Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

HP To Kill 3000 System After 30 years

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the somewhere-on-a-desert-highway dept.

James Ots writes "HP have announced that their 30 year old HP3000 series of computers will be joining their calculators on the scrapheap. Which is a shame, because a lot of work has gone into porting unix tools to the platform, and now we'll have to stop and port MPE (the HP3000 OS) tools to unix. Cnet have pre-announced the announcement, and the guys on comp.sys.hp.mpe don't seem too happy. (See also CSL's page on the story)"

9 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah! Kill the damn thing!!! by Juju · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Having worked for HP, I can only be glad they would scrap it. The application that are still running on this are nightmarish stuff coming from the seventies... So it's all COBOL and EDI. Yuk

    Let's replace all these crappy old systems (hardware + software) with something more decent. Replace HP3000 with HP9000, Cobol with C++, and EDI with XML.

    I for one, think that updating hardware and software every 30 years should be mandatory. Think of all the time lost to update and maintain that crap!

    Nostalgia is not for Teckies!!! (except when it concerns Arcade games ;o)

    By the way, I don't want to hear about Unix being far older than Windows... Unix is still being developed actively.

    --
    Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
    1. Re:Yeah! Kill the damn thing!!! by Detritus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why on Earth would anyone want to replace COBOL with C++ for business applications? COBOL may have its warts, but it was designed for business applications, unlike C++, which was designed to be a Swiss Army Chainsaw.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    2. Re:Yeah! Kill the damn thing!!! by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Having worked for HP, I can only be glad they would scrap it. The application that are still running on this are nightmarish stuff coming from the seventies... So it's all COBOL and EDI. Yuk

      In other words, important stuff that makes the world work, and has had millions of man-hours of development work put into it. These aren't your typical brochureware web sites, coded up in a few days where you can re-boot the server if anything goes wrong. Migrating these applications onto a more modern platform, including all the testing that needs to be done, is a distinctly non-trivial undertaking (these aren't like AS/400 where moving OS/400 applications from 48-bit CISC to 64-bit RISC was all taken care of by a virtual machine layer).

      Think of all the time lost to update and maintain that crap!

      And rewriting those applications... that's probably never going to happen. You think they're hard to maintain, they will be even more difficult to reverse-engineer when the original coders aren't around and the documentation is sketchy at best. There may not even be complete source code for any of these applications any more. C++ isn't an especially easier language to maintain than COBOL anyway.

    3. Re:Yeah! Kill the damn thing!!! by Monte · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So it's all COBOL and EDI. Yuk

      What prints your paycheck?

  2. What a shame by SumDeusExMachina · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I would have to say that, as a trained system administrator, I am sad to see these systems go. Truely, they were a basition of reliability and engineering, and I am happy to have had the priviledge of admining an MPE system at one time.

    BTW, what is the deal with them discontinuing the calculators? I always thought RPN was just about the coolest idea ever for calculators, and I have fond memories of having "calculator races" back in high school where we would see who's machine could solve the problem first. Those of us with the sweet HP calculators were always the first to finish. Truely the end of a great product line.

    --

    Is your company running tools written by ma
  3. well by nomadic · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This server line is as old as UNIX for heaven's sake; I think you have to admire HP for keeping it going this long, especially when you consider they're still going to support it for a few more years. I mean, dropping the calculator division may have been a boneheaded move but you've got to give HP some credit here...

  4. HP is dead by CharlieG · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I said when the spun off Agilent "HP is dead" - HP was and intrumentation company FIRST, when they spun that divison off I said it was over. I wonder if Agilent can survive on it's own, and if they can, should they BUY the HP name and calculator division when HP liquidates?

    --
    -- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
  5. Good point - not flamebait by Ldir · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Not sure why this was modded as flamebait, I think his point is a good one. It is expensive to maintain development and support for multiple platforms. HP's 9000 series - open systems, UNIX-based - is doing well. It's obviously where HP will find most of its future market.

    The 3000, on the other hand - closed, proprietary, not the most flexible and capable by today's OS standards - is more and more a niche product. Even if it is still profitable for HP today, it won't be over the long haul. It is not HP's future.

    HP has talked about retiring the 3000 line for years. As I understand it, they've kept the line this long only because of their commitment to customer service. There are a lot of companies (like ours) that rely on the 3000. It will be expensive to replace.

    People who are critical of companies still using 3000s, IMHO, are a little lacking in real-world business experience. We recognized long ago that the 3000's life was limited. We haven't put any major new applications on them in years. Unfortunately, we have millions of lines of existing code supporting several critical lines of business. We can't replace that at a whim. It will be extremely expensive.

    As just one example, the Y2K remediation effort for one large application was about 24,000 man-hours. Note that this application was already almost Y2K compliant, designed in the beginning to track century information. For most programs, most of this time was simply the overhead of checking out the source code, reviewing it for compliance, and checking it back in. There were thousands of programs to check.

    I agree that HP deserves credit for continuing the line for so many years past its prime, and for providing good advance notice about retiring it. The future is open systems. HP "done good" by easing the transition.

  6. gspl?! by bani · · Score: 3, Insightful

    gspl compiler for what, i386?

    A lot of SPL code I've seen is selfmodifying code. This means pushing old (pre-parisc) opcodes onto the compatibility mode stack and executing them.

    Don't forget that a lot of SPL code depends on intricate details of the compatibility mode linker, too.

    In the end, if you were going to do a gspl you'd basically have to end up writing a compatiblity mode VM as well.

    Even HP didn't get the CM VM 100% perfect when they went to PA-RISC. CM code still sometimes mysteriously vomits (or maybe its on purpose, part of evil scheme to get you to port your code to native mode :-)

    Don't forget the complexity of writing a VM to fully emulate the intricate block-mode oriented terminal I/O... even commercial terminal emulation software like Reflections don't always get this quite right...

    I don't think it would be an easy job at all. You could make a bundle off it though, selling it to corporations desperate to keep their HP3K investments afloat...