Lalley has been on the hunt for a method to make the 3000's GSP as useful as the unit in an HP-UX server. "On HP-UX it is possible to reset from the host OS," he said. "I have not found a way from MPE."

Lalley explains that on HP-UX it is possible to issue the command

stty +resetGSP < /dev/GSPdiag1

to reset the GSP. From time to time a reset may be required for diagnostics services. If your 3000 gets loving care from outside your computer room, you may need a paper clip to keep service at HP-UX levels.

The gap between 3000 and HP 9000/Integrity GSPs is a common shortfall of HP designs. Even though the 3000's MPE/iX includes a Posix interface, HP didn't engineer enough Unix into the 3000 to enable some administration that HP-UX users enjoy. (That can be a good thing when a security breach opens up in the Unix world, however.)

But when a 3000 needs a GSP reset, pressing a magic recessed button on the 3000's back will do the trick if a Telnet command doesn't work. Matt Perdue of Hill Country Technologies and the OpenMPE board explains.

"I telnet to the IP address of the GSP, log in and do the reset that way," he says. "But you can get someone, to press the physical reset button at the back of the machine. If memory serves, it's recessed into the cabinet so you may need a 'magic paper clip' bent just so."

Lalley calls the GSP, which HP introduced with its final generation of 3000s, one of the most useful things in the A-Class and N-Class boxes.

The GSP is a small computer that is always powered on when the plug has power. With it, it is possible to telnet to and BE the console. While multiple admins can telnet in and watch, only one has the keyboard.

It is possible to reboot, memory dumps and even fully power down the HP 3000 from the GSP.  Use the command PC OFF.

It is probably the best feature of the N-Class and A-class boxes.  The problem is sometimes it needs to be reset, usually with a paper clip.  Since the GSP is a different CPU, it can be done during business hours.

All of which begs the question of to secure these resets. He says the MPE/iX user/account structure provides the security.

As for security, users and passwords are defined, and there are two or three classes of users.

1) Administrator
2) Operator
3) Perhaps even User

I only use Operator, i.e. I usually am the only one who accesses it.  I do have one customer that allows operators. They can reply and watch messages, but not reboot and so on.

Perhaps not so much with the 9x7 internal batteries. A few weeks ago we reported that a 3000 which forgets what time it is may have a failed internal system clock battery. Sad to say, this isn't an easy hardware failure to recover from, and a good reason to invest in spare parts server. Or arrange for complete hardware support.

Bob J. of Ideal Computer Services filled out the details on getting a working battery to replace what he calls "the Dallas Semiconductor DS1287 real time clock module. The replacement is a DS12887 and is available from components suppliers. The only concern is getting a replacement part that has been on the shelf too long."

"The battery is part of the IC’s package," Bob says, "so it looks like a tall IC. You need to remove the 3000's backplane to replace this soldered module. I don’t expect a battery shop or Radio Shack to be helpful.These modules were used in many early PCs, but haven’t been used in any new equipment for over a decade, so the replacements may be near the end of their lives too."

Bob said that a hobbyist has managed to mount an external battery on the module, to give the chip a replaceable power source. It looks like a workbench project at the hobbyist's Web site. Better to engage a hardware support provider. Better still, perhaps, to consider a newer 3000 if you really want to sustain your applications. Even homesteading has real costs.

"I really have no idea what this is worth," he said on the day after he posted the item, "so any info you could give me based on the facts already at hand would be great." He did note that as configured, the server sold new for more than $150,000. So that would make his asking price a 99.8 percent discount.

Since he's not sure if his paperwork will pass HP's muster to transfer the MPE/iX license, Cartwright will have to wait on that assessment. But Bob Sigworth of Bay Pointe Technology took a quick look at the listing. The 3000 hardware reseller said it's been a long time since he's seen a Series 9x7 with decent license paperwork. The phrase "parts box" came up to describe Cartwright's offer.

Not that there's anything wrong with selling a 9x7 for parts, or buying one. There's a internal systems clock in a 9x7 that's a combination battery-chip. It's not easily replaced if it goes bad, which will happen to a 15-year-old computer. The 9x7's $400 might be worthwhile just to get the Dallas Semiconductor DS1287. (Tip of the hat to Bob J. at 3000 hardware support company Ideal Computer for the part number on the clock.)

The software could be worth a lot less. Sigworth said the MPE/iX license could be tough to qualify for a License To Use certificate from HP. "I have not seen a legit LTU on a 9x7 in years,  I am sure it could be very well a parts box. $400 is a bit steep for a 9x7."

If you'd like to reel in the system from Cartwright, you can check out his Craigslist posting, or call him at 408-210-8185. At the $400 price, he says you'll need to pick it up yourself or pay to have it packaged and shipped.

So it came as a surprise to the enterprise solutions community when ACUCOBOL regained its development future at Micro Focus this year. Peter Anderton of Micro Focus explained the turnabout at the e3000 Community Meet in September. "We told our customers we were merging Micro Focus and AcuCOBOL, and they told us we were daft," the Englishman said with British candor. "And we were."

Migration service suppliers had a hard time visualizing an ACUCOBOL that would survive. Mike Howard of Unicon Conversion Technologies pointed out that a customer couldn't purchase AcuCOBOL since the acquisition. Anderton said that's changing now, and his company has a roadmap available that visualizes an ACUCOBOL 9, created by Micro Focus.

ScreenJet's Alan Yeo passed along a copy of the roadmap. His product includes a module to migrate VPlus 3000 screens using the AcuCOBOL GUI, one of the strongest elements of Acu.

The roadmap also pledges loyalty to R/M COBOL, another competing product acquired by Micro Focus. Anderton's forecast for R/M sounded more pragmatic at the Meet than the language used in the roadmap.

RM/COBOL is a trusted and mature technology. Our primary objective for RM/COBOL users is to ensure that your  existing applications continue to work at their best and are fully  supported both in terms of the platforms they are available on (such  as Windows 7), and to provide the high level of user support and fixes that you have come to expect.

If you are starting a new cycle of developing COBOL or mixed  language solutions from scratch, we would recommend that you  consider one of our other product lines: ACUCOBOL which offers  the highest levels of compatibility with RM/COBOL, or Net Express/ Server Express which offer the ultimate in scope, functionality and  performance.

HP 3000 customers might recognize the "trusted and mature" label from their days reading HP's tea leaves about the 3000 futures. Not good. (HP's software products for the 3000 gained that kiss of death regularly through the 1990s, until products like Business Report Writer, Transact and Allbase 4GL became antiques.)

The news that Micro Focus will sell ACUCOBOL for new projects offers some hope for the Acu future. It might be more impressive if Acu was sold into more places than R/M COBOL shops, but that could prove to be true in the year to come. Acu doesn't have its own sales force, and it's hard to judge how many products a Micro Focus rep can peddle. (Again, there's the 3000 experience, where a consolidated HP salesforce with both MPE and HP-UX to offer sold nearly every customer on Unix. Many sales came out of the hide of healthy 3000 shops.)

But like the 3000, ACUCOBOL has unique advantages that can be spread to COBOL sites moving away from the 3000's COBOL II. Acucorp took the time to give its compiler the understanding of MPE intrinsics, because Acucorp intended to sell the product to 3000 shops as a COBOL II alternative. Micro Focus COBOL simply demands you excise these 3000 directives before you can compile and run on a new platform.

Micro Focus lives and breathes .NET architecture, though, something a Windows convert will crave to get to "Native Windows," as Howard calls his company's conversions. At the risk of being too cheery, the new map seems to extend the boundaries of COBOL choices for migration projects. You can see a road that permits a "Lift and Shift" migration using Acu, especially if Windows is not on your trail.

At this fall's e3000 Community Meet, ScreenJet's Alan Yeo shared an unexpected story. His company helped to establish a new HP 3000 customer site within the past year. While there's a lot of talk about the risk of remaining on the HP 3000 due to the vendor's exit in 2010, this company saw a 3000 app as a way to avoid the trouble of falling behind.

In our 3-minute video (click on the embed above, or view it on our YouTube channel), Yeo related the case study. A 3000 solution beat out IBM iSeries apps and outlasted the promises of a migration too often postponed.

They were in a position where they hadn't been allowed to do anything for years — because the answer to everything they wanted to do was, “wait until the new ERP system comes in.” They said they needed to do something, so they looked in their group to see who was doing what. The best systems they had in the group happened to be HP 3000 systems. Even though they had IBM i5 apps running.

There's risk in any choice, because IT management never provides a foolproof solution. Tales at the Meet's Roundtable outlined the merits of migrating bugs (to keep auditors happy) and training a third party to manage an application that's understood by only one IT pro at a corporation.

Nobody can mistake a single 3000 startup as a trend, not as 2010 waits at the end of next month. But risk is in the eye of the customer. This one has good reasons for taking up with MPE/iX apps for the foreseeable future.

"The group's strategy was to implement a new ERP system," Yeo said, "but they hadn't gotten around to doing it for five years. Then the economic climate changes, and suddenly you haven't got $10 million in cash to do it."

It's the kind of story more easily shared when you can look your audience in the eye. That kind of contact makes a good case for more Meets in the years to come.

We agree, and want to note that 3k.com was always a Web resource with more scope than the now-defunct Jazz. The 3k Associates site hosts a 3000 technical Wiki, did a 3000 FAQ before that, hosts a raft of technical papers, has a link to the freeware from 3000/9000 support vendor Beechglen, points to another set of tools from Allegro Consultants, and has been home to the biggest directory of HP 3000 software products. How long has this resource been around? Well, 3k.com is a two-character Web address. You simply can't buy those anymore, having been snapped up long before the 3000 business was closed off at HP.

HP closed down Jazz one year ago this month, but the vendor did more than pull the plug on the freeware server. As we've reported before, the Jazz programs are now walled off by a 40-page End User License Agreement. At least the ones that HP engineers developed for free use by the community. The third-party tools that were hosted on Jazz aren't covered by the HP EULA. That's where 3k.com comes in, during a time when OpenMPE is still working to try to get its hosting site open to the public.

The OpenMPE initiative will add a new dimension to a 3000 Web resource, whenever it finally goes online. The servers will host the Jazz contents from HP, as well as the invent3k public development server facility. It's taking longer than expected to bring OpenMPE's Jazz and invent3k.openmpe.org online. The holdup is the state that HP left its Jazz pages in: full of HP logos and references that the vendor demands be excised by third parties.

It's been suggested that this kind of Web housecleaning is a straightforward process using perl or awk, but until recently the volunteer OpenMPE team didn't have this kind of experience. HP certainly knew perl and awk, but it just turned over Jazz in its unauthorized rehosting state. OpenMPE gained a new volunteer this week to help in its Jazz hosting. But HP could have spared the advocacy group, Speedware and Client Systems all the legally required exorcism work.

Shareware, by a popular definition, is software without restrictions for use or sharing, donated to a community. It's good that Speedware, Client Systems and even more so, 3k, have maintained the concept. OpenMPE will have to abide by that nettlesome HP EULA to keep the vendor's donated programs online. This release could have been done with more elegance and attention to the spirit of the free tools. While it's fair to appreciate the work that someone in HP did to free up Jazz's shareware, the delays in presentation by the new hosts illustrate another spot where HP "didn't think of that." OpenMPE directors say that answer was uttered frequently by HP while it responded to OpenMPE's requests.

We'd say "Free Jazz now," but that would involve OpenMPE ignoring the HP EULA. With the likes of 3k.com's wide array, as well as Speedware and Client Systems sites (both were delayed by the HP logo purge), the software is free now. Just not as free of the memory of HP's need for controls while it exits your community.

All those follow-the-crowd reasons show why a brief announcement from Computing Solutions Ltd. (CSL) could help migrating 3000 sites.The UK company sold Linkway an IMAGE-to-ODBC utility starting in the 1990s. Now the vendor is tossing its development hat into the SQL Server arena.

CSL's SQL Server Job Monitor (SSJM) software is on sale at launch prices through this month, according to Tom Moore of the company. The utility helps supply automated monitoring of batch work (SQL jobs) to the Windows environment.

Linkway earned good marks from the community in the late '90s, while IMAGE was still gaining tools like the company's founding product. The company continues to support some 3000 customers still using its products and services. Batch work under Windows merits special considerations while making a migration, according to Unicon's Mike Howard.

Drilling down into the database batch work is SSJM's specialty. The product can be used with SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, Moore said. "It supports exception reporting of failures of SQL jobs that need corrective action, as well as an interface to other monitoring software as required." One unique feature of the product is that "it particularly supports a wall-mounted display as an operator's support tool, showing colored statuses of all jobs for the monitored server."

As for the link between Linkway and SSJM, Moore reports that it's all a result of evolution of fundamental database utility technology.

CSL has continued on in software development, particularly in Web application developments on SQL or Oracle as clients need, whilst still keeping services running from the HP 3000 for non-migrated clients. There are still sites that have not migrated, but they don’t want to invest now!

Details on the new product and an offer to download a copy for a free 14-day trial are at the product's Web site.

Whoever imagined a conference agenda with the discussions on the appropriateness of using iTunes to distribute e-learning content, or open-source versus proprietary applications? How things have changed!
 
This week I’m attending the Educause conference in Denver, where I will be taking a dive into the modern world of educational computing looking at these topics and more.

The world of computing for education used to be really simple. Early HP 3000 adopters included many higher-ed and K-12 organizations. There were consortiums that were formed to build common applications iN Washington state, California and other places. The HP 3000 market had several providers that sprung up – SRN provided fundraising software, degree audits and more. Bi-Tech provided financials and many customers flocked to conferences. There were even conferences within conferences, as there was a SIG-ED track at Interex.
 
But the modern campus landscape has evolved to include massive IT infrastructures – internet, wireless, servers, secure networks, mobile computing, peer to peer file sharing, High Performance Computing, and Learning Management Systems (LMS) dot the landscape of the modern campus.

It’s interesting to see the issues, ranging from defining what a department is to the percentage increase of Adobe’s latest licenses. (It’s up to 50 percent for some colleges). There’s also been a large amount of discussion about the support for office and Windows 7 for Mac devices, especially through Safari and Firefox.

I'll have more to share as the conference unfolds.

Birket Foster is CEO of MB Foster, supplier of HP 3000 migration services and tools, as well as data management and datamart solutions. You can also follow the Educause Twitter stream by using the #EDUCAUSE09 tag.

The iManifest initiative took off in the spring in Japan. What does the iSeries need that IBM sales and marketing isn't supplying? The launch manifesto doesn't call out IBM's shortcomings, but aims to rally the users to recognize their systems' value.

More widespread usage of IBM i is the best way for corporations to strengthen their management capability and business power. We have started activities to add to the user community as many new companies as possible. We ask that users renew their firm confidence and belief that IBM i is the best infrastructure available to support managerial and operational innovation.

2009 is the 20th anniversary of the iSeries family, which started when IBM migrated its System 36/38 customers to the AS400. At the same time HP was moving its HP 3000 sites to the PA-RISC 3000s and MPE/XL. iManifest is trying to ensure that HP's 3000 history doesn't repeat in a fadeout of the iSeries. The initiative recently gained new members in the iSeries chief scientist Frank Soltis, as well as the top application supplier Infor -- which owns the MANMAN customer base in the 3000 world.

Much like PA-RISC, IBM uses its own chip design to power the iSeries (now being called Series i). This POWER architecture is in its sixth generation, and Soltis is the primary creator of the architecture used in IBM's Power Systems. He's also retired from IBM after decades of toil in the technical trenches for the community.

The users of iSeries systems will remind you of that huge share of the 3000 community: Small-to-midsize companies that chose an integrated IT solution in the 1980s and '90s, only to see industry-standard choices dominate the vendor's roadmap. IBM hasn't joined iManifest; that might be tantamount to admitting the product line is in need of a spark. Over in the iSeries press, Chris Maxer of iSeries Network reports that a vendor rep in Europe has received only non-official support from IBM.

LANSA's Martin Fincham notes, "While I have no official word from IBM, I want to go on-record and say that I have personally received enthusiastic and practical support for iManifest EMEA from a number of IBM'ers around the globe. I cannot thank-you by name here, but you know who you are."

HP officials in the 3000 division were not much impressed by the future of IBM's integrated business alternative in 2002 and 2003. The decline in IT sales during 2008 and 2009 hasn't been kind to these non-standard products, and the press reports a steady drain from sales of the Series i. HP said it would weather IBM's pursuit of the HP 3000 migration crowd. Declining share would put pressure on solution suppliers such as LANSA, a forecast we heard in 2002 from then-e3000 Business Manager Dave Wilde.

As the market share becomes smaller and the prices drop, it becomes difficult to fund the marketing and sales channel to keep a vertically integrated system in place. One thing that’s going to happen is the margins will drop for a solution like the AS/400. Their sales volume will drop because of the differences. The other thing that happens is that a channel partner doesn’t want to test on as many platforms, just one or two mainstream platforms that are an easier sell.

Since then IBM has renamed the system twice, pumped two new generations of OS and architecture into the computer. It's also consolidated the division with the Unix version of the iSeries, another move that has the customer base worried. In one view, Wilde's predictions have come true, though probably on a longer timetable than HP imagined. The same extended timeline can be observed for HP 3000 migrations.

But the iSeries community isn't going gentle into any perceived good night. It's raising funds for marketing in the US. Independent software vendors like Infor and LANSA propose to market more than just applications -- and fund that vertical system's sales where IBM has not.

"The match has been struck. It just needs a little gasoline to light the bonfire," said Dan Burger writing in IT Jungle. "The manifest is IT activism. It comes from a loyal customer base that is irate about the mediocrity of IBM i marketing and is fearful that the mediocrity will creep into research, development, and sales of an outstanding product."

Had this sort of activism -- you might even call it community organization -- taken place for the HP 3000 before 2001, HP's decision to depart might have had a different timetable. Or not, based on policy and marketing beliefs like

In situations like an election without a contested seat, members understand their vote won't influence the outcome of the balloting. But voting will keep you engaged and more interested in what the board of directors will propose for the year to come. This year's slate of directors includes a candidate from the HP 3000 community running for re-election. Steve Davidek of the City of Sparks, Nevada is volunteering for a term that runs through 2011.

Connect members are the only people who can vote. Membership is only $50 for a year for an individual. You can cast a ballot after looking over the slate at the Connect site, then following the link to vote. 

One of the best resources Connect offers is a lively Twitter feed, managed by Kees den Hartigh. The Community Manager and an officer of a Netherlands user group, den Hartigh posts news from the HP that's the destination of HP3000 migrations, offering Unix and industry standard system updates. Follow den Hartigh on Twitter via @Connect_WW.

Connect is also building a 3000 user group community online, led by its president-elect Chris Koppe of Speedware and Speedware product manager Nick Fortin. The 3000 NewsWire's Twitter feed is part of the page, which is working to gain momentum among members. The Connect site has introduced an upgrade to the user interface for the group just last week.

Birth and death are both parts of the 3000's ecosystem, even on the sixth anniversary of the system's World Wide Wake. The Wake was concocted by Alan Yeo of the UK-based company ScreenJet in 2003, a worldwide celebration in October of that year to mark the end of the 3000's manufacture. A half-dozen years after dozens of meetings lifted a glass to the 3000's HP lifespan, Yeo has introduced a new product for 3000 sites, while another UK company has closed its book on its programmer's environment.

First, the obituary. Whisper Technologies ended its 18-year run as a supplier of programmer tools, according to the company's founder Graham Wooley. (Tip of the hat to Duane Percox of QSS, whose development labs used Whisper's products.) The UK's Whisper built and promoted the Programmer Studio PC-based toolset, selling it as a development environment which understood exchanges with the 3000 but could be used to create programs under Windows. Robelle responded promptly with a Windows version of Qedit, and the 3000 ecosystem had a lively competition for programming tools for more than five years.

The birth was first announced at this fall's e3000 Community Meet. Yeo introduced EZ View, a tool for migrating the 3000's VPlus forms to industry-standard XML forms. As Yeo suggests in the video above, EZ View promotes a no-changes transformation of 3000 app hosting. Whatever the behavior of your 3000 apps today for the user base, EZ View will copy it faithfully to another environment so no retraining is required. At the same time, the door to .NET Windows or anything which XML supports can be opened.

At QSS, where the ghostscript/ghostpdl porting project is underway, Percox passed on this report from Wooley, who founded Whisper back in the era when the 3000's OS was called MPE XL. Wooley told Percox:

Unfortunately Whisper Technology is no more.  As the developer, Greg Sharp had looked after Whisper and Programmer Studio by himself for the last three years, but he has now moved on to other things and the company has now closed.

Meanwhile, EZ View is opening possibilities for companies who want to leave VPlus behind. While it was a good screen development tool for 3000 integration, VPlus was long ago passed by Visual Basic, and then Microsoft's Visual Studio in flexibility and industry support.

But the key to ScreenJet's new product lies in its ability to copy what the 3000 did. Users operate an app that's been through the EZ View transfer in the same way they've been using a 3000 app. The devotion to the old look and feel is important to minimize retraining. It also lets a 3000 shop test a migration step while the app remains on the 3000.

“We have the only VPlus migration product that runs on the 3000 as well," Yeo said. "You can switch to our API and the XML forms files.”

Mark West of Car Hop, an auto sales and finance firm, needed to perform this kind of link, but discovered that the known links to freevt3k through telemon.com have gone dead. West dug up the source code for the utility, rehosted it in a forge on SourceForge.net, then told the community about its lost-then-found resource.

I've been trying to find a suitable terminal to access the HP3000 servers we use at work. I made a couple of small corrections and set up a sourceforge project to store the freevt3k code on. While I’m sure this isn’t the most recent copy, at least it’s been saved from the lost and found. I’ll be happy to accept any patches sent to me.

Freevt3k made its debut in the late 1990s. HP discontinued its NS VT3K product, which allowed HP 9000s to log into the HP 3000. HP-UX 11.0 and later versions no longer support a pathway from outside systems into HP 3000s. But freevt3k a means to let users onto the systems if you don't want to use telnet. (Some companies have restrictions on telnet services into HP 3000s, but no limits on proprietary, internal access.) A freeware project created this shareware version of VT3K.

The version of the software that West has provided has Linux binaries and a Unix source tarball for download. Notes in the README file deliver instructions on how to use it.

The 3000's internal time is preserved using a small battery, according to the experts out on the 3000 newsgroup. This came to light in a discussion about fixing a clock gone slow. A few MPE/iX commands and a trip to Radio Shack maintains a 3000's sense of time.

"I thought the internal clock could not be altered," said Paul English. "Our server was powered off for many months, and maybe the CMOS battery went flat." The result was that English's 3000 showed Greenwich Mean Time as being four years off reality. CTIME reported for his server:

*  Greenwich Mean Time : THU, JUN 17, 2004, 11:30 AM   *

* GMT/MPE offset      : +-19670:30:00                 *

* MPE System Time     : THU, SEP 10, 2009,  2:00 PM   *

Yup, that's a bad battery, said Pro 3k consultant Mark Ranft. "It is cheap at a specialty battery store," he said, "and can be replaced easily, if you have some hardware skills and a grounding strap." Radio Shack offers the battery.

But you can also alter the 3000's clock which tracks GMT, he added.

"The internal clock can be set or reset at bootup (the method varies depending on the hardware), or by using the MPE SETCLOCK date=xx/xx/xx;time;NOW command, in conjuction with SETCLOCK ;CANCEL.  Follow these by the SHOWCLKS command. It usually takes me a couple of attempts to get it, but you should be able to straighten this out without even having to reboot."

A few customers warned that utility software will sometimes fail to start up if a bad battery has pulled the internal clock too far off the system clock. Tracy Johnson of OpenMPE explained:

Collateral damage may include some third party software going non-operational. I have at least one software package whose license goes bad when the offset gets too large (think years).  When I fix the offset to a reasonable number (within a day or two), then the software works again.

In this case you would be wrong. Leggett & Platt is managing its health plan using an HP 3000 and the EnCore claims system. Migration is probably not going to happen before sometime in 2012.

"We do plan on migrating to another platform, but not for another 3-5 years," said Douglas Grimes in IT. Our longtime subscriber added, "I am not sure which one we will go to. We will probably wait to see what EnCore does and follow them."

Leggett & Platt, New York Stock Exchange-listed and 125 years old, makes bedding and furniture assemblies. For example, its Mira-Coil continuous coil innerspring unit "grew in popularity in the 1980s and was patented in 23 countries."

Leggett & Platt doesn't show up on the extensive HP 3000 customer list at the OpenMPE Web site. When a company uses a solution that's not in the Top 20 MPE applications, tracking its business becomes tougher. A Fortune 500 site shouldn't be tough to locate, so we'll just assume someone in the 3000 migration community has Leggett & Platt on a tickle file.

How can a company this size maintain its 3000 use? Independent outsourced support along with experienced in-house application expertise. (Customers of some size do get special HP support deals that could well go beyond 2010, but HP isn't advertising that for Leggett & Platt or any other customer.) That app expertise  might not be any harder to locate than the best selection of Windows IT pros. While Windows has a vast user base among IT staffers, there's so many Windows tools and solutions that matching experience to a specific solution can make for a non-trivial hire.

ScreenJet's Alan Yeo, founder of the company that has helped 3000 sites move and enhance VPlus screens for more than a dozen years, said he figures there's 50 to 100 development solutions for Windows programmers. Entire IDEs, no less. Choosing a tool in the Top 10 of popularity might make Windows experts easy to recruit and retain. But then that kind of selection winnows so much possibility out of the rich world of Windows solutions.

EnCore is supported on other platforms, including an implementation that uses the Eloquence database to mirror its IMAGE capabilities. When the time is right for a Fortune 500 site to migrate, it will. The end of the 3000s life is being determined by customers, not by HP's support calendar.

We've recently heard from Chuck Townsend, a COBOL and modernization consultant who helped launch the software vendor LegacyJ. He recalls that LegacyJ "implemented the HP COBOL syntax, the HP Intrinsics (excluding IMAGE), the HP Macro capability and you might remember the VPlus capability as well." So LegacyJ offers a COBOL for use on platforms other than the 3000. One that claims to know something about the 3000.

Then there's ACUCOBOL-GT. It was easy to believe that ACUCOBOL would decline in favor of Micro Focus COBOL, when MF bought Acucorp in 2007. But Alan Yeo of ScreenJet reminds us that:

The ACUCOBOL product is still available, and we have migrations that are still in progress with our ACUCOBOL GUI conversion for VPlus products. In fact, Micro Focus are adapting that technology as the Thin Client GUI for the Micro Focus COBOL products. Like the 3000, rumours of ACUCOBOL's death appear premature.

Now that Micro Focus owns the product, it may not be as easy to ask for ACUCOBOL by name, but the GT suite still appears for sale on the Micro Focus Web site. What's even more interesting at that MF site is a pep talk by analyst Dale Vecchio of Gartner, above. The research VP comes across as a consigliere (mob elder statesman) in a six-minute sermon about why retirements are good for IT's future. He seems to invoke that image with his comparison of IT practices and the methods of The Sopranos.

Let's be clear about why Vecchio is speaking in the 6-minute video at the Micro Focus site. (Registration required.) He's advising IT managers and directors to get busy. Gartner people like to incite. Make changes, he says, or you'll believe the same thing Albert Einstein said. "Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal," Vecchio quotes Einstein. It appears Einstein actually said something like this, but then Vecchio adds to the quote, "no good can come of it." 

(Web resources agree that Einstein said technological progress, not change. This distinction has always been the undoing of change cheerleaders like Vecchio. Progress is something the IT pros must accomplish. The analysts and vendors will only supply the change, unless you hire them for it. We'll leave it as an exercise for our readers to determine the context of the quote from Einstein, who's invoked for everything from IT to baby development videos.)

The good news, Vecchio says, is that the people in IT are retiring who believe change is no good. It's a bit naive for Vecchio to think that stubborn IT managers and CIOs are standing in the way of improvements, unless they own their companies. Change -- whether it's adopting Micro Focus COBOL instead of the ACUCOBOL solution, or embracing even wider like cloud computing or the .NET distinction -- needs to show proof of success, or it's just an experiment.

The need for proof is what keeps 50-ish IT professionals on the job when they'd rather be retired. What you know remains an asset to your company. Proven success keeps COBOL running much of the world's business computing, 50 years after the language was invented. It's hard to refuse something that's worked for this long -- if its community keeps reinventing it. If your IT efforts include care for languages and programs, like so many do, then caring about your next COBOL should be an issue to investigate.

Both of those technologies, mini and copier, are considered old-school. Everybody understands what a copier does, but few people under 50 know what the term mini represents. For anybody reading who's only just arrived in IT during this decade, computers were known as mainframes, microcomputers, and minicomputers. People who know what mini means helped connect a Ricoh copier to a 3000. Over a network, no less.

Of course this Ricoh CP M4000 is not a copier of the '80s, not any more than the HP 3000 is a minicomputer of that era. The Ricoh prints for PCs (microcomputers) at Victor S. Barnes Company. It also stacks and staples, a feature set that IT manager Tom Hula wanted to extend to its 3000. The system became a copy cat by telling the copier to stop looking for some of its configuration information. A third party tool helped provide another way to claim this new life for the 3000.

Routing application output to print and copy devices often becomes the task of a print server. The 3000 has a good heritage of working with such a PC print clearinghouse. There's also the NBSPOOL software from Quest Software. The latter is still for sale, still supported. Quest is one of those suppliers who's going to be supporting 3000 sites a long time after HP leaves the field.

Another fine 3000 product, NetPrint from Minisoft, specializes in connecting HP 3000s with output devices HP doesn't support under MPE/iX. Hula found a workaround on his own, once he talked to the Ricoh support. The answer he discovered within 24 hours was to disable the NPCONFIG information on the output job

The problem had to do with restrictions that were set on printing color. On each workstation, I had had to specify black and white printing as the preference so that people could print to the copier. Using color then required an authorization code if the user had one assigned.

As far as I know, the HP 3000 has no way of communicating printing preferences to this copier. As soon as I removed the restriction from the copier, printing using the NPCONFIG entry I originally used worked. 

One of the community's networking gurus added some more information to suggest another workaround. Jeff Kell, who manages the 3000 newsgroup where this catty advice appeared, said the 3000's tool set might include enough connection to talk to Ricoh's software drivers.

We have an “outsourced” copy center that uses Ricoh printers. Their printers normally require an authorization code to print anything. The only way to print to them from the 3000 was to have them disable the authorization check on the particular printer.  Once that is done, it does accept a normal PCL-stream on tcp/9100 (with SNMP disabled).

Ricoh has drivers for Windows, and there are Unix “cups” configurations for them including authorization codes. But of course there is no MPE variant, unless you can front-end one with some esoteric “lpr” type options, using one of the 3000's external network printing packages (ESPUL?).

ESPUL was created by RAC Software's Rich Corn. The product is resold by Minisoft as NetPrint. The advice gives 3000 customers more than one way to skin this cat. Nothing that gruesome is needed to extend a 3000's reach today. You need only ask those who remember that the word mini can represent a large array of solutions.

Today Forbes has an early review of the first book by a retired HP executive, Chuck House, who knew and worked with the HP 3000 business. The HP Phenomenon earned praise from a reviewer who's written his own HP book, George Anders. But the reviewer of Phenomenon wrote a more upbeat take on HP's changes than House's clear-eyed memories. Anders wrote the Carly Fiorina saga Perfect Enough, a kinder view of the changes that CEO inflicted on the HP which House remembers.

House still reveres the HP of the Sixties through the 1980s, just like the 3000 community venerates the MPE Software Pocket Guides of the 1970s and '80s. A current thread on the 3000 newsgroup has floated into memory lane about that era of the 3000. Like the guide itself -- and the HP computer management which House admires in his book -- the world has changed enough to make its best days appear to be behind it.

There's no doubt that the pocket guides are a token of the past. I was lucky to receive one that had been in the trenches, obviously well used and well-loved. Alfredo Rego passed on his MPE III guide once the OS started to move out of MPE V territory. But like the community members who now recall how vital a tool the book once was, Alfredo wrote a note in his guide's cover in 1987.

This little MPE III pocket guide is as valid today as it was in 1978. As a matter of fact, I used this guide today to change THE bit that made Adager run on the HP3000 Series 930.

As that summer of 1987 wrapped up, the Series 930 was the test-pilot aircraft of the overdue PA-RISC fleet. Only a handful were ever shipped, and HP replaced every one for free with the more capable Series 950.

By the time my MPE III guide was in heavy use, the community had another wizard, this one a wunderkind revered by veterans and novices alike. Eugene Volokh co-created the MPEX utility along with his dad Vladimir. House was on the scene at HP in those times. House was also part of the HP 3000 history seminar from last summer. Steve Cooper, who founded Allegro Consultants with Stan Sieler in that era, chronicled the Eugene legend in this video from the meeting.

The story includes a note from Sieler about the novelty of the concept of a super-MPE with wildcarding capability. One engineer in the 3000 group, Walt McCullough, engineered a similar concept. But HP wasn't focused in 1980 on incremental technology that could become so vital as MPEX, Sieler explains

House was working on his book during the summer of that seminar; the book is only available today through Stanford University Press, and the Amazon UK Web site. But there are excerpts from the book available through House's blog. In one blog entry, he takes a break from his memoirs of the Bill & Dave HP era to note how much change has occurred in the boardroom of the modern HP.

In an entry titled Whither HP Now? House explains why he believes HP has made a habit of under-investing in creating technology.

HP, after spending 9% of revenues for 60 years, almost like clockwork, cut that to 6% under [CEO] Lew Platt's regime, and from the midpoint of Carly's time until now, it has been reduced by a cool 0.5% per year, until now it is only 3% of revenues, one-half of IBM's investments in its future. To cut R&D by two-thirds, to rework HP Labs to the point of only pursuing work that the divisions will market or that universities will support (huh, say that again?), is to sell out the future. Period.

One might confidently predict that the constant wellspring of "renewal" -- so long the hallmark of HP -- is running dry. The acquisitions had better work.

There is an HP which still lives at many HP 3000-using companies: the vendor who will supply replacement systems and environments as migration targets. Two paths can be followed: one toward technology in which HP continues to invest, HP-UX. The other path is away from software innovation and toward standards, following Windows or Linux advances. An HP which couldn't imagine why they'd need a Pocket Guide for any product will exist in the future. But looking to the past won't clear the crystal ball to reveal when that "day of the dry well" arrives for HP. A customer who invests in HP's future needs to see smaller, more nimble tech companies continue to join and create the Hewlett-Packard phenomenon.

For the customer who's always wondered what the inside of the HP Garage looks like, the workplace of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is on display over the Web. A video tour, led by HP archivist Anna Mancini, is online -- so you can see the head of that wellspring. At what the industry calls the Birthplace of Silicon valley, the garage restored by HP shows the era of HP's phenomenon when R&D was all the company could offer.

In addition to smart forms, deeper barcode features and a secure numeric font for check printing, eFORMz brings something even more significant to a paperless drive toward PDF forms and e-document management: ongoing support and continued updates. Those are benefits that are worth paying a vendor for, rather than working with open source solutions.

Enterprise IT in the 3000 world can have pretty low budgets these days, but free solutions cost something. The price is the integration expertise, usually measured in hours or days spent plugging in an open source tool. You rely on the open source community to keep your free solution updated, too, unless you've studied the source code enough to create "diffs" for MPE/iX versions. That's what QSS developer Mark Bixby is doing this month. He has also advised the 3000 community to learn such porting skills.

Minisoft reports that it will include updates to the new eFORMz for one year as part of its discount. While you cannot be certain that open source software will need more work in its first year, there's no guarantee of such updates being created.

Bixby gave sage advice to the community in the years after HP announced its exit from the 3000. While still working at HP, but after he moved away from 3000 duties, he said anyone staying on the system in a homestead mode would be well served to learn how to port open source solutions like Samba or perl. A vendor with a paid solution lets a homestead site leave the driving to vendor developers, like Neal Kazmi at Minisoft.

Alfredo Iglesias of Veryant tells us that " the majority of our customers find the idea of leveraging their COBOL and application expertise while deploying pure Java applications is very attractive." You can move away from COBOL completely, too.

If someone who knows the COBOL application takes the time to study the Java libraries that isCOBOL provides for the runtime environment, it is possible to take our generated Java code, clean it from the COBOL ‘accent’ and continue development in the Java programming language.

Then there's Daniel Meyers of LegacyJ, the company named after its mission of getting legacy applications into Java. He says the company "has had HP-compatible COBOL and COBOL II solutions -- among 16 others -- for years." I think we'd all like to know more about another COBOL that, like AcuCOBOL, has had COBOL II intrinsics designed into it. Excising 3000 intrinsics from COBOL II can be detailed work, although UNICON reports it's got an automation tool to do this to 3000 apps.

Meyers told us in a scrappy e-mail that not only does his company's solution offer the same kind of cross-language COBOL-to-Java utility, he asserts that Veryant copied some LegacyJ concepts. (It's nice to know that the COBOL to Java jump is so established that two products can make similar claims.) We'll leave the two vendors to slug that copy issue out, but Meyers said this about LegacyJ.

12 years ago we solved the COBOL transition problem by providing a cross-compiler / translator to allow re-hosting without re-engineering, moving your applications over to the Java Virtual Machine environment. If you’re on an HP 3000, you can modernize more rapidly than other approaches.

Our high-speed COBOL compiler is written in C and generates an intermediate Cobol/Java code that can be maintained in COBOL or Java, works in any Java Virtual Machine-compatible environment, and is primarily used in Windows and Linux server situations. We generate Java bytecode, which operates with a runtime module to facilitate the operation on the more modern, affordable platforms that lend themselves to further modernization steps.

Veryant’s approach is much like ours, having been copied without permission from our original, patented technology -- though they decided to write their compiler in Java, trading speed for some notion of portability.

Veryant stresses that portability in its offer. Its isCOBOL points the way out of rejuvenating COBOL leadership on a development team, even while giving COBOL experts a role to play in the transition. Iglesias likes to refer prospects to a case study of Donato's Pizza, which "is leaving COBOL behind and rewriting its core business applications in Java."

Although many of Veryant’s customers use isCOBOL as the perfect bridge to leave COBOL programming in favor of Java programming, the toolset is currently designed for those customers that would like to continue to develop, maintain, debug in the COBOL language and deploy in the Java Runtime Environment.

Veryant customers... do not have to learn the Java programming language, Java scripting, Ajax, Web programming, etc. They are able to play in the Java sandbox using the COBOL programming language (including Object-Oriented COBOL), a standards based-COBOL compiler, a graphical, portable debugger with remote debugging capabilities, and a COBOL-friendly IDE based on the Eclipse platform.

Iglesias goes into more detail in his comment underneath the original article. Of note: isCOBOL will need some cleaning of its COBOL "accent" to make the code genuine Java. The isCOBOL Java is suited for the Java Runtime Environment, something quite different from Java programming language itself.

Despite the downtime on the archive/original Web site, you can still read the NewsWire's blog Thursday at anytime. Please use the alternate address:

to keep up with our news and features. Like any HP 3000 site, planned downtime is a part of our lives. We're happy to have an alternative to go along with our high-uptime main Web service on 3000newswire.com. Next year we renew that Web address for our 15th year. Along the way we're been lucky to have the savvy and experience of Chris Bartram, our original Webmaster, at 3k.

Mark Bixby of QSS is at work on the porting project. Bixby ported the Apache Web server as well as Internet connectivity software to the 3000's OS late in the last decade, then joined the HP 3000 lab technical staff in the Internet & Interoperability unit. He left HP to join QSS in 2008.

Percox said the project will bring Ghostpdl and Ghostscript to the 3000. The former software can be used as a file format converter, such as printer language-to-PDF converter, the latter can be combined with a printer driver in "virtual printer" PDF creators. The QSS work will focus on including the 3000's common printer language, PCL, in the conversion options.

Ghostscript has been ported to Windows, HP-UX, Linux, OpenVMS and Mac operating systems. The QSS project will be shared with the 3000 community as open source when the work is complete, Percox said.

Many HP 3000 applications use the PCL printer language to send output to print devices. PDF is not supported widely in the 3000 application world, but the standard is omnipresent in the computer industry at large. Ghostscript will give 3000 sites a means to create PDF documents from 3000 reports. The open source solution would have to be integrated with an MPE/iX app, but at least the port project will make it available.

Percox said the work might put pressure on some suppliers of output and print products for the 3000. It gives the sites with a tight budget another option for printing, however.

“This might negatively impact vendors with expensive PDF generation products for the HP 3000,” Percox said. “But Ghostscript is a great feature for the financially-challenged customer who wants full PCL-to-PDF capability.”

Review by Steve Hardwick, CISSP

I have worked in the information security business for more than 10 years, and I’ve learned there is one constant throughout – change. Keeping up with the ever-present cat and mouse battle between the hackers and security industry is a full time job. The Myths of Security by John Viega (O'Reilly Media, $29.95) provides a good view of what the security industry faces and why they sometimes fall short in the eyes of many people. So the next time you are hitting your computer with your keyboard in utter frustration, put it down, pick up this book and take a look at why computer security is so hard. You can also learn what doesn’t work to secure computers – and by extension, good security practices. Some of the biggest security weaknesses will surprise you.
 
This book begins by outlining how easy it is to have a security problem. Early chapters cover the methods of attacking computer systems and how they have evolved. These include simple viruses focused on specific operating systems up to more sophisticated Web-based attacks and social engineering exploits. New attacks are independent on the operating system; rather, they exploit the lack of knowledge of the user. (Despite their sanguine outlook, even Apple users are wide open to these types of attacks.) Chapter 15 has an excellent example of a phishing attack that demonstrates how the bad guy can get key information without ever touching the operating system. According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, June of 2009 was the second-highest month for number of new phishing sites detected.

The author makes two very crucial points: First, it is no longer just a battle of viruses anymore – any computer user is vulnerable. Second, users will want an antivirus application that can deal with all manner of information security threats — viruses, malware, adware, phishing, cross site scripting and more.

This book provides an excellent view of many basic security elements, then steps into an overview of the good, the bad and the ugly of the tools that are out there. The author is critical of products that look great on the vendor’s Web site, but would bring a network to its knees if used, for example, intrusion prevention systems.

Viega dedicates several chapters to explain in plain language why some of these tools are not suited for personal use or for small companies. Many solid recommendations throughout inform individual users how to better protect themselves from a wide range of security threats. There is deeper detail on some of the more important security tools, but you'll need a good technical understanding for these sections. Chapter 29 “Application Security on a Budget” highlights the type of issues that are important – emphasizing training and simple free solutions vs. multiple expensive high tech solutions such as those intrusion prevention systems and virtualization.
 
As a former solutions developer, Viega is in an ideal position to give an informative peek over the fence at the challenges the security vendors face. In Chapters 8, 9 and 10, he breaks down the difficulty of vetting the thousands of pieces of data that daily go into our computers. He also explains why product vendors have some difficult choices in meeting end-users’ security as well satisfying the needs of vendor shareholders. This results in some odd methodologies that do not always have the end user’s interest as the highest priority – Chapter 7, “Google is Evil.” Or at worst, as outlined in Chapter 18, even plain old snake oil in a digital wrapper.

Many users do not realize the high cost of development and sheer manpower it takes to combat the threats that are out there. There are many detailed examples throughout the book showing how the business world shapes security products as much as the hackers.
 
The author does lend his industry experience to give suggestions on how the industry can better attack the problems. However, they may be somewhat controversial – Chapter 39, “What Antivirus Companies should be doing” is a good example. The chapter proposes that the antivirus vendors act as a “safe application” clearinghouse and restrict programs that have not been classified. But this goes against the open culture of the user community, even though Apple is trying this approach with its iPhone applications, with mixed reviews.
 
On the flip side, some attention is paid to understanding why there are hackers. Hacking has moved from the era of bravado and bragging rights into organized crime, as well as offering people in disadvantaged countries a way to make easy money. (In one recent example, a Russian consortium offered a malware affiliate bounty: infect a Mac, earn 43 cents.) However, the issue of outdated legal infrastructure in many developing countries which enables this, was not highlighted in the book. Those policies are a major hole in the global response to computer crime.

Similarly, it would have been a good balance to include a discussion on what the various governments are trying to do with new laws and regulations to help combat the problem. Conversely, the book did cover some newer threats such as data hostaging – which is becoming more of a threat to industries at large. For example, consider the salesman who will not return his laptop with all the customer information on it until his last commission check is in the bank.
 
If you are looking for a quick-fix to stop your computer from grinding to a halt every couple of days after your kids have unwittingly loaded the latest and greatest malware, then this is not the book for you. If you want a more in-depth understanding of today's threats, what you can do -- and what, if anything, anyone is trying to do to fix them -- then I would recommend this book.

Steve Hardwick has over 10 years of information security experience. He has worked with different environments from military customers, financial institutions, healthcare organizations and Fortune 1000 companies, as well as conducting security assessments for large and small corporations. He is currently Partner Manager at Mobile Armor Inc. providing cost effective solutions for securing and protecting mobile data.

HP's 2009 policies on Invent3k and Jazz content aimed to share such resources with the community. But a 40-page HP End User License Agreement (EULA) inserted restrictions, terms and fees to control where such freeware and open source software can be hosted. The vendor did not simply pass along code and utilities written by third parties. New hosting outlets must arrange their own agreements to host the independent tools, now that HP has closed up these resources.

Much of it was built on the back of Klein's work, volunteer nights and weekends for the equivalent of a year of full-time coding. The new language opened the door for the HP 3000’s interoperability. He reported today, "I may just host the GNU stuff here in my lab, and at OpenMPE." A third outlet for open source is getting ready to open, too.

Brian Edminster is polishing up his open source repository for the community, a project born of his company Applied Technologies' use of open source in consulting, 3000 migration and management assignments.

But if you're going to be doing any rewriting at all, why not aim for more than a new COBOL that acts like the old one? If a transfer to Java from COBOL is your desire, a software company called Veryant has a language that claims to speak both languages.

Java got a jolt of news this week while its bridegroom, Oracle, gathered the Oracle faithful at its annual Oracle World. James Gosling, considered the father of Java, reported that Java's NetBeans development environment and Glassfish, an open source application server, are more popular than ever. Gosling said this week that Glassfish, as free as any Linux distro, has been downloaded at the rate of a million copies a month.

Except that Oracle already has its own development environment. Plus an application server that it loves. There may be some overlap in that acquisition. But a million copies a month carries a lot of clout. It's things like Glassfish that make Java look attractive during a move away from COBOL. That's where Veryant's isCOBOL could take a role in the move away from COBOL. It all depends on what caliber of Java you get out of it.

Remember, we're talking about migrations that will require revisions of COBOL here. These sites are already committed to rewrites, somewhat automated but which require testing. When you've got the hood up, can you get all the way to Java? isCOBOL compiles COBOL code into Java. In the late 1990s, a time of great optimism for Java, the 3000 community not only had an interest in the language, but third party did its best to make the technology transfer a reality. Chuck Townsend of Synkronix pushed the Java stone up the 3000 hill, but not even his IBM experience could give PERCobol a place to rest in 3000 shops. And that product understood COBOL II's extensions, according to Townsend.

Alfredo Iglesias of Veryant would love to work with a 3000 site on that kind of adoption. Veryant's isCOBOL came to our attention when Speedware's Nick Fortin pointed it out after our article about the two migration COBOL choices. With isCOBOL there may be three, and Transoft has certified its Transoft U/SQL Adapters for use with the isCOBOL Application Platform Suite.

You'd be among the very first to choose this isCOBOL for a 3000 project. "We do not have any customers yet that have used isCOBOL to replace HP COBOL II," Iglesias said. "We would be glad to work with any interested in the future." Migration can offer such groundbreaking opportunity. Java may be worth the experimentation, considering those millions of adopters out there.

Iglesias admits that the COBOL II specialties will demand some replacement. "I must bring to your attention that isCOBOL does not offer any compatibility to the HP 3000 extensions to the COBOL standard found in HP COBOL II. That means that they will have to be removed by the customer or a migration company in order for the code to compile and execute with isCOBOL."

isCOBOL was also on the radar screen of our author of the "Deciding Between COBOLs for Migration" article. Mike Howard mentioned it in passing at first, calling it no major player. It seems the adoption rate to date in the 3000 world confirms his view. Howard has his own assessment of isCOBOL's utility as well.

It is a COBOL that has no COBOL compiler. And yet the development process is to

1. Write the COBOL source code
2. Compile it to produce an object
3. Run the compiled object

And this is what the developer sees when he programs in isCOBOL. But in fact, the compile step actually has two steps in it. 1. Convert the COBOL source to Java source; 2. Compile the Java source.

So the actual process is

1. Code the program in COBOL
2. Convert the COBOL source to Java source
3. Compile the Java source
4. Run the Java object code

This process clearly demonstrates one additional item: how accurately COBOL can be converted to Java. For this process to work, the converter must be 100 percent at all times.

You can actually stop the "compiler" after the COBOL to Java conversion step and get the converted Java code. Unfortunately, it isn't much use, because the conversion was simply done for the Java compilation to take place — and the actual Java code is horrible. A better application code converter would be written to convert the COBOL to Java to produce code so that is good, maintainable Java.

Twitter makes both of these features possible. The moment a blog article is posted, Twitter notifies you if you're following @3000newswire on the service. Even if you don't participate in Twitter, the note appears in our Twitter section of this page -- right-hand column, just under the Transoft ad.

That's also the spot where our mini-updates appear, as well as in your Twitter feed if you follow us. (Do you see a pattern here? We like Twitter because tweet have to be short: 140 characters or less. For an old print headline writer like me, it's a fun challenge.) We're working on one or two Twitter extras during the workdays, sometimes with a link. We'll do Outtakes, since most stories have more material than we can use. We don't want to wear out our welcome. Readers have things to do in addition to keeping up with what's new or helpful.

You can also get our reports sent to you via other services. Twitter is hot now. But there's other technology to keep our news on your plate.

Some of our audience uses newsreader software to take our daily feeds. This is powered by the RSS standard. Bruce Hobbs, a veteran 3000 developer, swears by Google Reader. There are others, some tied to mail services like Yahoo, others standalone programs. Newsreaders give you a timeline of articles, just like our blog does. You control what you see, although the helpful Twitter links won't be on a newsreader feed.

How to newsread? Right-hand column again, just above the Community Comments. "Subscribe to this blog's feed." One click and you're on the way to having the 3000 NewsWire appear in your reader.

Several years ago, we invited readers to send a request to have us e-mail a "Blog Me" update when articles appeared. Twitter gives us a foolproof way to avoid the spam boxes with your requests. Weekly or so, we will remind you of the articles, via e-mail. But the best way to stay up to the minute, and keep up with updated tweets, is through Twitter or on this page.

We return you now to our regular coverage, in this main column, on individual category or article pages -- or over on the Twitter feed at right. Follow us.

But that timeline hasn't dislodged applications from many 3000 customer workflows. So some of the same companies who offer migration engagements will also manage your 3000 apps. Speedware is discounting those services for customers who sign on until the end of 2009. Its marketing manager Chris Koppe said that HP's "end of life" label for 2010 doesn't match up to everything he sees.

2010 = End of Life is valid at some larger sites, but smaller ones will rely on 3000 apps for awhile. End of life "has a different meaning for different people," he said. "While the smaller shops have applications on the side, like mail servers, their core businesses are running on the HP 3000."

And so, Speedware (like a few other providers) sees 3000 app management as an important service to the customer. For a limited time it's waiving fees for "application support set-up and knowledge transfer" services to attract this homesteading business, designed to match the lifespan that a customer sees for its 3000s.

Koppe said that Speedware has started to push application support for 3000s, extra effort to win customers with a service Speedware has offered for more than a year. Customers who asked the vendor got app support up to this summer, but Speedware wants to connect with more of these sites.

He believes his company has the largest number of 3000 software programmers employed or on contract "that know 3000s inside and out and can handle any kind of environment."  Koppe mentioned MB Foster as another source; the Support Group inc specializes in ERP application support, especially MANMAN.

Koppe reasons that because his company's programmers have been busy with migration details, moving applications had made them experts in the 3000's languages. "For those customers that are not going to be migrating right away, a lot of them may need to deal with issues like lack of programming staff -- human resource backup options."

These kinds of potential customers for app support have no 3000 programmers anymore, or can't answer questions about how much 3000 code they have. "How are they maintaining this code," he wonders. "It just runs in the background." MB Foster's Birket Foster agreed about the focus on apps for the community. "It's all about the applications," he said at the recent e3000 Community Meet. Both men invoked the "what about winning the lottery" question, where a 3000 customer's only expert hits the jackpot and curtails an IT career, suddenly.

Speedware will let you pay their experts to maintain application code, batch processing, enhancements, help desk, vendor management, online processing. "It's not hardware support, and it's not operating system support," he explained. Speedware can refer this administration support for hardware and OS to another supplier, and then offer a full package for a company that wants to keep its 3000 apps without any 3000 staff.

Co-location, or offsite system hosting, gets referred by Speedware to the Support Group if a customer needs that level of support. The talent and resources are out there in the community, Koppe said. The app support offers the same benefits as you'd seek from any homestead support provider -- safeguarding IT systems and possibly reducing costs.

HMS Host was listed as a 3000 customer on the OpenMPE online roster, compiled several years ago. The company is exiting the 3000 user community as quickly as it can, but customized applications like the duty-free app keep HMS in the fold for now, probably into 2010.

"There's still value in the business logic," said Edminster, who's studied the application with its creator since the middle '90s. He thinks the retail app is so sound that it could be used in a small chain of department stores.

Whatever the future value of the duty-free app at the HMS-run airport shops, the program is getting the job done there. HP continues to service this customer with support, but Edminster is the key link to keeping the shops online. This relationship defines one share of the 3000 community: stable apps maintained by third parties with no products or support to track for anybody who's counting the 3000 populace.

A customer in this category -- which I would call an interim homesteader -- often has a project in play to make its exit, even if the timeline is fuzzy. At HMS the company has moved much of its operations onto SAP, Edminster reports. In-house resources do this migration work. What's more, at HMS the company has a fall-back plan if the 3000 apps cannot be folded in the massive SAP solution suite.

These four HP 3000s -- three 9x8s and one A-Class server -- could be taken offline and out of HMS if 1. The company gets out of the duty-free shop business altogether, or 2. HMS hands off its duty-free to the Portugal-based sister company that manages other duty-free with a PC-based server configuration.

Remote apps that serve US airports starts to creep into cloud computing, with a resource attached via networks and tapped by users via PCs in the shops. The sticking point is the networking into and out of major US airports, those built before the 1990s. "It's flaky at best," Edminster says of the airport network service. 

Don't all of you go applying at once now. Even though we're told the pool of 3000 IT pros is shrinking, we hear of many 3000 veterans who are at liberty, too.

What's in Orlando? The job listing is pretty detailed. It reports that ARGI, a subscription management and fulfillment application/outsourced service, leads the list:

This position will administer all aspects of HP 3000 minicomputers including the hardware and operating system. Applications include: ARGI subscription fulfillment, Maestro, 3000 Security, and Omnidex. Must be experienced in COBOL programming. Additional skills in Microsoft server, IIS and PC setup / support. Duties include developing and maintaining COBOL programs, develop and maintain visual basic programs, installing software patches & upgrades, maintaining nightly backups, and supporting PCs.

That's right, you read correctly: This job includes development in COBOL on a 3000, in the year 2009.

We'll have more to share about this kind of 3000 next week, but the label for this installation is often "Longtime Success Needs New Steward." Without getting too speculative, Time-Warner once operated its subscription and premium fulfillment services for its publications in the Central Florida area. That's precisely the level of company that's got intentions to leave the platform, but cannot find a replacement solution that fits as well as its 20-year-tested business logic in COBOL.

These kinds of sites and customers represent opportunity for the marketplace in general. If you cannot find a qualified person who can take a 6-month contract to administer, you might move the app to an outsourced hosting provider. If the app looks creaky but runs fast, you could modernize without leaving MPE/iX. As we heard today from a consultant and app support expert, "there many miles to go before all these 3000s go to sleep." In the meantime, some need a watchful eye.

In Orlando they need "excellent COBOL programming skills and above average Visual Basic programming skills." If you've acquired both those skills and have a yen to live near Disney World, get in touch.

This might come as heresy to the 3000 advocates who lobbied HP long and hard for a shot at 64-bit processing, the Valhalla of the journey via Itanium. But look at what HP-UX customers got for their waiting -- including the 3000 sites that migrated sooner than later -- and you can wonder if the delays were worth it. The 3000, and MPE/iX apps, are now more likely to find a future on an mainstream Intel chip.

This matters now, in the gray time of HP's Unix system migration. PA-RISC is old tech, but it's running a large share of the migrated 3000 sites. The Itanium failure to dominate relegated HP-UX to a niche market, a place HP couldn't imagine setting up shop. The 3000 was supposed to be the small market, even if HP didn't say so while Itanium was so new it was called Merced.

Since Hewlett-Packard plowed its engineering into Itanium, HP's Unix customers cannot host their applications on a standard computer, something HP sells very well (think ProLiants, and Linux or Windows). These Industry Standard Servers, as HP calls them, are so strong that HP is thinking of folding its printer business into a combined PC-printer organization. This would offer little help to HP-UX customers. The merger is supposed to jump-start HP's printer sales.

Back in the 90s, HP trumpeted vast plans for the chip that now represents the Only Home for HP's Unix. Then the market had its say. One PC columnist, whose last name is the same as a failed keyboard layout, asserts that Itanium hobbled more than HP-UX options, since it failed to live up to its promise. John Dvorak says the chip killed the computer industry.

Now Dvorak has been a splashy computer writer for a long time, which can boost a fella's readership nicely. (It helps to be published by PC Magazine, which recently dropped printing altogether to retreat to the Web.) Dvorak told his version of Itanium history this year as a cautionary tale. He reminded us that promises of world domination by any technology should be viewed as fables until the future arrives.

His column does a good job of summarizing the hubris of Itanium, nee-Merced-nee-Tahoe, a flight plan HP cooked up in its top-notch Labs but had to take on Intel as a co-pilot in order to fly. The flight of Itanium was as anticipated as any Spruce Goose test run. HP told all of its customers to expect all other chip architectures to evaporate. Who could take on the industry clout of Intel and the brainpower of HP's Very Long Instruction Word designs? And so by degrees we lost the Alpha, the SPARC, and more. Computers made by Dell, IBM and Sun would be powered with chips created by HP and Intel.

I've covered Itanium since these two companies were calling their joint project Tahoe in 1994, then naming the chip architecture Merced in '95. By '96, the 3000 community was eager to learn what Hewlett-Packard would decide about including the HP 3000 in the world domination party. Early in '97, the 3000 customers were told, in a special TV teleconference, that they weren't invited to the 64-bit party.

PA-RISC, said HP in 1997, provided plenty of processor for the 3000s future. As it turned out, HP sold PA-RISC to all of its MPE and Unix customers for another 6-11 years. We wrote in 1997:

[HP] indicates a long lifespan for the 64-bit processor that now powers the 3000. Remember, Merced still isn't a tested solution anywhere, and few expect it to be available before 1999 in HP's processors. What's more, HP still hasn't shipped PA-8200 chips in either HP 9000 or HP 3000 systems. There's a lot of PA-RISC lifetime still left to live.

Only in 2007 did the number of HP-UX servers sold for Itanium/Integrity pass the sales of PA-RISC computers. HP stopped selling PA-RISC last year, 14 years after it crowed about Itanium ruling the marketplace.

Dvorak says that the high-water mark of the computer industry was 2000, and he adds that Itanium pulled the business into the basement in the years since then. It doesn't look like he's accounting for the Y2K swell that put your community at its crest. But he's right about one thing: The chip that hosts the future of HP-UX, the one that will give those users processor headroom for years to come, never came close to the $38 billion it was supposed to earn way back in 2001.

HP and Intel were late, over and over, in delivering something to beat PA-RISC. Hewlett-Packard was hoping for a repeat of the miracle of MPE. HP rolled out PA-RISC in 1987 and the 3000 apps written for 16-bit CISC processors ran in Emulation Mode on the new chips. That's why an emulator for the 3000 hardware will have traction and generate sales for a company that makes it available. Emulators have a good track record with 3000 enterprise customers.

What better not happen: A series of big promises and Itanium-like delays for these hardware emulators. That's why nobody, not Stromasys or Strobe Data or anybody, is promising when the emulator solution will be ready. It's worse to miss a milestone than to release no schedule. People budget for products months and years in advance. Changing your mind is often expensive, and IT expenses remain on many chopping blocks.

Itanium has carved a niche for some apps, so it's not an utter failure. It provides the fastest engine for HP-UX, although there's no chip even racing in second place. No amount of cheery industry measurements can pull the only current HP-UX processor into the mainstream market. Such a market is important to a future without costly changes. HP 3000 owners have learned that business practice from Hewlett-Packard. Sales and market share make at difference at HP. Perhaps any project to emulate PA-RISC on industry standard Intel chips will have an even bigger set of customers: HP-UX sites looking for a longer future for their PA-RISC investments.

The size of the known 3000 universe is as tough to track as any other kind of expanding entity. By expanding, I mean accelerating away from HP. Everyone who's remaining on the system is moving away from the vendor in relationship to their 3000 use. These customers have been in free flight, out of formation and out of contact for many years now. HP never knew for sure how many 3000s were running, by its own admission. The vendor's estimates drifter further afield with every year that it relied on resellers, then didn't close the loop on support contract renewals. About the only thing HP can report on these days is the relative silence compared to years ago.

So when we heard today from Dave Wiseman, who helped bring ScreenJet into the 3000 world late in the 1990s, about a few 3000s he encountered in-flight, we wondered: Are a pair of US airports, both using 3000 systems in duty-free shops, on anyone's radar who's tracking the size of the universe?

Wiseman, who's working these days for computer fraud prevention company iovation.com, checked in after he checked out of the duty-free shops in the airports.

I was in Minneapolis Airport on Sunday and went to the duty free. When I checked out they were using an HP 3000 green screen system! Apparently it’s still in use in Minneapolis and [Seattle's] Sea-Tac.

In this era of transition, the size of the known universe becomes important for both owners and vendors in the community. The former, they want to know how many people are left manning the oars. Too few (by whatever measure) could mean a loss of knowledge and hardware resources that could jeopardize the system's reliability.

For the vendors, the numbers are more crucial. They help determine how much resource to supply to the market. If the amount of water in the pond can't float the development and support boats, a vendor has to launch a smaller vessel, or put their 3000 business into dry dock. So people ask about this number, just as they have ever since the NewsWire first went into print 14 years ago.

The 1,000 Customers number is the lowest we've heard shared with the 3000 community, but every universe needs to have boundaries both low and high. We'd love to hear from a vendor or supplier who knew about the 3000s in those airports' Duty Free shops. The fact that these systems are tallying sales sparks two thoughts. First, how many more might be out of the main flight path? Second, we wonder who might compile a continuing list of customers -- other than ours. Let us hear from you about any free flying systems you encounter.

The OpenMPE advocacy group is looking for investors. This all-volunteer, not-for-profit organization has passed HP's examination for a source code license. Now it needs money to pay for this license, along with some administration funding to make the knowledge available to its members and its virtual lab.

Above, the group's director Matt Perdue explains the situation in a video of two minutes, recorded at last month's e3000 Community Meet. He's assisted at one point by OpenMPE chair Birket Foster (pan to the right), who explains some circumstances under which HP could terminate these licenses.

A terminated MPE/iX license hasn't ever happened to customers, because they weren't using source code. But the read-only MPE/iX source is for development of patches to the 3000. This is new territory here. No third party has ever asked a constituency in public for funding to open a lab. This is the new turf of volunteer, advocate-based development. OpenMPE at least wants to assemble an independent organization more extensive than a Web-based code forge, the vehicle most open source communities use.

But because HP's license prevents anyone from discussing the terms in public, the source license doesn't have the ironclad, tangible rules and policies you'd expect for an investment in a product.

Neither Perdue or Foster was permitted to state all the reasons that HP could terminate the source license. (It's part of the license terms that none of this gets broadcasted.) Why would a license termination matter? It appears to be part of a guarantee of future support -- something not many software companies will ever offer. The group intends to establish a development lab for patches, then support its work, for a membership fee. If HP revokes the source code license, then using that source for patch support violates the contract terms. We think. Nobody could say for sure.

HP did put an extra requirement into the OpenMPE source license, Foster said. "Certain board members are key to allowing this [licensing] to flow," he said. "They want us to do our own succession planning, so [HP] is good with whoever's there." He added that HP didn't restrict OpenMPE as a licensee in the event the group's board all retired from service. "The next group would be able to take [the license] over." We didn't hear details about HP's permissions to review OpenMPE board changes. Since the licenses are a confidential matter, there's no way to compare terms of any other licensees. So far, no one else has announced they hold an MPE/iX source license.

Perdue said that "there would have to be a specific reason for HP to change its mind" about revoking OpenMPE's license. One reason Perdue did say out loud: A departure of "key people" from the volunteer board.

There's already $1,000 in the license fund as a result of the community meeting. Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies, which is preparing an open source MPE/iX Web site, chipped in the startup money right after the Community Meet of Sept. 23. If your company (or you as an individual) want to invest in the OpenMPE license, the group offers the following deposit point to send your checks (made out to OpenMPE):

OpenMPE, Inc.
c/o Matt Perdue, Treasurer
PO Box 460091
San Antonio, TX 78246-0091

The aircraft manufacturer is making efforts to leave the platform as soon as possible, but the timing of its migration isn't tied to any HP support schedule. Long-time NewsWire reader Ray Legault from Boeing checked in last week and reports that some key applications may take awhile to move. Third party support and outsourced services are in place to let Boeing's application owners work at their own migration schedule.

"There are just some Finance, QA and Manufacturing apps that are left," said the Boeing systems integrator. "They want the platform to disappear ASAP. It may take a while to migrate."

If finance, quality assurance and manufacturing sound like mission-critical apps, that might be mitigated by the app's reach into the Boeing operations. The company generated $60 billion in sales last year. It's long-anticipated Dreamliner 787 is scheduled to arrive in the market just as HP ends its 3000 support.

In Boeing IT, the group which owns the application establishes its migration plan. The plans which are in place vary in approach and schedule.

"They let each business system owner and a architecture board decide where each app will migrate to," Legault said. "An off-the-shelf [replacement] is the main thought, even if it has reduced functionality. One app does not have any off-the-shelf options, so they are re-writing it into Oracle/Unix, slowly."

Eloquence database creator Michael Marxmeier gives a presentation at the recent e3000 Community Meet in this video, shot handheld from the front row of the SF Airport Hyatt hotel meeting room. Presenters had to limit talks to 15 minutes or less; most were even briefer. We grabbed a minute of his talk for the camera.

Marxmeier's slides are not yet part of the Meet's archive page we reported on earlier today. In this video he has a slide up which describes the following overall technology enhancements for the latest release of Eloquence 8:

• Implements new thread model for Eloquence database server (improving on the default HP-UX threading)
• Provides base for future enhancements
• Aligns Eloquence technology to newer hardware and OS capabilities including multiple CPU cores, CPU core speed increases made more moderate, and larger memory sizes.

Functional enhancements for the latest release include

• Scalability
• Database replication
• Point-in-time recovery / incremental recovery
• Monitoring improvements
• Programmatic access to achived database transactions
• query3k and utility program improvements

The six sets of PowerPoint slides can be downloaded from www.hpmigrations.com/sfevent

The slide sets include Koppe's own, which detail the efforts the user group is making for the 3000 community, as well as a Speedware update on migration and homesteading issues. Speedware offers a service to manage 3000 applications for customers who are homesteading, as well as its migration tools and services.

Other slide sets online today are from Transoft, presenting migration and application upgrade information; an update from ScreenJet's Alan Yeo about its modernization tools; David Floyd of the Support Group, explaining sustainability options and services; and OpenMPE secretary Donna Hofmeister, presenting details on the group's campaign to fund an MPE/iX source license (as well as services coming online soon.)

We have video and audio from these talks we're working to edit and post here in the days to come.

The NewsWire's pages, both printed and those we flung onto the fledgling World Wide Web, had to prove the concept of a 3000-only publication. We promoted the platform by highlighting the changes to its solutions. HP was already calling the HP 3000 a "legacy" system during 1995, even while people in the 3000 division worked to bring the platform up to date.

In October of 1995, HP was just starting to embrace the idea of serving small customers with the 3000's fastest technology. We called the Series 9x9 servers Kittyhawks in our Page One article, using HP's code name. (Click on the image above to read that front page.) System configurations were a major part of a 3000 customer's duty in that day, so we reported HP was finally adding an 8-user MPE/iX license to the entry model of the 9x9 line. HP said you could get the latest generation 3000 at under $50,000, we reported with an asterisk,"before disks, console and networking cards are added." Most customers needed to add one or more of these elements, but HP was still trying to improve the image of the 3000's value.

Another kind of image was important in that first issue, the 3000 database of the same name. We launched our first at-deadline issue of the FlashPaper with a report on the new leader of the IMAGE/SQL lab, Tien-You Chen. The vendor community was pleased with the move, since it looked like the database group was getting a leader devoted to results rather than policy.

Chen has a can-do style. In a meeting with several partners over TurboStore integration, someone in the meeting suggested that “an HP file system engineer would really help us here.” Chen excused himself, got up and came back with the engineer.

Of course, much of what seemed novel and important 14 years ago has aged into history. We looked over the first issue's story lineup to see that top HP executives (like CEO Lew Platt) were still praising the platform in public, when pressed. HP could show a wrinkled side of its image to the 3000 faithful, too: 3000 division executives made a show of taking off their jackets en masse at an Interex conference roundtable. Although roundtables and HP executive comments on the 3000 have evaporated, our first issue carried news that resonates in today's community. A powerful object-oriented compiler was being launched, C++, "which promised better products sooner" for the 3000. It remains a key tool to keep the 3000's future smooth, no matter how long you've decided to remain on the computer's path.

HP once operated a repository for the 3000 version of GNU C++ source, hosted on the Invent3k public development server. But when HP closed down Invent3k almost a year ago, the compiler had to find a public home. OpenMPE will include the compiler on its invent3k.openmpe.org resource, opening later this month.

This open source tool will be needed to keep the more modern ports to the 3000 up to date in years to come. It's so essential, said our columnist John Burke, that

Without Mark Klein’s initial porting of and continued attention to the GNU C++ compiler and utilities on the HP 3000, there would be no Apache/iX, syslog/iX, sendmail/iX, bind/iX, etc. from Mark Bixby, and no Samba/iX from Lars Appel. And the HP 3000 would still be trying to hang on for dear life, rather than being a player in the new e-commerce arena.

And our first issue covered a new HP initiative to spark integration in the manufacturing sector, carried out by six North American partners.

The integrators will offer customers one of three strategies to assist them in examining their information infrastructure, with the goal of implementing Customer Oriented Manufacturing Management (COMMS systems):
    1. To retain systems while expanding use of software features and increasing processing power using strategies such as COMMS;
    2. To supplement systems such as MRP II with more comprehensive software on current computer platforms or additional environments; or
    3. To migrate manufacturing systems to newer “Choices Approved” software solutions such as Ross Systems' Renaissance CS or  Spectrum's PointMan.

So even while the first NewsWire was hitting the mailboxes of October, 1995, this newsletter was acknowledging that migration was one choice in moving ahead. Something else hasn't changed since that month. One of those six partners remains vital in the 3000 community: the Support Group, inc.

Like a lot of your world, tSGi is concerned with continuity. Today the company's president David Floyd, son of the founder Terry Floyd, celebrates his birthday while tSGi leads customers into both homestead and migration futures. We're happy to share a birthday with him, while we work toward "many happy returns of the day." Thank you for reading us for 14 years, and for the support of our partners and sponsors into another generation, starting with today.

    Lalley has been active in the HP 3000 community for over 25 years, and he's worked on every model of the HP 3000 from the Series III to the largest N-Class servers. For more than a decade he was the senior technical support manager at Stone Container in Chicago, managing 60 HP 3000s around the country. When not busy reading memory dumps, he is busy chauffeuring his five children, who are not socially-deprived homeschoolers.

    Lalley also consults on performance enhancement for business systems that go beyond 3000 installations. He's managed migrations as an outsourced resource and even maintains a replacement system for a company that hired him to help move off its HP 3000.

    In his work as a veteran who both expands and replaces 3000s, Lalley sees the full scope of the transition choices your community faces today. We asked him to talk about the technology to extend homesteading as well as the realities of moving away from the 3000. We traded email for our interview in August, just after his return from a cross-country family vacation, during the week of the Twitter and Facebook outages.

What technology offers the biggest opportunity to improve the performance and value of an HP 3000 today?

    For those considering homesteading on an HP 3000, the single best way to increase performance and reliability is to add a high-speed RAID array. The VA7410 will allow 2*2Gb per second fibre connections. The VA is rated at 45,000 IOs per second, which is well above the limits of an N-Class 750 4-way system.

    Another option, given that a discontinued HP 3000 is relatively inexpensive, is to buy a second HP 3000 for reporting reasons. A second HP 3000 would make it possible to offload the reporting aspects of the system, thus reducing the load on the primary computer. Of course, the costs of licensing the software may make this option unavailable. A second 3000 could also be used for parts.

Are the 3000s built with PCI peripheral architecture capable of using more modern disk and backup storage? How do they compare?

    Yes, the A-Class and N-Class products using the PCI bus are capable of 2Gb per second fiber connections. Compared the 2Gb/sec to the sustained throughput of 20Mb/sec on the NIO bus (9x9, 9x8 and 9x7 systems), the performance improvement is drastic.

How does the mix of 3000 and non-3000 consulting work shake out for you this year? Are there clients who engage you for both?

    Clearly the HP 3000 user base is disintegrating. At the same time, there are quite a few companies that have not even started a migration.

    I believe the main reason for the lack of those migrations is that there is no business requirement to migrate off the HP 3000. The second reason would be the economy. Most companies don't feel comfortable with the capital requirements for a migration at this time.

What is keeping the remaining companies from migrating off the system? Is it a roadblock that can be lifted with know-how?

    I think which the faith in the economy is at an all time low, the costs for a migration are quite high. The tools to migrate off the HP 3000 are quite good, and there are several options available. I believe cost is probably the deciding factor.

Do you see a useful future for the 3000s out there more than three years from now?

    I am old enough to remember the pending “Death of Mainframes.” I believe the death of the HP 3000 has been greatly exaggerated.

    The HP 3000 is a powerful machine for its time, and its maintenance cost is an order of magnitude less the other products. A well-configured Linux box could probably give the HP 3000 a good run for the money.

What's the oldest HP 3000 you know of that's still in production use? What's the risk that a customer runs by identifying themselves as users of older hardware?

    I know of a couple 918s and a 937 that are in production. I think the biggest risk is the availability of parts. FW-SCSI hard drives are going to be hard to find.

What are the top skills you've learned outside of 3000 techniques that pay off best for you? What have you added that's enhanced the value of your career investments?

    I can think of two skills that have really helped me. First, my understanding of requirements for storage, which are growing at exponential rates. My experience with HP VAs (Virtual Arrays), along with HP's XP enterprise storage solution, can be reused in all data processing shops, regardless of OS.

    I think the second skill set is to be able to communicate with the customers in their language  Most customers don't really care about memory, MHz and IO throughput. Customers care about orders processed, credit card throughput and management barometers.

By Mike Howard

When HP announced it was discontinuing the HP 3000, there were four main Windows COBOLs: RM COBOL, ACUCOBOL, Micro Focus COBOL and Fujitsu COBOL.

But in May 2007, Micro Focus acquired ACUCOBOL when they bought Acucorp. Shortly after they also acquired RM COBOL when they bought Liant. ACUCOBOL is very similar to RM COBOL but has more features and functions. Micro Focus immediately incorporated the RM COBOL product into ACUCOBOL and stopped selling RM COBOL. Micro Focus is now incorporating ACUCOBOL into the Micro Focus COBOL product.

So today, for new Windows COBOL customers there are two COBOLs -- Micro Focus and Fujitsu. In summary, Micro Focus is an all-embracing, all-platform COBOL with excellent support, but it is expensive. Fujitsu is a Windows product with limited support but an extremely attractive price. We have found that both products are very stable and very fast in production. Both charge the same for support, 20 percent per year. The differences lie in cost of ownership vs. response time of support.

In a unique beginning, the master of ceremonies Alan Yeo invited everyone present at the start of the day to introduce themselves. We got almost everybody on our hand-held video camera to record the players who were taking the stage. We're introducing this video resource via a fresh 3000 NewsWire channel on YouTube, the world's steaming pile of entertainment, advertising, comedy, and frothing dissent. Of those four, only good humor was on tap in the e3000 meeting room. (There was dissent, but of the kind that doesn't end discussions or ruin chances to partner.)

Brian Duncombe started off the introductions, traveling out of his retirement to attend after he created performance and clustering software in the 1980s and '90s. Consultant Bruce Hobbs in his trademark beard was also on the front row, along with consultant Jim Snider. Then we caught up again with Michael Watson's introduction. Watson reported he's still developing in COBOL, as were several others on that front row.

HP was present in the back of the room, as support engineer Cathlene McRae attests at the end of the intros. After lunch, HP's Alvina Nishimoto sat in the back and offered some insights during a roundtable session of more than an hour. James Hofmeister, working in support of Linux customers for HP, was also on hand.

Some people in the community hope this Meet might gather as many users than vendors. At this stage of the 3000's legend, those are the same attendees. Putting people together in a room all day sparks plans and renews trust. As the evening winked out, a sketch was emerging for 2010 Meet that focuses on training.

Social Network Harm and Help: Advice & Wisecracks

Do you tweet? (All feathered creatures need not try to answer in English). Or share your life on Facebook? Or Digg your Web discoveries, or pile them up in a Delicious box? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

If not, you're in a big group. Maybe not the 70 million people rumored to be using one of these social networks. There's so many more, like the unique one that user group Connect operates, or the public Linked In site. Or Plaxo. Or something new, Cummerbund. (Sorry, just making that last one up.)

That fact about Cummerbund shows a little of the harm in this powerful new tool. You can make something up, and if it's not easily checked in a Google probe, it can get traction. The shorter the report, the easier it becomes to disguise or mistake. Take this tweet from Twitter, posted by @AngelaAtHP:

I witnessed a woman squeal and clap when she test-drove this new HP web-enabled printer at D23

This “tweet” on Twitter then included a link to a Web site. If you noticed Angela's Twitter name, you wouldn't be surprised where her link took you:

Meanwhile, an N-Class server donated by Matt Perdue will host the Jazz contents from OpenMPE. Hofmeister outlined the work still to be completed.

"Just like Speedware did, we have to de-HP-ize all the HTML pages," she said. Webmaster Paul Raulerson is currently working on that.  So that's why it will take a bit longer before OpenMPE's Jazz is available." Client Systems brought out its version of Jazz this spring, while Speedware's made its debut this month.

The HP 3000 manuals are among the first wave of documents to move off the old Web address, according to an HP notice.

The migration is being conducted in stages over the next year and the MPE/iX content has been migrated as part of the first phase. You will see a  redirection link under the MPE/iX section of the docs.hp.com homepage. It will take you to the landing page for the MPE/iX docs on the Business Support Center.

If you're plugging in a revised Web address for docs.hp.com for the 3000, it's www.hp.com/go/e3000-docs

HP has reorganized and standardized the presentation of the manuals for the 6.x and 7.x versions of the 3000's software and subsystems. The documentation is now available only in PDF documents; HTML versions existed on the HP site in the past.

McRae pointed to an HP document that explains, "To achieve a look and feel similar to docs.hp.com, all the manuals will be organized by categories within each group and in alphabetical order." Documentation for HP Linux systems, OpenVMS, and Tru64 Unix has also been moved in the first phase.

The 3000's documentation has been licensed to Client Systems and Speedware for re-hosting, but Speedware's Chris Koppe said during the Community Meet that HP won't permit these partners to host the manuals until HP clears the material from embargo. HP confirmed at the meeting that it will host the documentation through 2015. HP recommends that customers download patches and documents from the HP site for themselves before Dec. 31 of that year.

McRae also posted links to other HP documents which answer some questions posed during the Community Meet:

• An October 2008 communique on post 2010 beta test patch and manual availability, Invent3k plans and Right to Use license policies.
• The final January 2009 communique covering source code license initiatives, emulator availability and guidelines on receiving MPE/iX and subsystem media.
• The one-page FAQ from January 2009 about HP's 3000 "platform emulator" licensing policies.

Perdue said at yesterday's e3000 Community Meet that the two services are available with a free account and now reside behind a firewall. OpenMPE will be the first organization to host the public access development services of Invent3k, a 3000 HP once operated for developers to test and create MPE/iX software. OpenMPE director Donna Hofmeister said that invent3k.openmpe.org will include the GNU development environment used to port open source software to MPE/iX.

Developers can request their free log-on account for Invent3k by e-mailing Hofmeister at donna@allegro.com

The resources the community is migrating from HP's Jazz Web server are still in a growth mode, Hofmeister added, just like those already online at Speedware. HP's licensing agreement restricted its software exchange to only the HP-created freeware off of Jazz, so freeware from third parties is being pursued for inclusion at the Jazz rehosting sites.

The relicensing partners such as Speedware and OpenMPE have made the third party programs available through links to authors' sites such as the one Lars Appel maintains for Samba. Other third party freeware still coming online include ports from Mark Bixby, the C++ tools ported by Mark Klein and other contributions. "We're in the process of getting permission from these people to put their software on the OpenMPE site," Hofmeister said during an update at the meeting.

OpenMPE also made an opening bid for a role as repository for the MPE/iX read-only source code which HP has been licensing this year. The vendor announced a license program for the 3000's source in February, but little else can be discussed by organizations and companies applying for or receiving a license. HP will not announce who the license holders are, but said this spring that it would consider ways that licensees can inform customers about receiving a source code license.

OpenMPE wants to act as a repository for the code, although other companies have also applied for licenses. The source licensing process is a black box, with all terms, lists of applicants and status of applications shielded under HP's Confidential Disclosure Agreement.

According to HP's CDA, OpenMPE can't even reveal the cost of the source code license. Perdue said at the meeting that purchasing the MPE license, "plus some start up cash to manage it" will require $25,000. The group has its license application ready to file for the source, but it needs a check for HP, and so kicked off a fundraising effort. One attendee, Applied Technologies' Brian Edminster, was ready to write a $1,000 check to spark the drive for the OpenMPE license.

Some community members who can't be in the room at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt wish for a live streaming feed, or some kind of a Webcast hookup. That's not going to happen today, but there's hope for future meetings. For today, Twitter might provide the best real-time blurbs. You can follow what's happening through the NewsWire's Twitter feed. Go to twitter.com, and just "follow" our account, 3000newswire.

Those tweets, as the Twitter messages are known, will be brief. (Despite what my writing might suggest, I know brief, since tweeting requires the same kind of skill I've employed in writing headlines for the last 30 years.) I enjoy the challenge of saying something meaningful in 140 characters or less per Twitter message. For a community that knows how to stay within the bounds of 132-column screens, Twitter will have a familiar feel. You can tweet back, too. If you're versed in Twitter's "hashtags" (think of them as database keys), I'll be using #3kmeet for today.

There will be more, as battery life, memory cards and concentration provide. We'll have recordings (podcasts on this site), video (on YouTube) and photos to share, some more real-time than others. If you don't Twitter, consider signing on today (it's free) and following the feed. It takes an real-life event to spark a stream of tweets. We're glad to have an audience.

There's also time to participate if you're within a short drive of the hotel in Burlingame. In person, as we all know, is the richest experience.

One notable addition to the 3000 Web resource family is this Third Party Utilities section at the Speedware site. Speedware's Nicolas Fortin explained these are links or files that were once located on HP's Jazz site but not provided to licensees by HP. This software includes shareware files created by Mark Bixby and Lars Appel, the two most prolific authors of open source, shareware utilities for the 3000. Speedware pursued the programs from these developers, linking to Appel's software and hosting the Bixby programs.

Fortin said that hosting these programs, along with what he calls the largest set of white papers for 3000s, requires more than hosting and creating links. There's an ongoing stewardship required to re-host the resource which HP once maintained as Jazz.

"Sometime in the near future, we’ll add a few more files to the Third Party Utilities section from Mark Bixby," he said. "Although the Jazz content is mostly static, in reality from time to time we might find ourselves improving it based on specific user requests, if it can help the community. For example, already a user e-mailed us to report that one of the tar files in the HP Software section was corrupted (the file was given to us that way). We managed to re-create that tar file by finding the content and re-packaging it, so now it’s available."

Fortin said that both Appel and Bixby "say they were happy to see the site go live." It's important to keep the work of these two engineers in the orbit of Planet 3000, since their contributions linked the platform with modern networking and Internet services. Bixby's Apache port and Appel's Samba port probably qualify among the more important software releases for the 3000 during the late '90s.

The launch that went live last Friday is the second phase of Speedware's HP site material relocation. HP Transition courses went online at Speedware this spring, and the MPE-to-HP-UX cross-reference tools will appear next. "It took more time than we expected," Fortin said, "but we decided to spend some additional effort to provide the community with some extra value-add, in addition to the content provided to us by HP."

Jason Goertz, HP support engineer, Orbit Software developer, Chronicle columnist, consultant and HP engineer - I remember Vesoft's Eugene Volokh speaking at the Interex conference in Anaheim, a newly minted UCLA graduate at age 16. I remember going to a talk about the latest COBOL standard. I also remember going to Eugene's talk and realizing that he could barely drive but had graduated with a degree. I left HP in May and started my job at Generra Sportswear as Manager of IS. Around that time the Response Centers were going into operation. As I was leaving HP, there was talk of this, and people started to go down to California to work a shift there, and the regional PICS phone support centers like the one we had in Bellevue, Washington were being shut down.

    The Series 64/68 was out at this time, as we had one when I went to Generra in 1984. I remember a problem that we were having at this time. The microcode was loaded at boot time (unlike any other machine up to that point) into fast memory. There was a class problem with the machine that every so often, at a totally random interval, the microcode memory would glitch and bring down the system. They finally figured out that it was some sort of background cosmic radiation that interacted with the molecules of the memory, and caused effectively a parity error. HP never solved the problem, as by that time they were working on PA-RISC (which of course had no microcode) and that attrition would solve the problem.

    In February we flew to the US to attend the Anaheim HP 3000 Users Conference. This was the fourth Interex conference we had attended, with the first being in 1980. We especially remember that this was the last time we saw [SuperGroup founder] David Brown before he disappeared. He used to run a toll-free call center using HP3000s in Ogden, Utah.

Ken Sletten, SIG-IMAGE chair, developer for US Navy, OpenMPE director - I ordered one of the first HP 3000s at what is now the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division Keyport. It was a Series 42 and we thought we were really getting a powerful machine, because we ordered it with 2 MB of memory (he says sitting at his MSI laptop with 2,000 times more memory), and two of the old 404MB Model 7933 ''washing machine'' disc drives (he says as he contemplates the tiny 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro external drive for my laptop, and the mirrored 1TB drives in my new quad-core desktop that I just had custom-built for me).

     In 1984 the consolidated data systems team that I worked on for 23 years took delivery of a Series 58. That was the 3000 that was not a ''desktop'' machine, but rather literally an entire desk in itself. It was ordered with four of the then-brand-new 571MB Model 7937 discs. Since four of these didn't take up much more cubic volume than one of the old 404MB 7933s, we thought this was a big step forward.

     The above was the start of a LONG run for HP e3000s at Keyport. We ran a string of HP 3000 model computers continuously from 1982 all the way up through the early part of 2005, when our production shop data system was successfully ''migrated'' (i.e. completely re-written) off our last PA-RISC box, using C# on MS SQL Server. The 3000 gave us just a couple years short of a quarter century of service.

Mark Klein, independent developer and consultant to HP, manager of the Orbit Software lab team, OpenMPE director - I'd already started consulting full time by 1984 and I know I started writing DBCHANGE for HP around that time. I spent most of 1984 consulting to the database lab and think that was about the time that DBRECOV introduced rollback and start/stop recovery. I had a hand in both those projects based on my work for Abacus Systems doing their database recovery system called Recovery/3000.

    Vision had been canceled by then and the PA-RISC work was under way as I started working on portions of the initial TurboIMAGE CM wrapper (I think it was called something like Onion Skin at the time) around then. I do remember all the excitement in the labs in those days and looked forward to going down there to be part of it. Besides, HP still served donuts and coffee on the house each morning.

Rene Woc, co-founder (with Alfredo Rego) and CEO of Adager - It certainly was a busy and exciting year. Lots of user conferences all over the world, in addition to all the user group meetings in the US. The Anaheim keynote in February was, of course, a great beginning for the year. Alfredo gave talks in many user groups; among them were New York, Cupertino, Vancouver, Ottawa, Exeter, Paris, Innsbruck, and Johannesburg. Also, by 1984, Adager was already an HP-supported product, listed in the Corporate Price List. News of the cancellation of Vision was soon overtaken by the news of the Spectrum Project.

Dave Wilde, HP's 3000 lab manager, e3000 business manager - Having worked with the HP 3000 (and other systems) doing data entry at a department store in Chicago during my high school years in the late '70s, and having used HP calculators and some HP workstations and VLSI design software (PIGLET) at the University of Illinois, I was thrilled to have just graduated and joined HP in June, 1984. I was working at the HP Santa Clara Division on a new IC test system HP was developing. That system was later cancelled, and in 1986 I moved over to HP's ITG group to work on the databases for HP's soon-to-be released first PA-RISC systems (then called Spectrum internally). Those were indeed exciting times in Cupertino, and it was then that I was re-introduced to the HP 3000 that I had worked on during my high school years.

Terry Floyd, ASK Software account rep, independent 3000 application developer, founder of the Support Group inc MANMAN consultancy - In 1984 I felt like HP was doing great as Big Brother, the middle of the glory years. I was working for ASK in Houston and we sold a lot of HP 3000s that year. Compaq was our big account and they were demanding a lot more from MANMAN than any of our other customers. My son David and I won the egg toss at the Compaq annual picnic that year. The only Interex Conference I ever missed, since my 3000 start in 1978, was in Anaheim that year. Life was good.

Shawn Gordon, 3000 software developer, NewsWire columnist - I was 21 at the that time, just graduated from a computer trade school and got my first job on a Series 44 for four months as a temp for a woman who went on maternity leave working for the city of Santa Fe Springs. I was just doing operations and data entry and then started BASIC coding on another Series 44 for an electronics component manufacturer, but also had to do operations. It was a one-man shop. Just before the temp job I worked for Pleion in marketing and they had a Series 44 and we were one of the first Speedware clients. That's also where I first played Adventure on the HP 3000.

Bob Green, Robelle founder - In 1984 The IMAGE/3000 Handbook was published, written by myself, David Greer, Robert Green, Alfredo Rego, Fred White, and Dennis Heidner. Marguirete Russell edited another project that I was working on , so I asked her to take on the Handbook as editor. Turns out it was quite a handful for her, but we got it done in about nine months. Then I turned order fulfillment over to her, since Robelle was busy. While she wasn't really that great at selling books, the book sold itself, and since the price was $50 each and we paid for the printing, she had a nice extra income for the next few years

Tony Summers of Smith Williamson, which migrated last year, said implementing NTP on the company's 3000 was disappointing, but suspected the install wasn't done properly. NTP itself is popular among all environment managers. "Our systems team are wanting to implement NTP on our Unix systems," he reported, "but I’m asking them (for technical reasons related to our own internal applications) that they only invoke NTP synchronization on a system reboot, rather than having it run constantly."

There are some reports that NTP can help manage 3000 operations, but not hosted on a 3000. Mark Ranft of Pro 3K says a corporate NTP server is assisting HP 3000s he manages, triggering an MPE/iX client.

"Before a patch," he added, "I had seen heavily loaded systems experience time drift. This routine was a life-saver."

These NTP executables are scheduled to be part of HP shareware offerings on the Speedware Web site, as well as on the OpenMPE server. There's also a way to synchonize a 3000's clock with routines written into MPE/iX, as opposed to the open source add-on of NTP. Jeff Kell, whose expertise in networking included a stint as a Networks Special Interest Group chairman, offered this advice:

NTP may have issues as a server/daemon. If you just want to keep your 3000's clock periodically synchronized, try something like this:

> !job timesync,mgr.xntp;pri=cs
> !ntpdate "a.b.c.d w.x.y.z"
> !stream timesync.pub.xntp;in=0,12,0

Substitute your favorite time servers addresses for a.b.c.d and w.x.y.z. This is an "on-demand" synchronization every 12 hours (adjust to taste).

Security becomes essential in the cloud picture to a degree far above everyday operations. A company's sensitive and competitive data, from HR profiles to sales reports, will all pass through a network more easily exposed to breaches. A cloud computing resource needs to pass muster on elements such as datacenter door access, or security of any wireless networks at the datacenter. Donnie Poston of the Support Group inc, a vendor that's moving toward more cloud services in the 3000 community, outlined the top three elements tSGi considers important in providing cloud computing.

"The top three things that anyone has to provide are security of access, a 24x7 uptime and access to data, and adequate bandwidth," he said. If a customer is putting its critical applications into the cloud, these elements can be guaranteed with a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

SLAs with outsource agencies might be new to the 3000 customer still operating in a localized datacenter environment. Connectivity guarantees are part of remote hosting services from vendors such as DST Health Solutions. DST is a Business Process Outsourcer, the type of supplier that hosts servers and systems for clients in the healthcare industry. In 2006 DST purchased Amisys, the largest healthcare software vendor in the 3000 community.

3000 customers who face migration as an inevitability could shop patiently for cloud services and get more value than moving next year. An SLA signed in 2011 is likely to have more offered for less subscription fees than a deal during 2010. The hard deadline for HP support customers arrives on Jan. 1, 2011. The more traditional a cloud based solution's software — SAP, QAD, IFS for manufacturers, for example — the more there's to gained from waiting.

Those solutions will have to work hard to compete with open source cloud services, according to tSGi's Sue Kiesel. "If you look at open source, we already have a way of getting a low-cost entry into this environment," she said. "Open source is one of the things that's making cloud computing as viable as it is today."

The Support Group is working on a complete open source cloud computing offer, she added, including Customer Relationship Management, Demand Management, analytics to serve Business Intelligence needs, tools for Business Process Management. Desktop tools will be available that "look just like Word, and just like PowerPoint, so you can't see the difference anymore."

The tSGi team envisions specialization in sectors such as geographical location, business sector and even service to government agencies. In the US that last category got its first dedicated cloud provider from a surprising source: the government itself. Apps.gov opened for business this week to supply business apps, cloud IT services, productivity apps and social media apps to US government customers. The Federal government has a CIO in Vivek Kundra who said in a press release yesterday

Apps.gov is starting small – with the goal of rapidly scaling it up in size. Along the way, we will need to address various issues related to security, privacy, information management and procurement to expand our cloud computing services.

The program has been firmed up with updates from Transoft and OpenMPE. But aside from these presentations, there's a value in the $30 that 30-50 attendees are paying for a day with breakfast and lunch provided. If you're at the Meet, business and engagements can get green-lit.

"I just made time and registered for the HP e3000 Community Meeting," reported Ralph Berkebile of Data Management Associates today. "I look forward to the research discussions, briefings and socializing with the associates remaining in the HPe3000 community!"

Other 3000 professionals will be on hand to explore ways to work together, either offering their services or talking of engagements where they'll need help.

Long-time 3000 pro Bruce Hobbs is justifying a trip up from the LA area to do "mainly networking. I may take a run at [promoting] my interest in Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, and see if anyone needs any COBOL folks." There's a mix of classic skills and new technologies that's a good blueprint for a valuable future.

Hobbs said that he's learned personal links earn nearly all new jobs. "I came across something recently reporting that only one out of nine positions is obtained through any of the job search Web sites," he said. "Seems like the overwhelming majority of successes occur through personal contacts."

The meeting is also going to include some discussion, at the end of the day, about organizing a "Bang and Not a Whimper" event for next year when HP closes up the remains of its 3000 business. The complete schedule as of this week:

9.30    Registration     (Breakfast provided)
10.30    Welcome        (Alan Yeo)
10.40    Chris Koppe        (Speedware)
11.00    Michael Marxmeier    (Eloquence)
11.15    Donna Hofmeister    (OpenMPE)
11.30    Networking Break
12.15    Birket Foster        (MBFoster)
12.30    Alan Yeo        (ScreenJet)
12.45    Lunch
01.45    Rene Nunnington    (Transoft)
02.00    David Floyd        (The Support Group)
02.15    Ron Seybold        (3000 Newswire)
02.30    Homesteading Roundtable
03.00    Networking Break
03.45    Migration Roundtable
04.15    HP User Group    (Chris Koppe)
04.25    Closing

Even though networking is scheduled, attendees will step out of the room to connect even while presentations are on offer. Starting at 6 PM, says organizer Alan Yeo, is an "Open Invitation HP3000 Social Gathering in the bar at the Hyatt. All are welcome, and we understand that the bar does a reasonable selection of food." Some of the community is likely to show up only for the networking and gathering in the evening.

With every passing year the virtual networking tools improve. But no Twitter feed, live streaming of a panel discussion or Webcast can offer all the depth of an in-person talk with a colleague, partner or supplier. I'll have my own 15 minutes to share more about the online community offerings and how to use them more skillfully. I hope to see you in person at the year's largest 3000 event.

We talked with tSGi after we asked 3000 partners how much cloud they expected to cover the community with in the year to come. A few companies reported they'd spread a few clouds, tSGi among them. You'll want to have an extensive IT operation to count on the bottom-line greenback savings. And if you're not a Fortune 1000 company? The services will get updated on the big boys' schedule.

"They roll out the upgrades and inform you that you will be going to the new release," Kiesel said. "They'll probably schedule the upgrade based on what a customer the size of GE wants." You may be able to push back if you're of a certain size, but that size is big.

Not upgrading is a common choice, especially for the ERP customer like the ones that tSGi serves. Too much customization of an app makes a careful IT manager look hard at the work it will take to catch up to an upgraded version.

This disconnect between traditional app management and the easy promises of the cloud will keep skies pretty clear for HP 3000 sites -- even those that are migrating and can get a better match between their local hosts and the ones up in the cloud. ERP has been more fraught with customization than most other business segments.

The flip side of the cloud question is how much those SaaS clouds will save the big customers that are running the release schedule. "You won't get the cost savings at that level if you're the size of a GE," Kiesel said. "If you go into the cloud what you're usually saving are capital expenditures, which are very small."

HP counts some pretty large wins in cloud computing, organizations like the US Department of Defense. The adopters are few in number at this point. Clouds operate under subscription-based payments, and "the subscription fees are going to be way up there for a General Electric," Kiesel said. That outlay might even offset the savings of reducing local headcount in IT, which is another cloud promise.

tSGi operates another aspect of a cloud offering, managing HP 3000s installed at the firm's datacenter and operated on behalf of remote clients who connect over networks. This removes the 3000 from daily maintenance, and in the case of tSGi even gives the customer extra support for the ERP applications on the hosted systems. It can even give a company more time to complete a migration. That's important for some, now that HP's 2010 support deadline is only about 15 months away.

In a relocation of host model, a customer can benefit from access to the IT talent they can't afford to get, Kiesel said. "I can afford it as a provider because I have 100 customers," she explained. "My little 10-seat customer can't afford that talent because he's a small business."

Consolidating many small IT operations through a cloud-like service gives the planet a boost, to be sure. A massive footprint of a large IT shop is easy to target. But the combined carbon footprints of computer rooms dwarf the footprints of autos, Kiesel said.

"You might say that you have a small footprint, and what can you really save. But if you put 100 companies together, and you have a bottom line that depends on how efficient you can run your [cloud] services for them, you have a chance of minimizing the footprint for a lot of people. That's computing green."

HP and Canon have become more competitors than allies in the 25 years since that rosy honeymoon. But today HP announced it will sell Canon printers to HP enterprise customers. HP held a press conference today and issued a press release on creating the sales alliance along with a Managed Enterpise Solutions unit inside its printer/camera business group.

That IPG unit at HP looked less healthy than in prior years when the Q3 numbers for FY 2009 were reported last month. HP wants to leverage its presence inside enterprise computing to sell computers, a chestnut of a strategy. If you're an enterprise-grade customer, expect more HP offers about managing your printer needs. At the heart of the business is that so-rich ink and supplies commerce, of course.