Disclaimer: I am glad that our application uses the HP 3000 as its
server, instead of the NT servers in our development environment, where
we only using NT as the file server, not the application server.

But having recently skimmed thru Being Digital again, I wonder if this
measure, years of age, is relevant. There are so many other factors to
consider, much the same problem we have with benchmarks. How do you
measure an OS? Years of existence just doesn't make sense. OS developer
hours (or whatever the relevant unit of time would be) spent creating it
makes a little sense, but not too much, as does application developer
hours spent developing, well, applications. But then, either of those
can become apples and oranges. And one wants to avoid an IBM k-loc
(thousands of lines of code) mentality. Hours of useful production time
makes sense for maturity, but is that per server, or per user? Do mips,
flops, or tps matter? Something like mean time between failures does
matter to many of us.

OTOH, what has your OS done for you lately? As for me, Alfredo's success
stories are pretty persuasive. They answer the question, "but what can
it do?". MPE runs. MPE has come a long way, and offers something rare:
it's own robustness combined with adherence to a quite different
standard, POSIX 2.

>----------
>From:  Ron Seybold[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent:  Tuesday, December 09, 1997 4:43 PM
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject:       Re: [HP3000-L] A golden opportunity for MPE/iX
<snip>
>...NT doesn't have the 25 years of maturity and stability the HP 3000
>counts on. He's counted on that stability, too. Nothing that's six years
>old will have the durability of a solution that's performed more than four
>times as long, surviving all fads while embracing all new technologies.
<snip>