I heard about MPE ports in 1992 approx. I think we were the first one to buy
the AIF product. At this time, we were moving to MPE/XL and were desperately
seeking for a routine to programatically change a logon, which exists within
AIF.
I remember we took a look at the other AIF routine available in the product
and saw those about ports. We were explained by our HP CE (was it that?)
that port was used by internal MPE processes to communicate with each other.
At that time (and I guess it is still true) it was the fastest way for doing
inter process communication.
We use it a little bit (since we have the product). However we do not make
an extensive use of it because our in-house processes do not communicate
that much.
We choose Pascal/iX to call the AIF routines, so I can't tell if it would be
easy to use them from a SPL program. I don't know enough about SPL.

Michel Gauthier
Donohue Inc.

jean huot <[log in to unmask]> wrote in message
news:F4B1826B1A21D211AEC5006008207AF402114A67@dogbert.csillc.com...
Reading Taming the HP 3000 Volume two by Robert A. Lund, I see the following
mention. "As an alternative to using message files, HP
has a facility called PORTS. PORTS is part of the operating system
architected interface (AIF).  It could be purchased for
about $2,000.00 in early 1992."

Question:  What is PORTS?
                 How do you make use of it?

Question:  If my application is written in SPL, will the use of PORTS
improve system performance?


Jean Huot
Northern Credit Bureaus Inc.