1. Where were you when you learned that HP had canceled its future
for the HP 3000?

I was sitting at my desk in AOL's Reston Technical Center in Reston,
VA, when I heard the news.  I was the manager of the Access Wardialer
Lab, which filled a little over 1,100 sq. ft. of raised floor with
racks containing  hundreds of test and measurement PCs connected to
three DS-3 lines providing telephone lines.

We had one HP 3000, and it collected, stored, and analyzed access
wardialer data from hundreds of PCs which called every AOL dialup
number multiple times every night to test the dialup network and
hammer the AOL Windows client.

The HP 3000 produced a number of reports, charts and emails every
day, with virtually all of AOL's senior executives and management on
the distribution lists of those emails.  It also hosted a web site
for retrieval of reports, processed wardialer data, Windows
"debugview" logs, and other analytics.

2. What's become of your company, your career, and the HP 3000 you
were using in 2001?

AOL's dialup usage took a nose dive in 2004, and in late 2004, my
group was disbanded (layoff).  Since then, AOL has split off from
Time Warner.  The AOL Reston Technical Center where I worked no
longer exists.  I was invited to, and attended AOL's 25th Anniversary
Celebration in Dulles, Virginia, on May 24th, 2010, and it was great
seeing so many of my former co-workers, most of whom have moved on to
other jobs in the various tech industries.  While a manager at AOL, I
also coded in SPLASH, SPL, BASIC, and BUSINESS BASIC, and I created
both terminal-based and web-based applications.

Today I'm the Software Engineering Manager for an Internet Services
Provider which also provides hosting, co-lo, and VoIP telephone
services.  I still code, but now I code primarily in PHP and SQL, and
the company's Enterprise Information System (EIS) is of my design.  I
also wrote all of EIS's core code.

I'm told that the HP 3000 I had at AOL was turned off and stored for
somewhere between 12 and 18 months, and then converted to an HP 9000
(AOL had many, many, many HP 9000s).

John

At 2011-11-14 03:15 PM, Ron Seybold wrote:
>Hello Friends,
>
>Today's the day, 10 years since Nov. 14, 2001.
>
>1. Where were you when you learned that HP had canceled its future
>for the HP 3000?
>
>2. What's become of your company, your career, and the HP 3000 you
>were using in 2001?
>
>Have a look at the blog today to spark those memories.
>
>Ron Seybold
>Editor, 3000 Newswire - 512.331.0075
>3000newswire.com/blog
>Twitter @3000newswire | Skype ronseybold
>
>* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
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John
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