Stan Sieler ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

: Mark Cousins, of HP, has unofficially supported it for many years
: on a "I'll try" basis.  He's no longer with the MPE group, but is
: still at HP.  He may be able to point you to whoever "owns"
: it now.  My guess at his email address is:
:    [log in to unmask]

Gosh, I really need to talk to Stan more often.

This is the aforementioned Mark Cousins, and I'm afraid I've neither
touched nor supported DEL/3000 since around 1988.  Here's what I do know:

DEL/3000 was indeed a terminal and forms package that predates V+.
It ran only in block mode.  Unlike V+, it supported
field-at-a-time ("block/line" mode) transfers as well as
swallow-all-fields-in-one-gulp ("block/page" mode).  This was all
invisible to the program, though.

It first released on the HP 3000 CX running MPE-C in 1975.  It was a
full product, with a manual, support, updates, and so on.  As far as I
know, it was fully supported as long as the 16-bit versions of MPE were.
Some of the HP application packages used it, because they were initially
developed before V+ (then VIEW/3000) existed.

Anyway, my involvement with it was as the development and support
engineer in the 80s.  I rewrote all the terminal handling code to
get rid of some nasty bugs and make it work with all the terminal
drivers, controllers, and MPE versions of that period.  As I recall
the last version I worked on was supported on Series IIIs running
MPE-IV thru Series 70s running MPE-V T something.

When MPE/XL came along, the terminal handling FCONTROLs that products
like DEL used were completely different.  It was adjudged by the powers
that be that there would be no port of DEL to the XL (now iX) platform.
So no version was ever released, though I did some investigation and
prototyping.  That code is not in my possession, and I assume it no
longer exists.

I also have no idea where the code for the MPE-V version might be.

I'm afraid this isn't much help or consolation, but there was a fair
amount of mis-information in the other postings so I wanted to write
and get the truth out there :-)

I miss my MPE buddies.  If any of you out there are reading this and
are so inclined, drop me a line.  For the record, I am now manager
of a group doing HP-UX High Availability support, training, and
consulting, still with HP (17 years now, ugh!).

Mark Cousins
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