Gavin wrote:
 
>
>This is not too surprising, as it is my understanding that things have been
>much worse (HP3000 wise) in Europe for a number of years.  The Europeans
>seem to have almost universally gone to UNIX when it became available.
>I've
 
>Also, I've heard a lot of comments in recent years about the total lack
>of interest in the HP3000 by HP in Europe.  It has sounded as though HP
>in Europe publicly declared the 3000 dead about five years ago.  I haven't
>heard anything lately, so I don't know if this is still the case.
>
It certainly happened like that here in South Africa. There was a mindless
rush towards UNIX here for a number of reasons. One was that the Apartheid
system started to bring on sanctions threats from previously neutral western
countries, and the feeling was that UNIX was public domain, the Universities
had the source code, it was platform independent, the rapidly dimishing
(through emigration) skills base would be consolidated and more focused,
etc. It wouldnt surprise me to find out that it was Govt. strategy!
 
All the promises of UNIX were exploited and touted in the rush to
standardise.
 
Also, the academics at the Universities began a vociferous advocation of
UNIX as the platform of choice. The MIS managers had their confidence
eroded. At the same time, most of the computer companies left the country,
leaving their infrastructure in the hands of caretaker companies. As soon as
the big brother was out of sight, the local companies stripped down the
product ranges, trimmed their support staff down to a minimum and made sure
that there was only one or two platforms to market and support, to save
costs. In the HP world, this coincided with the UNIX thrust, and the gradual
marginalisation of proprietary platforms like MPE.
 
Thank goodness we didn't succumb to this. I have spent the last five years
defending MPE against heavy odds. But in those five years, not one of our
six sites lost a single bit of data through operating system failure. Also,
the sites run lean and mean staff wise. During this time, we have had to
support UNIX, and it has been a traumatic and I must say, an unpleasant,
experience.Thank goodness we never had mission critical systems running on
UNIX, or I would have retired by now.:)
 
All this time, of course, we've had Windows operating systems and Microsoft
software everywhere, so the leaning towards NT is natural for us. Now were
looking to move everything we can off UNIX and onto NT. We can do this
because we've never put mission critical systems onto UNIX anyway.
 
Weve just moved a 16,000 document per day scanning system from 64MB
HP9000/827,Plexus,Informix, 180 GB of WORM JukeBox config onto a Netserver
running NT3.51, 64MB, 180GB of RAID 5 disk. We don't use any database, we
use NT's file system, we don't need fancy client server software, we use VB
to develop the viewer and scanning applications. We use batch scripts to
manage printing. The HP3000 holds the structured data and indexes and
pointers to the images in robust, unbreakable TurboImage datasets, and the
NT server holds millions of tiff,doc,txt files.
 
The files are available anywhere on the Windows LAN though Universal Naming
Convention, we dont sit in front of the NT server puzzled by strange cryptic
problems that just happen. We use tar to back up (and recover) the frames to
DAT tapes.  We use ftp to get stuff between HP3000 and NT. We use the HP3000
to create NT batch files for bulk printing.
 
In short, we don't really touch the system, and it just works. What a
contrast!
 
All we need now, is to get a closer interface (remsh, rexec, UNC support)
between the HP3000 and NT, and we'll be in computer heaven. Roll on 5.5, 6.0
etc.
 
Neil Harvey
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