This is a re-posting of a note I sent yesterday which never showed up anywhere (HP3000-L, comp.sys.hp.mpe, or DejaNews). If this winds up being a duplicate, my sincere apologies. The reason that I'm reposting this note is my AOL e-mail has become quite unreliable in the last week or so. I know that AOL lost a number of my incoming and outgoing messages during the last week. The problem is that you never know how many. On the whole, I've been very pleased with AOL, but this is enough to make you a little grumpy. Wirt Atmar ===================================== Ken Sletten writes: >And then on the serious subject at hand: >>I can't think of a better way to accomplish that than to >>have a simple, high-speed, reliable language like BASIC >>be available to everyone, especially if the alternative is to >>simply abandon both of the languages. >Per Heather Goudey's last post and the "Category C" list >on HP's web site, support for BASIC/V and a long list of >other CM systems on MPE/iX will be ongoing... I may be completely misunderstanding the chart -- as I said in my first posting -- but the way that I read the chart is: all support for BASIC/V, SPL and MPE/V will end on September 1, 1998 for MPE/V machines. "Support" will be ongoing for those people who have previously purchased BASIC/V or SPL on MPE/iX boxes, but -- and this is the big but -- there is no product number listed for these products on MPE/iX, as there are for TRANSACT/V and COBOL II/V, thus there would soon seem to be no way of ordering either BASIC or SPL after this date, even if you wished to purchase them. I consider this state to essentially represent abandonment. Secondly, as a practical matter, on-going "support" for BASIC and SPL is now down to being able to purchase whatever stock of manuals are left. No modifications to either product, to my knowledge, have occurred in quite some time. However, as I also said in my first posting, the value of these products is far from non-existent -- they are actually jewels in the HP3000's crown -- and each represents a mechanism to help foster additional applications development, even if those applications were restricted to relatively minor, totally home-grown applications. Anything that helps an individual user obtain significantly greater benefit from his or her HP3000 helps us all. HP is soon going to be faced with one of two choices: complete the phased abandonment of SPL and BASIC and say, "That's it. It's over. We aren't going to support these languages any longer and you can no longer buy them." At that point HP erases the discs on which they're stored and throws the remaining manuals in the trash. Or they can distribute them as freeware and say, "Here they are, kid. You're free to use them as you wish. Just don't call us for support. Talk to your friends, instead." The first is a lose-lose situation. The other is win-win. A no-brainer, IMO.** Wirt Atmar **Marketing-speak. Translations into English available upon request. =====================================