HP finishes MPE System Improvement Ballot items from 2001

HP reported that it has completed all but two of the top 11 items on the 2001 MPE/iX System Improvement Ballot (SIB), declining to do the top two items because of changes in the 3000 labs’ mission after HP’s discontinuance announcement of last November.

HP has done an investigation on the IMAGE and multiple threads project, the top-rated item in customer balloting that ended in mid-2001. A large-effort project to improve the performance of the HP 3000 database, multiple threads didn’t make the cut in light of more urgent work to prepare for the system’s afterlife.

HP also declined to do system-wide CI variables for the HP 3000, deciding that wrappers available on the Jazz Web site could serve instead.

HP delivered the other nine top items from the SIB, including full LDEV 1 disk utilization (available in MPE/iX 7.5) as well as full support for sendmail in the 3000’s Fundamental Operating System, starting with the 7.0 release. HP also added a SHUTDOWN command (available in both 7.0 and 7.5); provided Samba password encryption; improved Java runtime performance; better integrated MPE with HP’s UPS units; and provided freeware support for PHP, OpenSSL and NTP on the Jazz Web server (PHP support is available on the Invent3k server). Perl is being supported as freeware as well, also through Jazz. Java startup time has also been reduced, through the use of the JAVACI routines available on Jazz (jazz.external.hp.com).