelled to reciprocate.
Adager's "numbers" are good and it was a relatively simple
exercise to extrapolate (very conservatively) into a normalized
metric for future MPE-Image revenue -- provided that true value
was provided to (and perceived by) MPE-Image users with a
dynamic technical-development campaign AND a dynamic worldwide
marketing campaign for their favorite OS and DBMS.

I got a tremendously enthusiastic response from my financial
friends.  But they wisely told me that MPE-Image would
immediately start to lose its appeal to them to the tune of one
million US$ for each day that HP delayed the release (as in
"hostage") of Cinderella to her new well-heeled group of Princes.

That was November/December 2001, so you can do the math to get
the present-value financial appeal of MPE-Image today (hint:
MPE-Image still has value, but it is a touch late now -- unless
Bill Gates steps in, and he was one of the few people I did not
contact then).

During November/December, I visited many places and spoke with
many people (including several prominent members of HP's
engineering teams -- perhaps without the permission of their
managers :-) and I also spoke with some of their managers, as
high up the HP hierarchy as I could.  I knew this was the best
thing I could do for MPE-Image users and, therefore, I felt it
was appropriate to contact as many people as I could without
worrying too much about "permissions".

The engineers were very enthusiastic about the possibility of
working without any artificial HP Corporate limitations,
exclusively focusing on developing MPE and IMAGE software.
After various high-level managerial discussions, unfortunately,
it became painfully clear to me that HP was not interested
(any time soon) in allowing MPE-Image to survive (and, more
importantly, TO PROSPER).  By "prosper" I meant, explicitly,
the ability to run without cumbersome shackles on ANY hardware
(on HP hardware first but then on whatever hardware turned
out to be the most convenient).  My thinking was naively
simple:  If HP considers that HP can't (or won't) develop and
market MPE-Image successfully, HP should be happy to pass the
ball to somebody who could score the goal.  Wrong!

In the middle of this exciting activity, I started to feel a bit
tired.  "Lazy bum", I told myself.  It was only when I could
not walk at all that my wife dragged me (literally) to the
doctors.  After some fooling around with camouflaged symptoms
and clever diagnostics, a sharp neurologist detected that I was
very ill with something that was totally unknown to me:
Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS).  If you are interested, see
 <http://www.guillain-barre.com/overview.html>
http://www.guillain-barre.com/overview.html for the technical
details.  Not fun, by any means.

When I was finally released from the hospital, my family
insisted that I must quit all non-essential activities.

Adager was a good thing to do, because I had to re-learn how
to type and I needed real-world practice with the keyboard.
Besides, writing Adager software has always been my best
therapy.  Thankfully, my brain and my heart never stopped
working and they provided lots of ideas and lots of passion
while my limp body just stood there.  But my globe-trotter
days as a potential deal-maker and match-maker were over.

Weird, really.  Lots of time to consider life.  By now, I have
recovered 99%, to the point that few people (who knew) noticed
any lingering problems when I attended the hp3000 Solutions
Symposium in the Spring.  They were very happy to see me doing
so well.  The gold medal, of course, was the fact that nobody
noticed at HP World in Los Angeles last week (or am I deluding
myself because the reason that nobody noticed was that people
were too busy discussing HP's policies toward the press? :-)

The only remnant of this heady period is the MPE-Image domain,
for which I pre-paid 10 years back in November.  I had
forgotten about it until Brian and Stan brought it up.

Now you know the story behind the MPE-Image domain.  If the
Internet could talk, we can only imagine all the stories and
all the human dramas behind many innocent-sounding domain names.

To your health,

   _______________
  |               |
  |               |
  |            r  |  Alfredo                     [log in to unmask]
  |          e    |                            <http://www.adager.com>
http://www.adager.com
  |        g      |  F. Alfredo Rego
  |      a        |  Manager, R & D Labs
  |    d          |  Adager Corporation
  |  A            |  Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000            U.S.A.
  |               |
  |_______________|