Early HP 3000 history

February 2002

Boosting your e3000 productivity

Early HP 3000 history

By Bob Green

With HP announcing its sunset for the HP 3000 in 2007, I thought some of you might be feeling nostalgic for some history. The original 16-bit HP 3000 (later called “the Classic”) was released in 1972 and re-engineered into a 32-bit RISC processor in the 1980s.

Background (1964-1969)

The HP 2000 Time-Shared Basic System (1968) was HP’s first big success in computers. The 2000 line was based on the 2116 computer, basically a DEC PDP-8 stretched from 12 to 16 bits. HP inherited the design of the 2216 computer when it acquired Data Systems, Inc. in 1964 from Union Carbide. The 2000 supported 16 to 32 time-sharing users, writing or running BASIC programs.

This product was incredibly successful, especially in schools. The original 2000A system was created by two guys working in a corner: Mike Green, who went on to found Tandem much later, and Steve Porter, who also went on to found his own computer company. Heavy sales of the 2000 brought the computer division of HP its first positive cash flow, and with it the urge to “make a contribution.” The engineers and programmers in Cupertino said to themselves, “If we can produce a time-sharing system this good using a junky computer like the 2116, think what we could accomplish if we designed our own computer.”

Abortive First Try (1969-1970)

The project to design a new computer, code-named “Omega,” brought new people into the Cupertino Lab, people who had experience with bigger operating systems on Burroughs and on IBM computers. The Omega team came up with a 32-bit mainframe: It was stack-oriented, had 32-bit instructions, data and I/O paths, eight index registers, up to 4 megabytes of main memory, up to four CPUs sharing the same memory and bus, both code segmentation and data segmentation, and a high-level systems programming language instead of Assembler; it was capable of multiprogramming from the start, and had support for many programming languages (not just BASIC as on the 2000).

The Omega was designed to compete with big CPUs. But Omega looked too risky to management. HP would have had to borrow long-term funds to finance the lease of machines to compete directly with IBM. So it was cancelled. Some of the Omega architects left HP, but most stayed. “Several people who remained took to wearing black-velvet armbands, in mourning for the cancelled project,” according to Dave Packard in his 1995 book, The HP Way.

The 16-Bit Alpha (1970-71)

Most of the Omega team were re-assigned to the Alpha project. This was an existing R&D project to produce a new 16-bit computer design. The Omega engineers and programmers were encouraged to continue with their objectives, but to limit themselves to a 16-bit machine. Alpha was Omega squeezed into 16 bits: 128 KB of main memory (max), one index register, and Huffman coding to support the many address modes desired (P+- for constants, DB+ for global variables, Q- for parameters, Q+ for local variables, and S- for expression evaluation).

Same People, Smaller Hardware, Bigger Software

The original design objectives for the Omega Operating System were limited to multiprogrammed batch. The Omega designers put off time-sharing to a later release that would be supported by a front-end communications processor. The cancellation of Omega gave the software designers another year to think of features that should be included in the Alpha Operating System.

As a result, the software specifications for this much smaller machine were now much more ambitious that those for the bigger Omega. They proposed batch, time-sharing and real-time processing, all at the same time, all at first release, and all without a front-end processor.

The instruction set of the Alpha was designed by the systems programmers who were going to write the compilers and operating system for the machine. The prevailing “computer science” philosophy of the day was that if the machine architecture was close to the structure of the systems programming languages, it would be easier to produce efficient, reliable software for the machine and you wouldn’t need to use Assembler (that is, a high-level language would be just as efficient and the code would be much easier to maintain).

The Alpha was a radical machine and it generated infectious enthusiasm. It had virtual memory, recursion, SPL instead of Assembler, friendly MPE with consistent batch and online capabilities instead of OS-360 with its obscure command syntax, variable-length segments instead of inflexible pages, and stacks instead of registers. The Alpha was announced as the HP 3000 with a fancy cabinet of pizza-oven doors, available in four colors. Prospective users were assured that it would support 64 users in 128 KB of memory.

Harsh Realities (1972-73): 200 Pounds of Armor on a 90-Pound Knight

I worked at Cupertino at the time and was assigned to coordinate the production of the ERS (External Reference Specifications) for the new software. I was as excited as everyone else. The first inkling I had that the HP 3000 was in trouble came in an MPE design meeting to review the system tables needed in main memory. Each of the ten project members described his part of MPE and his tables: code segment table, data segment table, file control blocks, etc. Some tables were memory-resident and some were swappable. When the total memory-resident requirements were calculated, they totaled more than the 128 KB maximum size of the machine.

MPE wouldn’t fit, so everyone squeezed: The programmers squeezed in 18-hour days, seven days a week trying to get MPE to work. Managers were telling their bosses that there was no problem, they just hadn’t had a chance to “optimize” MPE yet. When they did, the managers maintained, it would all turn out as originally promised. So marketing went on selling the machines to the many existing happy users of the HP 2000. As the scheduled date for the first shipment approached, the Cupertino factory was festooned with banners proclaiming “November Is a Happening.”

The first HP 3000 was shipped November 1, 1972 to Lawrence Livermore Hall of Science in Berkeley, California. But it was incomplete: It had no spooling, no real-time, etc. It supported only two users, and it crashed every 10 to 20 minutes. Customers who had been promised 64 terminals and who were used to the traditional HP reliability became increasingly frustrated and angry.

Eventually the differences between the HP 3000 reality and the HP 3000 fantasy became so large and well-known that there was even a news item in ComputerWorld magazine about it — the first bad press ever for HP. Bill and Dave were not amused. The product was withdrawn from the market for a short time.

Struggling to Restore Lost Credibility (1973-74)

Hewlett-Packard had no experience with bad publicity from low-quality products. Paul Ely was brought in from the successful Microwave Division to straighten out the computer group. The first priority was to help out the existing HP 3000 users, the ones who had trusted HP and placed early orders. Many of them received free 2000 systems to tide them over until the 3000 was improved. The second priority was to focus the programmers’ energy on fixing the reliability of MPE.

Once the HP managers realized the magnitude of the 3000 disaster, the division was in for lean times. Budgets and staffs that had swollen to handle vast projected sales were cut to the bone. Training, where I worked, was cut from 70 people to fewer than 20 in one day. HP adopted a firm “no futures” policy in answering customer questions (a policy that lasted for years after the HP 3000 trauma, but was forgotten by the time of the Spectrum-RISC project). The new division manager was strictly no nonsense. Many people had gotten in the habit of taking their coffee breaks in the final-assembly area, and kibitzing with the teams testing the new 3000s. Ely banned coffee cups from the factory floor and instituted rigorous management controls over the prima donnas of the computer group.

By continuing to work long weeks, the programmers managed to reduce MPE crashes from 48 a day to two, and to increase users from two to eight. Marketing finally took a look at what the 3000 could actually do, and found a market for it as a replacement for the IBM 1130. They sold the 3000 as a machine with more software capability than an IBM 1130 that could be available to a number of users at once instead of just one. Eventually the 3000 became a stable, useful product. To my mind, this happened when someone discovered the “24-day time bomb” bug. If you kept your HP 3000 running continuously for 24 days (2^31 milliseconds) without a shutdown or a crash, the internal clock register would overflow and the system would suddenly be set back by 25 days!

The Comeback: Fulfilling the Promise (1975-76)

The original 3000 had a minimum usable memory size of 96 KB and a maximum of 128 KB — not much of an expansion. The Series II went beyond that 16-bit limitation by adding “bank” registers for each of the key pointers (that is, code segment, data segment, and so on). Thus the Series II could support up to 512 KB, a much more reasonable configuration for the software power of MPE.

The choice of SPL as the HP 3000 machine language instead of Assembler truly began to pay off now in an avalanche of excellent software: The IMAGE database (again, two guys working in a corner: Jon Bale and Fred White) was soon joined by compilers for COBOL and RPG, a screen handler, and other tools to support transaction processing.

Concurrent, consistent batch and time-sharing was now a reality and the goal of concurrent real-time was finally dropped as unrealistic. The HP 3000 hardware now matched the software written for it. Business users discovered that the 3000 was great for online transaction processing; they dragged Hewlett-Packard firmly into the commercial information processing world.

At last, with the Series 64 in 1982, the 3000 reached the original target of 64 users on a single machine.

P.S. For another interesting history of the HP 3000, read HP’s Early Computers, Part Three: The Strongest Castle: The Rise, Fall and Rise of the HP 3000 by Chris Edlar at www.3kassociates.com/papers/hp3000_history.html.