The HP 3000 is still the core of our application. We're running on a Series 969-420 and rebooted two months ago -- we last rebooted five years ago. So far the application has been very robust, averaging production application changes weekly, allowing us to change at the speed of thought to accomodate changes in the manufacturing workplace and reductions in workforce. One of the main reasons we are still on this application and platform is that it is cost effective, solid and all development and management of the system is within the Maintenance Department.

That's the maintenance department of the Cessna Aircraft Company, the world's largest manufacturer (by aircraft sold) of general aviation airplanes. Not exactly a small enterprise, and there's clearly no software problem in Cessna's maintenance group. (Thon, by the way, is looking for fellow users of MM/3000. You can link in to him via the HP 3000 Community.)

The ease of integration which lets Cessna "change at the speed of thought" is enhanced by a third-party piece of software that improves MM/3000. Products like the eXegeSys eXegete client, a front end for the MM/3000 software, have made using 3000s to drive a big company a safe long-term investment. It's been that way for more than 30 years in your market, but there was a time when any software sold outside of HP was a budding enterprise. I located a link to illuminate this pedigree at the Adager website, where long-term 3000 resources have always had a generous harbor.

On the Adager site you can read "The Future of Third-Party Vendors In the HP3000 User Market." The paper written by Eugene Volokh of VEsoft at the end of 1983 does some in-house forecasting. Third parties are going to do well in the world of 3000 owners, Eugene figured, because the system vendor would always be missing out on improvements, innovation, or competitive pricing on software. This might seem like a no-duh theory now. But in the world of 1983, independent providers of computer solutions were anything but a slam-dunk in the world of enterprise IT.

Volokh, Adager and Robelle are among the group of software solution "Improvers" that Eugene cited in his historic paper. In essence, after 3-4 years of success from these companies the case was pretty well proven that a solid product like MPEX, Adager, Qedit or Suprtool was going to win a lot of business away from the systems makers.

But the point that you might overlook in the paper is that these three companies continue to make long-term investments in 3000s possible and profitable, even after three decades. Eugene was just taking note of a software trend that remains true today: innovation from outside the system creator builds a lifelong community of support.

In a recent talk with Birket Foster, whose MB Foster Associates celebrates 35 years of continued business this year, he reminded me of where the community turned for new ideas in the early 1980s. The third-party vendors such as Foster, Adager, VEsoft and Robelle turned out papers, published books and newsletters, and spoke at in-person user group meetings. "There was no Internet back then, so you had to meet with somebody or talk to them to get solutions," Foster said.

A user community that grew up before the Internet has stronger links to innovation and assistance than groups that grew in the 1990s (Windows) and later (Linux), member for member. I like to think that every member of your Community carries several times more power and prowess than those from younger communities. As we've grown older things have changed a lot for the prospect of independent software and service providers. Yes, HP cleared out of your market. Its departure is even making companies like Cessna revisit how long they'll use the 3000 hardware no longer built by Hewlett-Packard. (There's a virtualization opportunity to replace HP's gear in the Stromasys product.) But HP's exit has also opened up the field for those Innovators and Improvers. Just look at how the world's change reveals itself in Eugene's survey of manager purchasing habits. One retired relic of that market: The Single-Vendor Shop.

Many HP customers have an almost blind loyalty to HP. In my years as an independent vendor, too often have I heard "sorry, we don't buy third-party products." This attitude, although sometimes justified by the desire to have a more easily supportable system, is usually quite incorrect because it deprives the user of the many advantages that can be derived from independent vendor products. However, condemning it won't make it go away, and every third-party vendor must live with the fact that a substantial part of the HP3000 market is forever barred from him.

Forever turned out to last less than 30 years. The change in the third-party vendor picture, whether selling software or services, has delivered a brighter opportunity for anyone who wanted to buy from more than HP. If an application enables your company to "change at the speed of thought," then the exit of the system vendor won't inhibit the useful lifespan of that application. Now there's only two parties in this ecosystem -- you, and anyone who can enhance and support your speed of thought. The third parties have become primary players with HP's exit. Since they created their places with innovation and improvement, I prefer to to call them independents -- or indie vendors, to borrow a term from the movies. The studio system isn't turning out as many great releases 30 years later, in either cinema or computing.

Editor's Note:

Your goal is to keep up with your professional friends quickly and easily. LinkedIn can do this.

Your goal is to have a modern version of the business card; you want to appear professional and up to date when clients look you up prior to an appointment, meeting, conference call, or interview. LinkedIn can do this, too.

Your goal, if you're job seeking, is to show up in the first 100 profiles when someone is searching for someone like you. The real goal is to be in the first 10, since that is all that shows per page. Shallow profiles rarely get found. Deep public profiles are searchable on Google/Bing. And internal corporate recruiters and execs are looking for you too. The following are the steps you can take on LinkedIn to raise these odds.

1. Use LinkedIn for interview preparation and business prospects. In a "people" search, type the name of the company; all the employees will come up that are in your network within three levels of separation. You might have to pay LinkedIn $20-80 to see all the names and full profiles. It's probably worth it. You can always do it for just a month.

2. Wordsmith your Headline, Summary, and Specialties sections. They all have maximum allowed spaces. Play with them. Use keywords and titles to describe yourself. Review position descriptions and ads of jobs you want, and pepper your profile with the most frequent, relevant, and desirable. Review peer profiles. For more on this subject, see booleanblackbelt.com and befoundjobs.com. You can also use wordcloud apps like wordle.net to create relevant word clouds.

4. There's a new section, Skills. These are pre-selected. You can have 50. These are very important as of late. Some say this section has surpassed keyword density in relevance.

5. Consider job seeking status on a monthly basis. Pro: You end up listed first. Con: You look desperate?

6. Link with as many as you can. Some experts say that you will only show up in search results for your skillset only 3 percent of the time if you are linked to fewer than 200 people. That incidence is supposed to climb to 90 percent if you are linked to "500+." Look for "Open Networkers" and LIONs that will link with everybody. Drop them later if you like.

7.  Add Groups related to your professional field. You are allowed 50. Concentrate on ones that have thousands of members at first. Add local ones that seem relevant and have at least 100. Check them out, and as you near your 50 Group maximum, drop some that are less relevant and add the most relevant for you. Most have jobs tabs. Link to Group members you like or that have 500+ connections. Find jobs on Discussion tabs also.

8. Check settings for your public profile. This is searchable by Google, Bing and Yahoo, and there is a huge recruiter subculture using Google strings.

9. Now, turn your privacy settings back to "broadcast mode." Consider whether you want your member feed showing, but you do want your status updates showing, and you might want to update your status 1-2 times per month.

10. Join discussions on your groups, follow the threads that seem to have good content. Comment where appropriate, get your name out there. This is a chance to impress. When you appear knowledgeable in your field, others will come forward and ask to be linked to you. Likewise, you will notice people that you like and can ask to link with or "follow." Check out group events, especially local networking opportunities.

11. Use a good basic headshot for your photo. It gets you three times the responses, compared to no headshot.

"I've had a couple of requests from sales people wanting to log on to the HP 3000 to do lookups," said Randy Stanfield of Unisource. It's a company using the HP 3000 in support of its business selling printing materials such as papers, facility supplies and equipment, and packaging materials and equipment.

Telnet, as we noted yesterday, is the state of the art for apps to communicate with the 3000. A telnet client will most probably not know anything about HP escape sequences, so the app access will be nothing more than character-mode.

Consultant and security expert Art Bahrs reports he's found a couple of telnet emulators, and wondered if WRQ might have one that runs on iOS. Alas no, and WRQ became a part of Attachmate years ago. Its Reflection line still offers NS/VT and telnet links to 3000s. Attachmate has no iOS apps, a fact that's easy to confirm because the Apple App Store is the only source of apps that don't need a jailbroken phone or pad. Jailbreaking adds power and options to these devices, but deploying jailbroken iPads to a sales force is a strategy that can change a career.

Then Bahrs checked back in to report on zaTelnet v 3.3, from zaTelnet. Bahrs and other 3000 vets are running tests to see if an iOS device can manage a 3000, access that's a few steps short of user-grade interfaces to 3000 applications. 

Security is another testing point. ZaTelnet is a SSH2 client for iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches. It  emulates terminal VT100 and partially xterm  -- enough for  console programs. ZaTelnet supports SSH2 authorization by plain password, interactive password and private key file.

"SSH is an option," Bahrs said of the secure shell handler on ZaTelnet, "and it did work successfully both ways. There are times that good old fashioned telnet really does come in handy when doing testing, so I test both."

Mocha Telnet, which we mentioned yesterday, gets the job done for 3000 management. "It works perfectly on my iPhone," said support provider Gilles Schipper, "even the Lite (free) version. I can even run HP Glance on it. While it doesn't look too pretty, one can decipher the output. I set the termtype to "hp," rather than the default "vt220."

.

  ..
 

Ask a few mobile-savvy consultants about how to marry an iPad with an HP server and you hear the word telnet. One manager reported that the iOS app Mocha Telnet has 700/92 emulation. Of course, there's a bit of the 3000's world missing from that solution -- NS/VT.

Now it might be an odd match to require a 3000 app that's old enough to use NS/VT to link with a mobile tablet that owns more than 95 percent of the tablet marketplace. A 3000 system probably designed in the 1980s, still being delivered to a mobile device that didn't even exist two years ago. If that's the challenge, the full range of 3000 interfaces -- including some of the oldest block mode response -- is not yet being served directly. (The Splashtop Remote Desktop app offers the best chance of that, since it controls a PC desktop over a wi-fi network link.)

But if your 3000 can be accessed via Telnet? Well, then the app Mocha Telnet is an app worth taking a shot towards. It's only $5.99. There's even a Lite version that's free.

If it's an all-3000 solution you need for the 3000, there's a great telnet webpage on the 3k Associates Technical Wiki (Twiki) for the server. The page covers the details of using an indie bit of software, the contributed NQTELNET program written by Eric Schubert of Notre Dame. NQTELNET is a host-based telnet server which will handle basic terminal operations.

What's this about a Twiki for the HP 3000? It's a tech resource set up years ago to capture as much tech expertise as possible from community 3000 managers such as Schubert. You'd be surprised how much is online at the site managed by 3k Associates founder Chris Bartram. But then you might have been surprised to learn that telnet is the interface that keeps on giving to the 3000, even while the community waits for a block mode tablet app to touch all of the MPE/iX apps.

For a better background on the possibilities of the HP 3000's connectivity, comparing telnet to NS/VT, have a look at the 3000 connectivity webpage at AICS Research. One of the great gifts that AICS gave to the community was the free QCTerm terminal emulator. There's top-grade telnet support inside that product, so much so that the freeware recognizes two levels of telnet access.

It doesn't sound too sinister until you take a few moments to consider how much Google is likely to know about you. Some people are surprised to see a picture of their house when they punch in their address in the search engine. Others simply write it off to life in the New Century. The cynics celebrate the fact that Google even bothered to tell us the policies were changing.

HP spread the word about its RTU license changes, sort of, in 2007. The 3000 group worked hard to make sure we had the story details. HP posted the notices on its 3000 webpages. US Mail didn't carry the news to those who don't read their NewsWire or travel to HP's web property. Just like the Google change, however, HP meant for its new license policies to be retroactive to anything you'd signed in order to own your first HP 3000. All you had to do was use the 3000, HP said, once it changed the terms in 2007.

Google has a similar trigger. Once you sign in to anyplace on Google on March 1 or later, you will be tracked across all of Google's properties -- apps, Calendar, Mail, YouTube and more -- as if you signed into them all. These are End User License Agreements, the EULAs that New York Times columnist David Pogue noted in his list of "Things That Were Once Amazing, but Are Really Kind of Old News at This Point."

These documents often contain astonishing language along the lines of this, from the original Google Chrome browser EULA: "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services."

It certainly does sound appalling. And I really have no idea what the lawyers really mean by that.

At the same time, there’s never yet been a case where this "ownership" amounted to anything. Google never published a book, for example, based on stuff its customers have written on their blogs.

Since the last time HP flexed its 3000 license muscles was 1999, we don't really know what that License Time language means in today's post-HP world of the 3000. Hewlett-Packard probably won't follow Google's path away from such steamroller language. About six months later, the license for Chrome was backed down off the ledge and included this simple explanation about Section 11.

This section is included because, under copyright law, Google needs what's called a "license" to display or transmit content. So to show a blog, we ask the user to give us a license to the blog's content. (The same goes for any other service where users can create content.) But in all these cases, the license is limited to providing the service. In Gmail, for example, the terms specifically disclaim our ownership right to Gmail content.

So for Google Chrome, only the first sentence of Section 11 should have applied. We're sorry we overlooked this, but we've fixed it now, and you can read the updated Google Chrome terms of service. If you're into the fine print, here's the revised text of Section 11:

11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

And that's all. Period. End of section.

It will take a little time to propagate this change through the 40+ languages in which Google Chrome is available, and to remove the language in the download versions. But rest assured that we're working quickly to fix this. The new terms will of course be retroactive, and will cover everyone who has downloaded Google Chrome since it was launched.

Licenses are often about "just in case." Other times they're simply taking what a large company knows a small guy can't protect -- or a deal where you have no choice. Last year, you had to give up your name to be on TV with Oprah.

The recent derby to win a starring role in a new series on the Oprah Winfrey Network forced every entrant to sign a five-page legal document. In it, OWN said it would own your name that you'd use on the show in perpetuity, IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE. (The caps are on because that's how it appeared in the agreement. We can't be sure about any un-known universe, because we don't know about it.) But licenses only have the power, at first, that we grant them in our minds. If you don't mind the all-caps language, then they don't matter -- unless lawyers change your mind.

Measured by the interest and behaviors of this February's market, the RTU seemed to be written to serve lawyers instead of IT managers. Many HP 3000s are sold today without regard for license validity. This is one reason you see a Series 9x8 on eBay for well under $1,000, until you don't see it, because it's been purchased. Sometimes a server like that -- which once had a valid license -- is being bought for parts. Some of the time this kind of 9x8 is being bought to replace an existing 9x8, or a 9x7 server. In that latter case, HP expected some RTU money to lift the license level.

It didn't make a difference to many companies, but some still want to stay inside the rules. HP said at the time it knew the RTU licenses would only make it into the budgets of some customers. Perhaps those who had internal auditing which would want to include system licenses. There are also resellers -- though not that many in this February -- who only sell licensed 3000s. It costs them some sales, but as Steve Suraci of Pivital Solutions says, "I sleep better at night, knowing HP won't be calling to ask about the lost revenues."

HP used to say, while it was drawing up this Update License and presenting it for sale, that a price on a used 3000 that seemed too good to be true probably was. The definition of truth was consistent for some of the really inexpensive systems: resellers have been candid from the start when selling 3000s sans-license. Others, not so much. No lying, but the unlicensed nature of a 3000 isn't part of the public offer. As it turns out, License Time has expired in a lot of 3000 shops. For a server the customer is migrating away from, a computer not sold or supported by the maker anymore? Even auditors could be induced to overlook that. It's a stopgap solution.

Those few years of License Time might turn out to be a very small percentage of the 3000's Afterlife, however. Migrations to SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle Financials and worse take a long time. Often longer than planned, so hardware's got to be replaced. The systems not only have an Unlicensed discount now built in, they sometimes can be clocked up to the full speed of their processors. HP never had any license offered, five years ago or even 10, to let a 3000 N-Class use eight processors, or run the PA-RISC chip at full bore. The market has expanded to what we might call Simulated Licensing, as if HP has stopped the clock on License Time. Until we hear about the HP Development Company -- the owner of the 3000's patents, copyrights and licenses -- reaching out to bill for an unlicensed machine, we can assume the clock has stopped.

If License Time ever restarted, however, it might look like another February, the one in 1999. That was the month when HP was busy suing resellers accused of back-door switching HP 9000s to 3000s, or extending power and users beyond licenses. Some were cleared or negotiated settlements, while others lost their suits. Jail time was levied to a select few. A $15,000 server would genuinely cost $120,000 during License Time. Suraci says he's glad no time will ever arrive when he'll have to wonder how to raise a missing $105,000.

First the dead ends, 11 of them. Premiersoft has nobody home at the URL of the same name; the company sold OSCAR, the Online Services Catalog and Application Repository to let HP 3000s host enterprise-wide server objects. (Object tech may have been too many steps ahead of an MPE market sweating out Y2K in 1999.) Retriever Interactive is gone along with its DataAid/3000 for data lookup and manipulation, which was even integrated with Suprtool. Also dead are Riva Systems (referencing exegesys.com, which now points to a French casino machine website); SeraSoft's link, though the company was migrating 3000 sites as of 2010; Software Licensing Corp.; Software Research Northwest, gently retired by founder Wayne Holt, who published the first PA-RISC hardback; Software and Management Consultants; Spentech; Starvision; Symple Systems, and SolutionStore 3000.

We know a lot about that last one. SolutionStore was a 3000 NewsWire project during the late 1990s, our effort to sell and report vendor listings for the 3000 community. In a way it was a precursor to the vendor list of hp3000links.com. A web administrator melted down while he took down the site with no warning. Such madness happens, but it was a serious gaffe to us at the time.

But then there are a dozen survivors, most thriving, some surviving. Pro 3K still leads you to consultant Mark Ranft, tending to servers and also managing the world's biggest fleet of N-Class servers at Navitaire. Productive Software Systems, Quest, Quintessential School Systems, Rich Corn's RAC Consulting, Robelle, Speedware, Solution-Soft, and STR Software, the last still supporting FAX/3000. Syllogize offers support for HP 3000s. Synowledge supports MANMAN, according to the IT Services page on its website, through six offices. There's even a valid link to Shawn Gordon's S.M. Gordon and Associates webpage, listing 3000 software of advancing age.

Toting up for this list, we get 12 valid web links to 3000 vendors, 11 fully deceased, and two which lead to places where 3000 is spoken no longer. There's much more that can be done to sort through some of those survivors; we know a website falls short of vetting a company for active 3000 work. But considering that the hp3000links.com resources were built more than a decade ago, and last updated in the spring of 2010,  a little under 50 percent is a respectable survival rate.

We'll look at the final 15 entries in this snapshot of 3000 Vendors and Consultants next week. Time moves at a more casual pace in your community, so we don't expect any more deaths in the family over the next seven days.

Back in the summer of 2010 we were waiting on the arrival of a 3000-grown solution. Minisoft intended to release its Javelin connection for iOS. It had even set a $9.95 price. But then the developer Neal Kazmi weathered some health issues and the project had to be tabled. But it's not canceled, according to Minisoft's founder and president Doug Greenup.

We were all set to do this with Neal and then had to pospone. He is back working on a number of projects here at Minisoft. The Javelin port to iPad is still on the "to do" list. I know there are people interested in a robust HP connectivity app for iPad. We just haven't had the development resources to finish the project.

So while we'll keep an eye on the App Store for the first 3000-savvy iOS app, there might be another solution available in the meantime. Something demoed on the Macworld show floor, just getting on its feet, can give users control over their desktop back at the office -- and so they'd be able to use a Windows PC running 3000 connectivity solutions, or even something hosted on the Mac.

But back to that desktop control solution. Splashtop Remote Desktop requires a wi-fi connection between the desktop and the tablet. It even supports Android devices. So you can use this app, plus a free Streamer client on that desktop, to control any interface you can drive from the desktop. There's one level of connectivity while inside the same wi-fi network. But Splashtop can also reach outside of a company's net for even greater remote range.

A connection through a working Gmail account lets the desktop certify itself to the iPad or Android tablet. Using this network, a worker in a secured wi-fi net in another location can touch the software on his desktop. I saw the on-the-same-net demonstration at Macworld and was surprised at the level of control. I don't know if I'd try this with an iPad 1, because more processing power is better. It will hum along even faster in a little while when the iPad 3 is released this spring.

There are three kinds of IT managers who respond to these mobile connection needs. The first wants to wall off IT from mobile access. The second is willing to see why mobile will make the enterprise better. The third knows that mobile is essential to keeping a company abreast of modern access. You don't want to be the first for very much longer. This is a wave that's not going to be stopped; it's a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) world out there now. Apple's sold 55 million iPads already, not to mention the 100 million iPhones. Android will bring even more devices into the shop. And there's usually a good chance they arrive under the arm or in the pocket of a VP who simply wants to use their favorite laptop replacement.

As for entrusting Google to certify a remote computer's indentity, it's better than nothing. Even the developers of Splashtop understand Gmail is a stopgap. But an internal wi-fi linkup is a great way to be responsive to a request for mobile 3000 access. The ultrabooks will make laptops lighter, but those are not the devices causing the BYOD wave. You can get ready for tablets now, and keep an eye on what else will emerge this year.

At least I didn't get my knuckles rapped with a ruler. Dr. Bill Highleyman, managing editor of The Availability Digest and a past chair of the Tandem User Group, addressed the serious question about the future of Itanium in his rousing conclusion to The Connection article.

One industry pundit suggested that [HP VP] Markin Fink's reference to a "single platform" signals that the Intel Xeon chip family is going to win out in HP's near future, probably meaning the end of the Itanium developments from Intel after its next two processor rollouts become a reality.

I remember writing that suggestion on November 25, indeed. There were a few other articles that followed it, but I'm not going to cry out "misquoted out of context." No journalist should ever bark that out, although I  invite you to read my other article that immediately followed my punditry. If you consider how long it's going to take Intel to do its next two Itanium rollouts, customers will be in the territory of 2016, or even later. (The last two rollouts took  a lot more than two years each.) Nobody at HP has shown a roadmap on the future of HP-UX beyond that date.

If Xeon hasn't "won out" already -- and those are Dr. Bill's words, since I'm no fan of racing metaphors -- it will surely represent a walloping majority of Intel's energy in four years. The end of proprietary tech at a vendor can come silently and quickly for no good technical reason. The HP 3000 did not officially lose HP's favor until a blind-side announcement. Right up to the late summer before MPE/iX got its HP dismissal, HP was still encouraging customers to ride that racehorse.

Dr. Bill quotes Pauline Nist of Intel in her company blog as saying

Intel remains equally committed to the Itanium and Xeon platforms, both of which represent our portfolio approach to bringing open standards-based computing to the mission-critical environment.

The next thing you know we'll be hearing how Itanium is "strategic to HP." Lessons from the 3000 division -- whose final GM, Winston "Coup de Grace" Prather, has become the Tandem/NonStop GM -- should make you want to race for the doors if strategic ever gets used to describe a product's future.

"[A product marketing manager at BCS] said that 'HP is not now planning to port HP-UX to x86-based servers.' " But the article wonders, "Was the operative word 'now' intentional?" (I'm reminded of a semantic debate about the definition of "is.") Dr. Bill is ready with an answer, right now, from Mr. Fink.

Martin: [The HP rep] is basically saying, "Never say never." At this point there are no plans; and I predict that it will never happen. The big problem is the software support and the ISV support for the 5,000 current HP-UX ISV applications. The better model is to bring the HP-UX capabilities to Linux, rather than port HP-UX to x86.

These are all very sharp people. I wonder why everybody is missing this point: why you'd ever need to port HP-UX, or whatever this better model is supposed to do. My headline of Nov. 25 said HP was aiming Unix sites at x86 futures. It sure seems to me, as an industry pundit, that once you bring HP-UX's capabilities to Linux, those customers using the capabilities aren't going to be HP-UX users much longer. I might be confused -- because at the same time that one person in HP says "never say never," about a UX port to x86, another says "I predict it will never happen."

I prefer to take my lessons on soothsaying from Yoda. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke asks him if his friends Leia and Han will die. "Difficult to tell," says Yoda. "Always in motion is the future."

All I know for certain is that 2016 looks like a lot more robust year for Linux apps than for HP-UX apps. And if you're still smarting from the knuckle-rapping HP gave you when you last paid the vendor to run a proprietary hardware and software platform -- well, you might not like what Highleyman assures you with. He quotes Martin: "IBM's strategy is not at all like Project Odyssey." But then the Doctor adds this.

IBM's proprietary operating system zOS has survived living alongside a hardened Linux. Hopefully this is an indication that the HP proprietary operating systems will survive alongside HP's hardened Linux and Windows.

If the demand for these operating systems declines, will Itanium survive? Martin: This is not an issue. Most planning cycles are five years or less. Changes like this take a long time. As long as you and I are around, we'll be supporting HP-UX on Itanium.

That sounds like some swell whistling past the graveyard, as our old friend Wirt Atmar used to describe optimism about HP's 3000 intentions. Martin Fink is predicting that UX is never getting to x86 and that HP will support HP-UX on Itanium as long as you and I will be around. I'm only 54. Unix is past 60 and starting to slow in the market. Father Time wins every race, to fall back on that hoary metaphor. Nothing lasts forever, but now HP has defined a new future where a "hardened Linux" somehow apes the best of HP-UX but it doesn't supplant it. Wirt had a professorship in evolutionary biology. He could see how any vendor's product has a lifespan that includes death.

If HP customers' best bet is to believe that IBM's mainframe zOS business will be a model for HP-UX -- well, good luck with that. HP's never liked doing things the IBM way until they're forced into it. I can't predict if there will be enough distubance in The Force of Itanium users to force HP to make HP-UX outlive us youngsters. I can only suggest.

It has been many years since a large conference included HP 3000 solutions. Not even the final HP World show of 2004 could be considered large by Macworld standards; Interex was doing very well when it drew 7,000 IT souls, and Macworld hovers near the 20,000 mark these days. A few hundred vendors make up the show floor this week, although it's thick with vendors of covers for any Apple product you can carry -- which if you take a moment to consider it becomes the bulk of the Apple line: ultra-slim laptops like the Macbook Air, beefier models like the Pro and the iPads and iPhones. All accomplished solutions, but there's a growing number of companies that want to out-do Windows desktops here, and I'm not talking about Angry Birds on Windows Phone or MS Office. You can look beyond the common-cloth Unix choices if you're making a migration and plan to buy off the shelf replacement software.

This year a new player entered this market with a software shell that makes Mac management as simple as administering Windows desktops. Mokafive integrates with those Mac systems so an admin with Windows experience -- Active Directory, that sort of thing -- can manage everything from a single screen. (That screen above is on a Macbook Air.)  After all, inside the heart of Apple's products beats Unix, the original "open" system that's supposed to connect with everything. Mokafive isn't the only way to convince your IT staff that Macs won't be any extra burden. There are other products aimed at creating a homongenous workplace for computers which tap corporate data.

Okay, full disclosure here: The companies I've worked for and founded since 1987 have been Apple shops. It used to be the domain of pariahs and the source of derisive snorts, but the Mac world has gone corporate on us all. The pro-sumer movement, where iPhones and iPads get carried into an enterprise by C-level officers, has brought along Macs as a sticky complement. In a report on the $46 billion quarter, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said nearly all of the Fortune 500 is using Apple's products, including most companies adopting Macs. It used to be that a localized in-house datacenter kept Apple out. Now there's cloud computing to take the place of an IMAGE/SQL, if you're departing the 3000 world. This cloudy future is helping to make Apple's business outlook brighter.

Padmanaban is clear-eyed about the hurdles the Mac faces in IT strategy. "Corporations have trouble adopting Macs because while Macs are beautiful and sleek, but Windows applications don't run on them, and it's very hard to secure a Mac," she said. "What we do is take your standard corporate Windows environment and make it a secure managed app on a Mac." Using a concept that Intel calls Intelligent Desktop virtualization, it means that the Mac takes an equal but familiar place on the console for corporate computing, with Windows losing none of its compatibility with the likes of SQL Server or even a 3000-savvy database like Eloquence for Windows. Mokafive provisions corporate Windows environments for the Mac desktops. You free your users to bring in that Macbook Air they want to use on the job.

Another way to embrace Windows work on Apple's products is through virtualization. While this doesn't provide much of a single-pane administration benefit, the likes of VMWare's Fusion or Parallels have advanced the cause of emulation. That's the vehicle that's carrying MPE into the future. Parallels can either present a Mac-like workspace on the desktop that's completely outfitted with Windows as well. Or it can give a user the Windows experience by day and let them revert to Mac OS X off the job. There's a lively competition between Fusion and Parallels that keeps each product improving at a constant rate. Both have gotten three major improvements in the last two years, and at $79 a desktop it's too inexpensive to trigger even 3000-grade budget shock.

Managing virtualization requires some learning, but it's a good skill set to acquire going into 2012. On the other hand, Padmanaban claimed that IT managers need "zero additional skills" to deploy and administer Mokafive's Player, "an app that is running my standard Windows desktops." She also says that deployment is possible in as little as 90 minutes. The software installation comes on a USB key.

As for the mobile goodies being displayed here, one software solution treats Windows as if it were running on iPads. Splashtop brings the Windows apps and desktops to the ultra-popular tablets by giving the user a remote control of their PCs. (Yes, that's the usually-reviled but necessary Explorer browser in the picture, running on an iPad that's controlling a PC remotely.) If an app can run on the PC, it can be used on an iPad. Because it's an iOS app, the cost is crazy-cheap. This week Splashtop is $2.99 per iPad, and the regular price is only $19.95. I watched a demo that showed a PC desktop running while the iPad gave cursor control, text entry, clicks on buttons -- any aspect of an interface required. It gets even better for remote use, because you can use it over a secured wi-fi environment from across the country. At the moment Google Mail somehow tells your desktop to talk to the remote app, since you sign in with a Gmail account on both iPad and PC. Google is far from perfect, but if its apps can be rolled out to the multi-billion dollar BBVA bank enterprise, it's probably capable of managing the handshake between an iPad and a Windows PC.

Windows and the PC world never cared much about adopting Apple support in the decades where Microsoft had all the mojo. Coming from a humble position in the business world, the Apple solutions have a "can't we all get along" approach. There are millions of Windows desktops out there. But there are now millions of Apple's mobile customers bringing along Macs, a market that showed 26 percent growth over the last year versus zero for the rest of the PC industry. Apple products are going to become a management mission for the IT department, driven along by mobile attachments. Although Apple never aimed at becoming an enterprise darling, the business has arrived anyway. It delivers an user experience that can mimic Windows, or something newer and smoother and yes, popular -- integrated with what you already are adopting for your migration.