Tim Hoefner writes:

> Anyway, he claims that the Classics are junks, no longer in
>  use and no longer supported by HP.  I know and attempted to
>  tell him he is full of *&#^%.
>
>  Got any scenarios I can give to him?  And can any of you
>  guys tell me how many Classics (ballpark) are still in use?

Just up the road from you a bit, Timothy, in Las Cruces, we have five classic
HP3000s, two of which are always on and in production. And we have one more
classic always on and in productive use in our Albuquerque office. All but
one of these machines are micro HP3000s. There's absolutely nothing wrong
with these machines, other than they're obviously a bit slow. But they're
also very cheap to operate -- and very valuable to us.

We use micros for development preferentially for two reasons: the first is to
ensure that our software is fully compatible with every HP3000 ever built;
the second is to ensure that we don't do something dumb (meaning resource
comsumptive) and have it covered over by a machine that's so powerful that we
don't notice our gluttony.

Of the five micros that we own, two were simply given to us in the last few
years by users who moved on up to RISC-based systems. These machines are now
wrapped up in plastic in our storage garage and are used as parts reservoirs
for the active machines. However, even with this surplus, no one should ever
assume that donations are no longer gratefully accepted :-). A MicroXE has a
negative dollar value worth on the used computer market -- but that dollar
value doesn't begin to accurately reflect their true worth.

Wirt Atmar