Robelle Tech: A New Book About the HP 3000

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October 2003

Boosting Your e3000 Productivity

A New Book About the HP 3000

By Bob Green

You may be surprised that we would publish a new book on the HP 3000, just as HP has announced the sunset of the system.

But there is more interest in 3000 information now than any time in the last eight years, because sites are now actually faced with the possibility of migrating their applications or adjusting them for increased self-sufficiency if they decide to homestead some applications.

The title of the book is HP 3000 Evolution, available for $25. You can purchase it online at www.robelle.com/books.

Who Should Read This Book?

We aimed this book at the entire HP 3000 community. It contains useful and new information about homesteading, migrating, and keeping your 3000 finely tuned. In fact, our suspicion is that people will approach the migration issue on an application by application basis. Those that are relatively easy to migrate, will be migrated. Those that are difficult, or not worth the expense, will stay on the 3000 and be homesteaded.

There are three sections to HP 3000 Evolution: Resources for Homesteading, HP 3000 Tune Up, and Migrating a 3000 Application. Plus, an introductory section describing in detail the earlier history of the HP 3000.

No single book could be big enough to contain everything there is to say on these topics, so we have made a special effort to track down all the on-line articles and papers that expand on each chapter. They are an integral part of the book, making the effective size several thousand pages. And so you won’t have to type in some fairly obscure Web addresses, we have included all the links in the book’s Web page.

The Contributors

We started with our own resources at Robelle, papers we had already written and new topics that we were able and willing to write. However, there are many topics that we know little about. So we asked experts in the 3000 field to contribute chapters on their specialties. Authors include: Chris Edler, Paul Edwards, Marius Schild, Neil Armstrong, John Burke, Alan Wyman and Alan Heter, Stan Sieler and Gavin Scott, Ken Robertson, Eugene Volokh, Alfredo Rego, Fred White, Steve Hammond, Wayne Boyer, Alan Yeo, Gunnar Fredlund, Michael Marxmeier, Terry O’Brien, Aaron Holmes, Dave Lo, and Glenn Cole.

Finally, we still felt the need for some additional perspective and depth. And we remembered the many fine articles in The 3000 Newswire. Editor Ron Seybold graciously allowed us to cherry-pick a half dozen articles to fill gaps in our book. Many thanks to all the authors.

Production of the Book

We got the idea for this book about June 1, and had the printed books arrived at HP World in Atlanta on July 30. We were able to do it that quickly because of some interesting new technology called “on-demand printing.” We wrote the book in Microsoft Word (please suggest something better, please!), then converted it to a PDF file and provided that to a firm called On Demand Manuals (www.ondemandmanuals.com). They created a color cover from our rough cover design, then integrated our PDF file into their production printing computer and web site.

The book is printed directly from the PDF file and bound, all in one step. The result is a very professional-looking book, as good as any other printer we have used. In fact, we do all of our product manuals with this method now (no inventory to worry about making obsolete, fast delivery, easy updates, any print quantity from one to a thousand copies).

And we can update the book with little effort. In fact, we have already created a second edition of HP 3000 Evolution that fixes the errors that everyone spotted after the initial printing. Plus we added a new chapter on Eloquence by Michael Marxmeier. And this was two weeks after HP World!

Now, whenever anyone wants a copy of the HP 3000 Evolution book, they just go to this Web page: www2.ondemandmanuals.com/robelle

After giving your credit card number, the book is printed instantly and shipped direct to you, usually in less than 24 hours.