Trey Edward Troegel wrote: > Also, what kind of chip does the HP3000[...] run > on? An Intel, AMD, Cyrix, or does HP make a chip for it? > Also, I'm new to the MPE iX OS so I'll probably be asking several > beginner like questions in the near future. If you aren't already in HP corporate management, you're a fine candidate :-) Just kidding as an inside joke to our readers, Trey; we'd be more than happy to be of assistance to your introduction to our beloved machine. What you are asking would take volumes so I won't attempt it, but to give you some concrete answers as a start, here's a very condensed version... PA-RISC is "Precision Architecture"-RISC, an HP trademark. It is a RISC chip but one tailored to high-level architectures. The 3000 began as an HP-proprietary CISC chip in the mid 1970s, unique in that it was a hardware implementation of a stack architecture machine with inherent separation of code and data; dynamic, shareable, relocatable and re-entrant code by default; kernel-level (and above) shared libraries (which Unix only recently bothered with); and many other comp-sci geek delights. When PA-RISC was developed, HP ported the old 3000 systems and the 680x0 9000 workstations to the PA-RISC architecture. The hardware is precisely the same with the exception of a few EPROMs here and there to make sure you can't run MPE on the cheaper HP-UX systems, and to provide the extra integrity inherent with MPE. Same hardware, different brains. Like Albert Einstein and Adolf Hitler. One has all the answers, the other is out for world domination at all costs :-) So the 3000 isn't a "strange an ancient beast" hardware-wise, it runs on the same stuff as the 9000. Software-wise "MPE kicks butt" because everything on the 3000 was created for the 3000, not for every generic box in the universe. But we are losing the software advantage as vendors and HP are putting less and less into software development/enhancement for the 3000. We're being starved. It has nothing to do with "the right thing to do", it's "the profitable thing to do" for the vendors and HP. Ask any 3000 user here, we love our systems, and nobody wants to give theirs up (come to think of it, I don't recall many, if any, readers disgusted over the system, just the ones disgusted at HP/vendors) But things are shaping up, we're hanging in there. Welcome aboard. Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]> Founding HP3000-L rabble-rouser :-)