Fred White retired from Adager early this month, after a career of service that pre-dated the HP 3000 itself. One of the co-creators of IMAGE, White joined HP in 1969, came to Adager in 1981, and left the company at age 76 to pursue a wide range of interests which Adager founder Alfredo Rego noted in a posting to the Internet. “After many years of contributing to the worldwide HP 3000 community (first at HP and then at Adager), Fred is going to pursue other worthwhile interests,” Rego said. “He has mentioned the word ‘retirement,’ but I just can’t imagine Fred sitting in his porch sipping lemonade all day. If anything, I have visions of Fred making sure that whatever comes under his sharp attention will function as well as humanly possible. Fred White was one of the original creators of the IMAGE Database Management System that all of us use in our mission-critical applications. Fred is a man of many talents and his exclusive involvement with IMAGE database structures has not allowed sufficient time to exercise some of his other abilities to their fullest. Did you know that he speaks Japanese, for instance? Or that he and his lovely wife Judy have ventured as far as Australia to watch magnificent birds of prey while hanging on to cliffs with their binoculars?”

Rego noted that “Fred has spent a lot of time making the lives of IMAGE users easier and more productive. It is only appropriate that he will now also have the opportunity to widen the reach of his inquisitive mind.” Here at the NewsWire we remember White as a critic dedicated to improving HP’s 3000 software and practices, as well as a scholar of database physics with penetrating concentration. In the late 1980s we watched him give a talk at the SCRUG users conference about the procedure of writing database files, one which had even longtime IMAGE experts gasping at its extensive detail. In meetings of the Interex North American conference White could be counted on to speak his mind. At the legendary SIG-IMAGE meeting of 1990, White said that users could “sue HP for a couple of million bucks” if the company went through with a plan to unbundle IMAGE from the 3000’s operating system.

More recently he asked HP improve the ability to administer production-grade IMAGE/SQL operations, because “I get the feeling that IMAGE/SQL was entered into step by step, without any overall design,” said White, who created the original IMAGE with HP’s Jon Bale. “It’s a database administrative nightmare and an annoying learning curve. We’re asking you to do it all over again.” White carved out the first extensive organization of date types for the 3000 community, some of the earliest work to make the machine ready for the Y2K transition and designs that made Adager one of the earliest Y2K remedies in the 3000 market. His “Birth of IMAGE” paper is a key to the community’s history, and his contributions over the system’s lifespan have added countless value to customer investments.

We will miss his passion, his intelligence, his wry wit and his engineering excellence. More than anyone else we know, White could claim ownership of the 3000 concept. At a 1999 conference, new HP marketing manager Christine Martino thanked attendees for good ideas submitted on selling the 3000, saying “I want to bring you all into my marketing department.” White brought down the house when he replied, “It’s nice to bring you into our marketing department.”