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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)"
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.
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
On top of evrything else now my company has to figure out how to migrate over 100 3000 systems, with over a terabyte of data and several million lines of code to a new platform.
lots and lots of tapes, and the mother of all perl scripts.
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
We found out yesterday morning. An HP service rep called one of our supervisors at home to break the news. While I'm not the one who manages these boxes at our site (I've got the UX machines), I do know that they are the most reliable of anything we've got. They just don't go down, and I guess this is bad news for HP. They need stuff to break so they can boost sales and services.
We've still got several critical apps running on MPE, including our 911 software for PD. These things are bulletproof, and I cringe at the thought of the PD folks going out and choosing an NT solution now. I can only hope a decent 911 app for UX exists.
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
Actually, HP-UX first appeared in 1982 or so on the HP9000 platform (series 500, Focus chipset, 32-bit CISC machine customed-designed by HP). A different version appeared on the 9000 series 200, 68000-based workstation (later replaced by the series 300). HP-UX 1.0 refers the first version on HP-PA (now called PA-RISC).
And, of course, there's the old joke: "If Hewlett-Packard had been named Packard-Hewlett, what would they have called HP-UX?"
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
It turned 30 and it's crystal turned red.
Time for Carousel.
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
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
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...