3000 NewsWire Online Extra Welcome to our 28th edition of Online Extra -- the e-mail update of articles in the April 1998 3000 NewsWire, plus items that have surfaced since we mailed our latest First Class issue. This service is an exclusive to our paid subscribers. We e-mail you this file between the First Class issues you receive by mail, updating the stories you've read and adding articles that have developed between issues. HP profits drop in second quarter report HP cited a tough PC market and trouble in Asian economies as the leading reasons its profits skidded 14 percent for the quarter ending April 30. This week’s HP second quarter report for 1998 included no mention of HP 3000 business -- but then the document has rarely included any significant mention of its specific server product lines. As usual, HP was careful to note that its Unix business showed good revenue and order growth, but made no mention of the line's profitability. The omission of detail about the Unix line's profits came in a report heavy with explanations for HP's fading earnings and cost overruns. HP said the quarter had "unacceptable operating-expense growth" in the period. Costs and expenses are now up 19 percent for the first half of fiscal 1998 over 1997 levels, and overall profits are down by 5 percent from last year. The company noted that it will begin short work weeks in operations which have not met targets for fiscal performance. Since the HP 3000 division finished at 700 percent of quota for the first quarter by some unconfirmed reports, the prospect of anything other than a regular work week at CSY seems remote indeed. Just as remote is growth in overseas markets when Asian business is factored in. HP orders grew by 21 percent in the US, but only 5 percent in the rest of the world's markets. HP's statement about the quarter said troubled Asian economies had a serious impact on its measurement systems, "whose products typically have higher gross margins." The comment shows how HP's relatively small divisions can have large impacts on the company's overall profitability, regardless of their contribution in revenue. Highly profitable divisions like CSY have earned respect at the company's highest levels. Although HP has earned itself a foothold in PC short lists with its business growth in NetServers and desktops, the new increased market share have come at the expense of profits. Determined to stay in its PC and printer races, HP CFO Bob Wayman looked into his crystal ball to see a future with fewer HP divisions, especially those not meeting targets. "Given the pressure on gross margin and slowing in some of our businesses, we will aggressively adjust our spending plans while we continue to execute existing expense-management programs, such as consolidations," he said. Analysts and the market were their most dour in their outlook on a period that showed $685 million in profits on $12 billion in revenues. For investors, HP's chief sin seems to have been falling 12 cents a share short of expected earnings for the period. HP's stock fell 14 percent in the first 24 hours of the report. The company still remains $3 billion ahead of last year's run rate for the first six months. The market was willing to write off HP's slowing earnings as typical of companies which rely on PC sales and Asian markets. HP revs up Instant Information The replacement for the LaserROM documentation service is in the wings for HP 3000 customers, while HP 9000 sites are already enjoying the improvements. HP Instant Information is the name for HP's new generation of electronic documentation, both updated content and a new browser. The browser, a third-party product called DynaText which HP has licensed from Inso Corp., replaces the proprietary HP LaserROM browser software and is integrated into Instant Information. Instant Information delivers a new user interface, powerful search functionality, and enhanced print-on-demand capabilities. But DynaText is an application with doesn't run on Macintosh platforms and only prints to Postscript printers, so the new solution isn't without its downsides. However, Gavin Scott of Denkart notes that GhostScript, a freeware program available though the GNU services, will let users on all platforms view DynaText files and print them once the documentation files have been "printed to a file" with DynaText. Given HP's fidelity to its own PCL-based printer line -- PostScript options got more expensive on HP printers and HP began to use a PostScript clone in its latest models -- it's surprising that DynaText won't let customers to print to most HP LaserJets and inkjets. But HP appears to be taking its documentation away from paper altogether, even dropping the hardcopy Table of Contents that used to come with LaserROM. The Table of Contents will now be an online file in the new product, which is expected to ship with the MPE/iX 6.0 release late this summer. Instant Information won't cost any more than LaserROM, and LaserROM customers will get the new product automatically. CSY's Mariann Tymn has posted a question-and-answer file on the new documentation service on the Web. 3000s on both sides of auto merger HP 3000s are working on both sides of the merger that's been announced between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler last week (May 15). The plan will merge the U.S.'s third largest automaker with Germany's third largest to make the fifth-largest car company worldwide. Chrysler relies on an HP 3000 to manage the compensation for its top 500 executives, and that site in the US counts itself as the Number 8 HP 3000 ever to be turned on, sometime in 1973. Across the Atlantic in Europe, Daimler-Benz subsidiary ABB Daimler-Benz is an HP 3000 user and an Adager customer. The ABB stands for Asea Brown Boveri, a Swedish/Swiss consortium that bought a good portion of Westinghouse's divisions (mostly electrical power systems). As a result of that purchase, ABB Daimler Benz acquired Westinghouse's HP 3000s. HP comes up with a 5si LaserJet replacement The new LaserJet 8000 line is expected to replace the LaserJet 5si units, a popular choice in HP 3000 shops for system printers. The new LaserJet 8000, 8000 N and 8000 DN -- all black-only printers -- print 24 pages a minute at 300, 600 or 1,200 DPI. The printers use a 133-MHz RISC processor -- although not HP's -- and can be loaded with as much as 192Mb of memory. The series also uses HP's new mopier technology first introduced in the D640 lineup, which produces multiple copies of documents without separate processing. The printers use media as big as 11 by 17 inches, and HP said they can print to within one-fifth of an inch from the paper's edge. The 8000 N model is most likely to be paired up with HP 3000. It costs $3,458, and ships with 16 Mb of RAM and a JetDirect 600N internal print server with that has 10Base-T Ethernet capabilities. Editorial: Still leaning into Unix at HP's Web sites Despite the success that the HP 3000 division has shown to corporate leaders, there are parts of HP where enterprise computers are considered HP 9000s by default. Take the HP Web site's main page at http://www.hp.com. Clicking on the page's link for Enterprise Computing steers a prospect directly into the HP 9000 pages. Not long ago the link used to give prospects a choice of either 3000s or 9000s. The blind choice is even more interesting considering what that 9000 division (ESY) has posted about the ballyhooed mainframe unplugging project of 1996. That was the year HP was proud to trumpet that it was free of IBM and Amdahl big iron, even arranging a party to celebrate. Skip over the gateways and browse to http://ww w.hp.com/esy/solutions/mainframe_alt/success/how3.html to see how HP 3000s took over both OMNI and HEART order applications from mainframes and run them successfully today. The first IBM mainframe was shipped out of HP's datacenter in early August 1994 as a result of the 3000's work. HP IT staff reported to us that at the time MPE/iX was more enterprise-ready than HP-UX. However, if you follow the links to the next page in the story at http://ww w.hp.com/esy/solutions/mainframe_alt/success/how4.html you'll see the old ESY thinking is dying hard. At the least the 9000 division's perspective of the future is still hanging on. A sentence placed well after the description of the 3000's success forecasts that "the order management is already scheduled to be re-engineered to Unix for better application and tool availability, flexibility and price/performance." All we can say about that price/performance bluster is "Yeah, right." It looks like this part of HP -- the ESY group -- is entertaining the same pipe dream to move off MPE/iX as others in the 3000 community. It's like all those five-year plans to replace the 3000 we hear about, the ones that never seem to get to year zero and actually get executed. We'll believe HP's rehosting when it happens. I can't wait to see how much HP-UX iron they'll need to throw at the applications to get them to perform better than MPE/iX today. Remember, these are applications that were finally moved onto a new host after 26 years. It might take that long to develop a version of a Unix solution that can outperform the HP 3000s. Get a head start on DNS services with your 3000 You don't have to wait for the 6.0 release of MPE/iX to let your 3000s manage their own Domain Name Services (DNS). That's because the same version of the software ready for the 6.0 release is available to you today from its creator, Coast Community College wizard Mark Bixby. Called BIND/iX, the software is now in what he calls "the official 8.1.2 production release, which includes the MPE port and thus will compile 'straight out of the box' on MPE. BIND is the most commonly used DNS server on the Internet. BIND makes your domain names visible to the Internet, as well as handling client requests to resolve domain names other than your own. Prior to BIND/iX, an HP 3000 shop had to rely on some other machine to host their organization DNS information. Now you can host it locally on your HP 3000." You'll need Syslog/iX to capture the logging information that BIND/iX will generate. It's also available at Bixby's site. Steer to http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/bindix. html to get the latest BIND/iX, the one HP will start supporting officially in late summer with the 6.0 release. You can download Syslog/iX from http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/syslo gix.html. HP 3000s now have an official MIME type The two leading HP file transfer programs now have official MIME types for transfer of their respective file formats, so it's easier than ever before to e-mail 3000 files as attachments. 3k Associates' founder Chris Bartram reported that "two MIME types have now been officially registered by the IETF for use in any applications: application/vnd.wrq-hp3000-labelled application/vnd.minisoft-hp3000-save Bartram adds, "So, for those interested in transporting HP 3000-specific files around the 'net, you now have two officially-registered MIME type choices to use. For instance, if you want to send (e-mail or via WWW) an HP 3000 file encoded using Reflection's R1-labelled format, you can use the first type; if you want to send it encoded using Minisoft's "hp3000 save attributes" format, use the second." Bartram adds that he expects it to take a while for the new types to make their way into browsers and other e-mail packages. Naturally, Bartram's own NetMail/3000 e-mail sever and transport mechanisms already support both labels. You can contact him for more details or to download a demo copy. Free stuff: a basic line editor for use with Samba/iX If you're making plans to use Samba/iX to link your 3000s with NT servers -- a smart move considering Samba/iX will be supported by summer's end -- you may want another free piece of software to edit files from your desktop. Lars Appel, the wizard who ported Samba to the 3000, recommends this free tool: "If dealing with bytestream files on the 3000 side is okay (and compilers like COBOL/iX, C/iX or GNU gcc/gxx as well as Java/iX happily process bytestream files) you definitely should give PFE (Programmer's File Editor) a try: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cp aap/pfe/ "It's freeware and works nicely together with Samba/iX as it can save files in either DOS or Unix format (CR LF or LF as line terminator). I like it." Appel notes there are other editors out there for purchase that are more MPE aware, like Robelle's Qedit for Windows."I have played with a number of them, and strongly recommend picking up the trial versions that are usually available to find out which product matches your individual needs best." Copyright 1998, The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved.