John Burke wrote:

[snip]

>Absolutely wrong. In the late '70s it absolutely was a
>superior technology to every thing else on the market.
>This is how I got involved  in the first place.
[snip]

This *fact* can be disputed. How about the Vax being
introduced in 1977 with an outstanding o/s and 32-bit
computing. Heck, prior to the vax, dec had a command language
'DCL' on rsts/e in the later 70's that morphed to the vax
that is what the mpe/xl CI is now. That was 10+ years ahead
of hp!

Sure, the HP 3000 was a good cobol machine with an integrated
database and screen handler. I liked it, and still do. But, I
never thought it was technically superior.

But, that provided for a narrow set of possibilities in sales and
a narrow window of time. It took hp 10 years after the vax for hp
to arrive with 32-bit computing! And by the early 80's the vax
had a good screen handling package that eliminated the screen
issue. Add the fact that Oracle was a major player on the vax
and you had a pretty good data processing environment well before
we ever saw mpe/xl. This lead to significant sales opportunities
being lost to the vax and one of the reasons the vax installed
base is 10x the hpe3k.

Or how about type ahead? The first time I worked on an hp 3000 (1979)
I was appalled they didn't have any kind of terminal type-ahead. hp
has never quite figured out terminal i/o like other vendors.

Here's my read on it... hp had a good franchise in the 70's because they
were the first to really make a play for compatibility across systems
and had a good developer architecture. However, other vendors caught
up and passed them in the 80's and hp didn't develop a large enough
installed base to sustain the investment required to keep up. hp was
able to keep things alive because the major investment had already
been spent in making mpe/ix. The costs associated with the development
of the a/n class i/o support and the impending cost of trying to
port to ia-64 created too large a mountain to scale.

duane percox

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