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HP To Kill 3000 System After 30 years
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)"
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.