I received the following message from one of the calendar recipients
yesterday. With his permission, I've anonymized the story enough to prevent
anyone embarrassment, but as a vendor on the HP3000, it's a story that I hear
virtually every week from a very large and diverse group of people. (On the
other hand, I constantly hear extraordinary success stories of sites with
very small or non-existent data processing staffs doing extraordinary things
with their machines, too. It's these latter stories that keep my enthusiasm
for the platform high).

There are two morals here:

     o The first is that it's harder to move off of a platform than anyone
gives intitial credit,

     o Secondly, and more importantly, you don't really know what you have
until you try to duplicate it somewhere else.

It's this second moral that a great deal more people need to be made aware
of. I credit the lack of attention to the HP3000 and its IMAGE database
surprisingly to the precisely the attributes that make it so cost effective
and reliable: its intrinsic cost effectiveness, its simplicity and its
reliability. These qualities suppress the very nature of a "successful"
database engine nowadays: a large number of consulting firms hawking their
wares and services.

It would be good if HP could come to understand the quality of the system
they have in the HP3000 and not constantly worry about what's trendy at the
moment. Quality is its own intrinsic virtue, and with sufficient faith, that
virtue can be rewarded.

Wirt Atmar

=======================================

Thanks for the calendar. But what I especially liked was the "MPE users kick
butt" picture. I've posted that here at work at (standard large company),
which in January of this year has named the project leader for the
get-off-of-the-HP3000 project.

About 10 years ago, at this same site; I was sent to a one week class on the
HP9000. As this was going to be the platform that replaced the HP3000.  About
2 years ago, that HP9000 computer was carted out the door. Nothing had been
developed for it. All it did was act as a printer server and allowed the use
of x-terminals.

In 1993, (standard large company) chose Uniface as the language of choice for
all new development.  I'm still writing new programs in COBOL and Cognos, as
nothing was ever developed in Uniface.

Last month, at our IT-department meeting, it was announced that the last
powerbuilder app had been replaced (actually I think it was the one and only
ever written).  This was another language that was going to be "the" language
to use,  and C++ had also been mentioned. Now it's Visual-Basic.

And back in 93, Sybase was the database choosen for development, now it's
SQL-Server.

Y2K - not to worry, we won't be on the HP3000 by the time that happens!!   Of
course I was reprimanded for responding to a posting by Alfredo, about a
"show of hands", of who is using the HP3000. I responded that (standard large
company) was (reluctantly) still on the HP3000, and I believe they would like
that to be kept a secret!

So, here I sit today, writting in COBOL, using IMAGE on an HP3000 computer,
while (standard large company) is on it's 2nd platform replacement, it's 2nd
database replacement (3rd, if you count the attempt to go to Allbase on the
3000), and it's 3rd or 4th language replacement. And a 3 or 4 year
expectation to be off of the HP3000 completely.

Needless to say, you can't quote me on any of this!

=======================================