Customers who rely on MPE/V HP 3000s might have felt left out of the Year 2000 preparations for the platform. But a recent message from HP offer hope for owners of "Classic" HP 3000s about preparation for the end of the century: several supported versions of the operating system are ready today, and many of HP's MPE V applications are already Year-2000 safe. The news is better than some might have expected, considering that HP plans to stop supporting Classic HP 3000s in less than a year.
In 1993, HP announced that its MPE V systems recognized the Year 2000, reporting that as of Release 30 the systems would recognize dates through the year 2027. In addition to support for CALENDAR, FMTDATE and FMTCALENDAR intrinsics, and TurboStore, Store/Restore, LISTDIR5, LISTLOG5 and the STREAM command, many other applications are Year 2000-safe on the platforms.
HP's Tracy DeDore, a marketing specialist in HP's SSD division where MPE V maintenance takes place, reported that a full investigation of MPE V software in 1996 turned up only a handful of applications that weren't already capable of running beyond the Year 2000.
"By the time we finished the fuller investigation in 1996, we found only five applications that did not already comply with the Year 2000," DeDore reported in a recent Internet message.
The problem applications are SNA/IMF, Dictionary/V, BASIC/V, Business BASIC/V and Inform/V. With the exception of Inform/V, HP has brought all these applications into compliance by providing patches. HP was testing a fix for Inform/V during March.
MPE V systems themselves will not function properly beginning in the year 2028 due to an internal storage standard used to save the year since 1900. HP says there are no plans to address this issue "as the MPE V hardware platform is scheduled to reach the end of support life in January 1998."
Currently supported versions of the MPE V operating system (Platform 2P, 3P and Release 40) support the Year 2000, but one version, V-Delta-4, will not function properly beginning in the year 2000. V-Delta-4 is an older version of the operating system that is certified for Department of Defense C2 security. HP has no plans to patch V-Delta-4 to support the year 2000 or any plans to certify a later version of MPE/V that supports the Year 2000 to adhere to C2 security standards.
Except for the issues noted above, HP said it has validated that MPE/V operating system and subsystems support multiple date formats including a two-digit year and correctly manipulate dates outside the Year 2000. In addition, HP has verified that the MPE/V software components related to system clocks represent January 1, 2000 correctly and that leap year is accommodated in the years 2000 through 2028.
One customer has reported that the MPE V leap year handing in the Year 2000 doesn't appear to work as promised. NewsWire subscriber Ken Nutsford of Timeshare Systems Ltd. said his 3P release of MPE V wouldn't accept February 29, 2000 as a valid date. Nutsford said his HP 3000/GX " rejects any attempt to stream a job on February 29 in the Year 2000. It accepts 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024, but not 2028. The system date reverts to 1900 on 1 January 2028, and the STREAM command becomes inoperable from then on."