At 11:49 AM 5/3/2002, Wayne Brown wrote: >And in the case of the HP3000 migration, you have to do all this to solve >a problem that HP created in the first place. HP didn't create a problem. They created a solution to lots of people's problems. It's called MPE and it used to be a great OS. These days it's getting pretty long in the tooth and it doesn't seem nearly as spry and lively as it did 20 years ago. The rest of the computing universe has caught up with most of the big advantages MPE once had (stability, reliability, price/performance, TCO, etc.) and they've left MPE practically standing still in the areas where they excel (like developer tools, flexibility, commodity pricing, etc.). >When someone decides unilaterally to tear down your house, it's a little >difficult to feel grateful to them for free advice on building a new one. Oh please! HP isn't tearing anybody's (computing) house down! They've just said they're not going to build this model of (computing) house anymore (starting two years from when they mentioned it)... and three years after that they'll not be taking support calls on it either. That doesn't mean that your (computing) house is going to fall down or that it's going to be repossessed or anything of the sort. If you want to run it until the bits wear out (or until 2028, whichever comes first) that's fine with HP and fine with the rest of us. In fact, Beechglen and some other folks outside HP would, I presume, be quite happy to take your MPE support dollars and will (from what I gather though I've never been a customer of theirs) do a quite reasonable job of making you as happy as HP support has. I'm also under the impression they aren't the only such software support providers around. And likewise, there seem to be many hardware maintenance and/or refurbished system vendors all over North America (and I presume most of the rest of the world) who will be happy to provide you with working hardware for the foreseeable future. (And for everyone who's buying an extra system or two for spare parts, there's going to be at least a system or two being sold by someone else who's migrating to other hardware, whether they're changing OS or not.) The number of Nova boxes HP has shipped over the last 10 years has got to be huge... and don't forget that includes the 8x7 HP9000 systems. SS_config issues aside (and that is a real issue for post-2006) there's no reason that reasonable precautions can't be made very economically to ensure replacement hardware is available for as long as you want to run an HP3000. The real reason (Okay, it's a complex set of reasons and I'm being simplistic.) the HP3000 is being discontinued is because HP built systems that were so robust and scaled so well and were so easy to use that many (most?) of their customers were *one*time* customers. A company would by an HP3000 or three (or three hundred... [Hi, donna! ;] ) and then manage to make those systems "get the job done" for 10 or 15 years. That's not a "customer", that's a "former customer". (And perhaps the business model at HP where the support organization and CSY don't share revenue exacerbates the problem, but that's the reality. And upper HP management [since long before Ms. Fiorina arrived on the HP scene] has dictated it would be thus. Blame it on the stock market, or the analysts, or the investors, or Capitalism, but that's reality in large high-tech corporations.) P.S. I've been a software developer and/or sys-admin on MPE for the vast majority of the last 20 years, since November 1980.... and I'm still working on software for MPE. But over the last 10 years I've gradually gotten more and more exposure to HP-UX, BSD, Linux and other flavors of unix... and believe it or not, I actually find software development on MPE to be obtuse now. Take editors as a case in point: I've been fluent in Qedit [took the manual home to read over the weekend sometime back in the very early 1980s when I first had access to it], Quad, Voodoo (HPedit before it was lobotomized for sale) and at various times in various companies have used each of them on a day-in, day-out basis. I can get around in Editor and WhisperTech's Programmer Studio. But the editor I prefer above them all is vi. Yes, lowly oft-scorned vi... present on every flavor of unix (including Linux), available on Windows (as vim and gvim), and even on MPE [where the half-duplex nature of terminal communication makes it something of a painful experience]. If you've tried vi on MPE and decided you didn't like it, try it on anything else... and take the plunge long enough to get over the first day's learning curve. Once you know vi, you can dance your way through the unix shells. OTOH, if you're one of those folks who runs Qedit and/or MPEX and never exits until the end of the day (or even the next reboot ;), then perhaps you'd prefer the exact opposite of vi, emacs, the program that comes bundled with it's own Lisp interpreter for scripting, is able to do everything including wash the dishes, and (some say, "in a pinch" ;) can edit text files. -- Jeff Woods [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask] * To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, * * etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *