Meanwhile, extra rebates of 50 percent on Series 9x7 systems will also end on April 30. Only US and Canada customers are affected by the deadlines

Keep your eyes peeled for news on the HP 3000 Spring sale, scheduled to go public on May 3.

3000 swings a bigger stick in HP, says Sterling

Customers wondering what's becoming of their 3000 division can look to the latest reorganization of HP as evidence of a bigger profile for the system. Even in a platform-agnostic company like HP, attention must be paid to a product like the 3000 that survived in spite of some unwise management decisions in the middle 90s. Now 3000 division General Manager Harry Sterling is getting bumped up in the HP ranks to reward his group's business savvy -- the kind that has 26-year-old technology still selling to new customers. Sterling's promotion to General Manager of the new Business and Technical Solution's division lets him retain the GM post for the 3000 while getting wider access to HP resources in the new Business Critical Computing Unit.

CSY had a hard time getting invited to all the R&D meetings in the old Enterprise Computing unit at HP, but now Sterling's new duties give the division a place at the technical planning table. There's also benefits to be had in being on the mainline for marketing efforts. We don't doubt that less of the CSY management details will float through Sterling's office -- he's going to be spending time in Richardson, Texas with the Technical Software group there. Fortunately, the 3000 division process leaves Sterling's seconds -- marketing manager Christine Martino and R&D chief Winston Prather -- plenty of room to work. It all has a chance to succeed because no HP division stays closer to its customers than CSY -- which is what gave Sterling the chance to step up in the first place.

N-Class previews the HP 3000 of late 2000

HP introduced the future of the HP 3000 systems over on the Unix side of the house in mid-April with its N-Class Enterprise Server rollouts. The new computers are powered by the PA-8500 processors, and can be considered a predecessor to the newer HP 3000s expected to be introduced by the end of the Year 2000. HP rolled out the systems with a top -end eight-way, 440MHz configuration that delivers more than 10.2 gigaflops, with a SPECfp_rate that exceeds 1,900 and a
SPECint_rate that exceeds 2,000.

HP expects to start shipping the N-Class next month, with a Unix-based starting price at $48,000. The number means little to HP 3000 sites, since the 3000 implementation will include MPE/iX and IMAGE/SQL, additions that HP has learned to price higher than Unix counterparts to reflect the greater value.

The N-Class will have a familiar advocate at its rollout in 3000 GM Harry Sterling. HP is looking for the systems to drive applications in the technical computing market, a channel of ISVs that Sterling is now managing in his new role of Business and Technical Solution GM. Early looks at the N-Class performance may be of benefit to the 3000 division in preparation for its own rollout of the Ia-64-ready 3000s using the same processors.

Resellers regroup in aftermath of lawsuits

When HP swooped down on used hardware resellers Hardwarehouse and Abtech in mid-March with lawsuits, customers were forced to drop business deals with the two leading sources of used 3000 gear. Other suppliers have begun to move in to take over the space, while Abtech lays off staff and Hardwarehouse disappears from the 3000 scene. Customers began to talk up other sources of used 3000s, from brokers such as Advant (www.advant.com) and BlueLine (www.go4blue.com). There was also persistent messaging from Europe's Epoka (www.epoka.com) about availability of HP 3000s in 997, 995 and 959 sizes, all advertised with operating system and IMAGE database. After HP's clear edict about license transfers (no swapping software between systems), we can all be pretty sure everyone will want to avoid a lawsuit from HP and keep the sales above board and legal.

Some people said the illegal system sales took place because customers could see a lot of price increase for a 3000 on hardware that looked identical. Well, the operating system is really the cause of all that, but that isn't an issue with peripherals like disk and tape. Some customers are looking at why their peripherals seem to cost more from HP when ordered with an HP 3000. One example is DLT4000 tape units, said to be about $800 cheaper when ordered with an HP 9000 part number instead of HP 3000 (the hardware is identical and comes in with a warranty of a year). One customer reported he ordered the 9000 version of the drive and had it installed and running successfully in his internal HP 3000 configuration. He's waiting to see if HP Support will give him any trouble in adding the device to his HP 3000 support contract next year.

New FTP fixes, versions for 3000s

HP's Electronic Response Center sent out patch FTPFD90A into general release this past weekend, fixing a host of Service Requests for the included FTP/iX file transfer utility in MPE/iX 5.5. The patch repairs things like hangs after displaying a logon banner, puts of bytestream files, GETs of ASCII files in IMAGE mode that truncated records and repairs of the MPUT command under some circumstances. Perhaps most significantly, the patch lets customers transfer all MPE/iX file types, so long at the FTP/iX client and server (FTPSRVR) are of the same type.

HP's patch notes indicated that "All MPE/iX file types can be transferred between like MPE/iX/FTP/iX systems without the need for buildparms on the command line. Buildparms included on the command line will be ignored if the file is a non standard file type such as RIO, MESSAGE, KSAMXL, KSAM, SPOOL, PRIV code, etc. The use of buildparms is only accepted for standard file types (file code of zero). Non standard file type transfers to incompatible MPE/iX/FTP/iX versions will result in a data transfer failure message. You cannot append to non-standard MPE/iX file types with the use of this new feature. Non-Standard file transfers to non MPE/iX systems will also result in a data transfer failure. Non compatibility of client and server file transfer requests will result in appropriate error messages."

A HASH command toggles a display function which will puts up a hash ('#') symbol every 1024 characters of data transfer. A SITE TIMEOUT command works similar to the TIMEOUT command at the FTP client command prompt. It sends a timeout value to the peer FTP server (MPE/iX compatible version only) and establishes a timeout for the data connection based on that value.
Also from the HP CSY labs in Bangalore comes a SOCKSified FTP that enables HP 3000s to act as clients to connect to systems outside the your intranets. HP hinted at IPROF '99 last month about the improved FTP utility.

The software is freeware and can be downloaded from HP 3000 Jazz Web server. (http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/index.html) Look for the link to SOCKSified FTP Web Page.

The web page gives more information about the product, installation details and pointers to other sources. Nothing's perfect, yet: A pre-requisite for installation is availability of a SOCKS server, something not yet available for the HP3000. Such a server can be found on HP-UX and other Unix platforms). Customers can connect their SOCKSified FTP clients to SOCKS servers on any platform and FTP to sites outside their intranets.

HP Bangalore said the product has successfully undergone beta tests at a couple of customer sites. While it is meant to be run on the latest 6.0 version of MPE/iX , it can also run on MPE/iX 5.5 with PowerPatch 4 and above.

HP rolls out new 3000 ads in Computerworld, InfoWeek

Customers concerned about the visibility of the HP 3000 platform outside of the installed base might have smiled when coming to pages 44 and 45 of the April 19 ComputerWorld and in InfoWeek. There HP had placed two-page ads extolling the virtues of using an HP 3000 to deliver E-Services, the second coming of the Internet. With copy non-technical and a graphic of a champagne glass, HP's message was that if you'd been promoted in IT, your life could be so much easier with an HP 3000 delivering said E-Services, integrating with Unix and NT. Old news for the installed base, but the kind of message IBM has been promoting with systems such as AS/400 and System 390. The ad appeared just a couple weeks before HP kicked off its spring sale of HP 3000s.

A new Web server for 3000s from Java

Since the HP 3000 runs Java applications with little fuss, it can benefit from worldwide development of useful things like Web servers. HP's Lars Appel reports that a new Java-based Web server appears to run just fine on MPE/iX 6.0:

"I just happened to stumble across the Jigsaw web server on the http://www.w3.org site, which seems to be an Open Source and Pure Java implementation. As it does support Java Servlets, it made me curious enough to download and give it a try...

Looks like it works out of the box on MPE/iX 5.5.

By the way, Jigsaw comes with a JigAdmin GUI, which is not an applet but a standalone Java program. I just noticed that it can be run quite nicely off a Samba/iX share (using CPU, memory and graphical display capabilities of the PC). Oh, I guess, this will also work with Mac or Linux as SMB client, but I haven't tried.

See http://www.editcorp.com/personal/lars_appel/ for details.

Most Y2K compliant release not 6.0, but 5.5

Sites still working on getting absolutely Year 2000 compliant can look backward to the most compliant MPE/iX, not forward. It seems that the PowerPatch 6 version of MPE/iX 5.5 has more Y2K compliant patches than its 6.0 successor. Too bad, since you need 6.0 to get official HP support for Java/iX and Samba/iX. We expect the situation to change with the PowerPatch 1 release of 6.0, but we're unsure when that might surface. Rumors run from next month until the HP World show in August.

CSY takes on VT3K ownership

In keeping with its quest to make the HP 3000 better connected to non-3000s, the Commercial Systems Division has taken on ownership of VT3K, a key element in making the IT/Operations software more useful for HP 3000 owners. The HP-UX labs obsoleted the VT3K/9000 product last year, but CSY is in the process of re-introducing the product to solve problems in installing the MPE agent for IT/Operations

CSY considers IT/O critical to their plans and is working to release it as a free program. Users can obtain the current version of VT3K from the HP 3000 Jazz Web server at http://jazz.external.hp.com/src/vt3k/index.html

The page contains instructions for installing VT3K on your IT/O management server. This version of vt3k on JAZZ is the supported version for HP-UX 10.20.

Creating Cobol layouts with DataAid/3000

If you've got nothing but an IMAGE schema and need to generate Cobol layouts, Bill Seitz of Retriever Interactive has pointed out a solution. February's issue had a question in the HiddenValue column asking if anyone knew of a program that can create Cobol layouts from the IMAGE Schema. Retirever's DataAid/3000 product has that option. Contact Seitz at 770.509.7169.