Well said.  We have many programmers here who feel they must become
Oracle/Java/C++  experts in order to survive in today's world.  I would hope
that not to be the case, but gone are the days when you could pick up the
Sunday paper and notice 6 ads requesting HP3000 programmers.

-----Original Message-----
RJ Wrote:


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!!