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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)"
HP3000's look like this.
Unlike HP's excellent and unparalleled line of RPN calculators, perhaps these minicomputers actually do belong on the scapheap. I lost my 48sx in college and I'm brokenhearted that I can't replace it.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Here's the early history of the HP3000.
According to the FAQ, it rather ran iX, you're right, I may have been confused between my HP3000 and the HP9000 that came soon after.
BTW, HP-UX appeared in 1986
Trolling using another account since 2005.
What tools? I haven't used MPE/xl in 10 years, but I don't remember it having any tools other than file copy (the OS doesn't even support directories if I remmeber correctly) and db schema stuff.
Although I do remember how me and a guy cracked (yes as in warez) a text editor for mpe/xl once. Each 3000 has a serial code that shows up as a read-only environment variable, and a lot of software uses that as a software key. i.e.: if you tried to copy a program to another box, it saw a different serial and said "no, you copyied this". So our hack was to create a slightly different environment variable called HPSUSAM, and store the serial # from the machine we copied the program from. Then we used a binary editor to search through the program for any occurance of "HPSUSAN" and replace with "HPSUSAM". m41nfr4m3 h4>0r1n6 1s 1337.
_______
2B1ASK1
Are you talking about "BASIC Computer Games" and "More BASIC Computer Games" by David Ahl? Two ~150 page softcover books, one yellow, one red, as I recall.
Not to sound harsh, but isn't that the kind of thing you should have thought of 10 years ago? They stopped deleoping these ages ago, so an exit should have been looked at at least as a side project.
Mod point free since 2001
(well, same numbering system so sort-of related to the HP3000 series)
Ahhh... I have fond memories of the HP2000A (later 2000F) system back in the mid-1970's at the University of Saskatchewan. Not really a "system" 'cause as soon as you logged in, you were dropped into a BASIC interpreter!
The Linux community could really take advantage of this opportunity to score with a killer app for businesses, a HP 3000 Emulator. I know that my company would love to migrate to all of their HP 3000 programs to another solution where they would still have rock-solid reliability and now have commodity hardware prices. This could bring about a true business need for Linux support services and basically bring the motherlode of cash for Linux programmers.
Just think of it, there are thousands of big companies using the HP3000 looking for a solution over the next 5 years (when HP ends support). HP will probably try some god-awful ports to the 9000 series, but if it's not broke, just emulate it. After all, millions of man hours have been invested in getting those programs to handle mission-critical applications.
When someone writes this, let me know... my company has a large pile of cash ready for them.
As someone who learned how to program on an HP3000 *Series I* (showing my age here), I can't help but feel bad about the decision, logical though it might be. New 3000s (based on PA-RISC hardware shared with the 9000) have been sold primarily as an upgrade path for existing users for quite a while. Apparently, those users (which paid the bills at HP for many years) are (finally) starting to dry up.
My career was made by these machines, although I saw the writing on the wall quite a while back and moved on. I worked for a number of companies that used 3000's (and probably still do in some form or fashion) including a long stint as a 3000 field software engineer with HP itself.
The system aged as gracefully as any computer in history, and was based on boring old dependability, much like the company itself used to be. Between this, the instrument/medical division (now Agilent) and calculators, it feels a little like the heart of the company has been removed.
I was fortunate enough to see the very first HP inkjet (in a little case that the Boise division guy practically handcuffed to his wrist), but had no idea how big it would end up being to the company.
I know there is little room for sentimentality in the computer world, but I have just as strong nostalgic feelings for these old beasties as any vintage video game. They are certainly deserving of respect.
If Linux is around 30 years from now, I think many of you (us) would have some sad feelings if the last copy were being deleted. Even if it was being replaced with something "better".
Should I burn the MPE source code fiche, in tribute?
Smilodon
V V
I'm shedding real tears over this.
Today, MPE has web services, ethernet support, and all the other modern trappings... except instability.
My MPE system maintained uptime in the YEARS... regularly... the OS never failed. Once in a long while (every couple of years) a 10 year old drive would fail & we'd have to deal with it. Because we never bothered to upgrade from the HPIB drives to SCSI, hot swap wasn't an option. But... I will note... it is said that you could upgrade the kernel on these w/o ever rebooting.
If vendors made systems as stable as this today, the world would not know what to do with itself.
-jbn
(Anyone in DC interested in doing a wake / memorial service?)
I worked for Bradmark, Inc. (http://www.bradmark.com) developing database repair and restructuring tools, and it was really interesting work. Sure the user interface was old, but the kind of code I was writing let me get down under the skin of the OS every now and then, and despite what most people here have been saying, MPE was a nice OS, and had features that I have yet to encounter on unix OSes.
File locking for one. I'm sorry, but the unix notion of locking a file is a joke. "I'll create this here lock file, and then other programs that see the lock will know not to open my file. I sure hope the other programs agree to play nice."
Give me a break. In MPE the locking mechanism is built into the file system, and is enforced by the OS. It is easy to build complex locks like "lock bytes 7643-8126 for exclusive write access" and then other programs can do whatever they want with the other parts of the file, and they can read the locked part, but only you can write. *Very* useful for databases.
Another thing the 3000s excel at is stability. I can honestly say that in the 4 years I worked at Bradmark, the only time our development machine ever had any instability was when we ran a beta version of the OS one time for some testing. I once saw an hp3000 ad that actually advertised their machines as having "99.999%" uptime. They had no worries about false advertising, because it wasn't false.
And on the rare occasions when something does go wrong, these machines are designed from the get go to recover gracefully without user intervention. In addition to their external UPS, each machine has an internal battery. This battery isn't for maintaining main power, rather it just maintains RAM, for up to 8 hours or more. When main power is restored the system does a self diagnostic, rolls back in disk IO that had been interrupted, reconnects to any dumb terminals (widely used when the 3000 was first designed), and restarts all programs! If you had a system where all users connect through terminals, then you could sit there and watch all of those terminals come back to life with their programs running exactly where they were when power failed.
Now that's reliability folks!
Someone I worked with told me his favorite 3000 war story: there was a brief power failure in his building during the middle of the day, but power came back on fairly quickly. At 5:00pm the 3000 sysadmins all made a point of walking by the computer room and saying things like "Gee did the power go out?" for the benefit of the Unix admins who were still checking their filesystems and trying to recover their machines.
If you're out there Chris: "Hi!" *waves*
Negative. VMS has never been EOLed, although DEC's marketing folks gave it quite a bit of short shrift in favor of NT. If VMS were to be axed, it would truly be a sad day for the industry. I can say without the slightest bit of hyperbole that, in my experience at least, there is not another OS on the market that is even remotely as stable, secure, and scalable (except perhaps IBM's VM or MVS systems, or the Tandem/Compaq NSK/NonStop OS, none of which I have direct experience with). VMS is immune to buffer overflow exploits, and even makes Unix look unstable by comparison. The DoD is heavily dependant upon it for many of their critical systems, as are many banks, credit unions, stock exchanges, and insurance and health care companies.
OpenVMS is currently in the process of being ported to the IA-64 platform (likely the first or second successor to Monroe, which will likely be an Alpha EV8 processor running IA-64 instructions in microcode... Thank goodness Intel finally admitted that they don't know how to design a decent 64-bit processor and brought in the Q's Alpha design engineers. Of course, the Q by the same action were admitting that they had no clue how to market the Alpha.)
Now what's this nonsense about overly long command lines? Any DCL command can be arbitrarily abbreviated provided that enought characters are provided to assure uniqueness...
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
Oh, this is cool... here's a page with a lot of those classic games, and they're already typed in! Has some other cool classic computing stuff also:
- Have a picture
I could see this coming a parsec away.
;)
;)
In a previous life I did HP3000 development. Ahhhh the memor^H^H^H^H^Hnightmares...
Yes, the HP3000 hardware and OS (MPE/iX) are supremely stable. However everything is also supremely expensive, and performance isn't very good.
The last few years MPE has desperately been playing catch-up with the modern Unix world. The development tools on the HP3000 are horribly archaic -- much worse than even ancient Unixes. The default native MPE environment doesnt even have a fullscreen text editor! At least you get 'vi' with Unix. The OS was riddled with anachronisms at least as many levels deep as Dante's hell. You think Unix is archaic? You ain't seen MPE, baby. It makes VMS look brand spanking new.
The (relatively) recent attempts to bring HP3000 up to speed didn't really work out that well. Adding a POSIX subsystem was cute, but not terribly useful. POSIX stuff could see everything on the MPE side (files, etc), but MPE applications couldn't easily access POSIX data. In the end it was like having two mutually exclusive OSes on the same box. They could co-exist but couldnt really usefully share data.
The HP3000 filesystem is both a blessing and a curse -- the record oriented filesystem can be extremely cumbersome at times when you're used to the rest of the world dealing with simple streams of bytes. Trying to ship data between HP3000 and the real world can be a real hair-pulling experience. Even Macs don't usually have it as bad.
I pity those companies that bet the farm on HP3000's. They may have several years before support is cut off -- but porting tens of millions of lines of code, much of it SPL (basically a macro assembler), is going to be a herculean effort. In many cases it's going to be easier to just start from scratch.
I guess I'm just glad I got out when I did
I used one of these for a decade and yes , they are a super reliable set up.
..what is the point of all that uptime if you can't connect due to other crap getting in the way ?
Unless you tried to use that complete screw up of an application 20/20 . Does anyone else remember that botched attempt at a spreadsheet app ?
I recall 20/20 bringing down the HP3000 at least twice before it was dumped.
What people tend to forget is that the 3000 and the OS were reliable and yes , I can recall instances of my terminal coming 'back up' right where I left off....but the 3000's that are around today are largely accessed via PC terminal apps (reflection etc) thereby exposing reliability to all the vagaries of MS desktops and all the network glitches that come with the 'No dumb terminal' approach.
From an end user perspective anyway