I worked at a company that had a 967 (a 37Mhz machine) with 150 users on
it.  It was 10 years old, never upgraded (except to add disc drives), never
crashed (once every 2 years or so), never had a data corruption error,
no "General Protection Faults", no viruses, a completely satisfied user
community, a technical staff of 3 people (operator, system manager,
programmer/analyst), and it used a total of 20 square feet of floor space
(3ft x 6.5ft) in the computer room.  It was running 10 different major
applications for those 150 users.  The company decided to take one of those
applications to client-server.  It took over 6 years and over $7 million
for that one application to be developed.  It served less than 50 users.
It is now running on 6 servers (each running at 500Mhz or better, and
costing no less than $20,000 each), and has a technical staff of 10 people
for that one application (DBAs, programmers, and sysadmins).  And to make
it sound even worse, it runs slower than the old application did on the 967
while competing with 100 other users!  The department that now uses the new
application had to hire additional people to keep up with the work, since
it now took the employees longer to do the same amount of work.

Yup, the HP e3000 is an old pile of junk that needs to drift off into the
sunset.  Just the same as of you programmer/analysts out there who have
been programming for more than 10 years.  You are old and are of no use to
anyone.  We should only have the new programmers do work.  Newer is always
better you know.

Just my opinion, not that of my employers.

Randy Keefer

PS.  Please, HP, market the damn machine!!  Believe it or not, you have an
incredibly excellent product that YOU have developed over the last 25
years.  It should be YOU telling us how wonderful the e3000 is, not the
other way around!!



On Thu, 9 Nov 2000 07:28:49 -0600, George Willis <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>Let's not forget about:
>
>Backward software compatibilty - no recompiling of programs is necessary
>when upgrading OS's.
>ROI - we bought our 987 in 1994 and has easily paid for itself many times
>over.
>
>George Willis
>Fayez Sarofim & Co
>Houston, Tx
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: John Dunlop [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2000 5:12 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: [HP3000-L] HP e3000 Ad
>
>
>Hmmm, here we go again. If I was marketing the HP e3000 I would
>include ...
>
>The HP e3000 with MPE/iX can be used as a top-notch web server but
>many companies use it for all their IT requirements because of its :
>
>Portability - Posix compliance guarrantees that much Unix software can
>run on the HP e3000 unchanged.
>Openness - latest software available, much of it free (quote list :
>Apache/iX, Samba/iX, Java/iX,etc etc)
>Speed - fastest transaction processor in the west (more than measures
>up against equivalent Unix boxes and pick your own DB)
>Stability - Uptime can be measured in years (quote example).
>Economy - Low maintenance and low administration costs (maybe operator
>less , one system manager for all functions)
>Security - Sophisticated controls , never had a virus (any security
>classifications added here).
>Scalability - HP e3000s are available from (put in smallest spec) to
>(largest spec) to handle any sized company or computing task.
>
>Add to this its Reliability - the IMAGE database is rock-solid and
>data integrity is assured (quote awards etc)
>
>With all these advantages, why anyone even want to POSSESS anything
>else?
>
>
>Just my $.02 , very tongue-in-cheek and hoping that others can flesh
>it out.
>
>Cheers,
>
>John Dunlop
>
>E-mail : [log in to unmask]   "If at first you don't succeed...
>Web : http://www.hp3000links.com   Don't take up sky-diving !"
>"All your HP e3000 resources on the Net"
>(Mirror: http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~jdunlop/index1.htm)