With all due apologies to David Lethe, who threatened to sign off if people continued to tell all these "non-serious" war stories, my favorite story about an HP3000 follows. Bruce Toback writes: >Marise Gwin writes: >>battery backup kicked in. Twenty minutes later we're up and cooking - no >>VREPAIR, no reloading of NLMs, no re-mirroring. Just go. ... > >>I love telling those stories to the non-3000 world. Too much, I'm sure. >> Too smug, too much of a UNIX -basher. >Again, _standards_. The user's data is precious; let's treat >it as such... >It is AMAZING what users of other systems put up with. >-- Bruce >PS. Admittedly, that was in the days when all HP-supplied >software fit on one 1200-foot 1600bpi tape! Our first HP3000 was a Series 33 purchased in 1977. It's still here in my office and theoretically capable of being turned back on, although it's now used as a desk and its 7925 disc drive is now being used as a printer stand. About 12 years ago, when the machine was about 5 years old, all of a sudden, the modem closet began filling with dense blue smoke and the smell of burning resistors filled the room and eventually the building. Quite obviously, something catastrophic had failed. But it wasn't easy to determine what. We ran a time-sharing service at the time, with about 25 remote customers all whanging away on the 33 (with its massive 1/2 meg of memory). Although the room was now quite smoky, everything was still working. The computer was still up and working normally. And as best we could tell, every modem was alive and well. And the phone system was working. We couldn't tell what the heck just burned up. After an hour or so of looking, we gave up; we figured we'd find out sooner or later. That night, as we always did at 7:00PM, we performed a full backup. And just a few minutes after we finished, the Series 33 very politely shut itself down with a power failure. What had happened was that a number of components in the power supply in the Series 33 had basically evaporated, but in the 33, the power supply didn't directly supply the electronics cabinet (CPU, memory, ADCCs); rather, it only charged the batteries. So when the power supply blew up, the machine went merrily along for the next seven hours using only its internal Ni-Cad battery power. What made the finding the problem all the more difficult was the speed of the fans that cooled the power supply. They exhausted the air from the power supply so fast that we couldn't see the smoke coming out the HP3000 -- and all that smoke simply welled up in the modem closet, which was nearby. We are all electrical engineers here, and always have been, and having almost all of the components in-house, we disassembled the HP3000 to get at the power supply, rebuilt it (redesigning it a bit to fit the components we had on hand), and re-installed it. And, of course, the Series 33 came right back up where it was, without a hitch. I was a fan of the HP3000 long before that incident happened, and it only further solidified my love of this machine. For business purposes -- where data integrity is everything -- there is no other comparable machine or operating system that I would ever recommend to a business customer. We have databases we created in 1977 still running today -- and in 17 years of use, we have never lost one bit of data or suffered any form of database corruption. That's a tough record to beat. A good portion of that integrity clearly lies in the province of software (operating system, database), but no small part lies also in the design of the hardware and its integration into the operating system and database. All systems are going to fail sooner or later; the Second Law of Thermodynamics guarantees it. The real question is how is the system going to handle critical business data when the machine does fail? The old HP3000s have set the standards high enough that I believe that HP may even have trouble living up its long-term users' expectations. Wirt Atmar