Interex volunteers have decided to cancel this year’s meeting of SIG 3000, a conference made up of the user group’s Special Interest Groups devoted to the HP 3000. The meeting drew a little more than 50 users last year, but they gathered at HP’s Oak Room meeting space on the HP 3000 campus in Cupertino, Calif. SIG3000, and its predecessor the Interex Programmer’s Forum (IPROF), always touted such close access to HP’s development staff for the 3000; the 2001 meeting was held at the same HP location where the meetings started in 1994.

The exhaustive technical debates among the most experienced HP 3000 users, with HP’s 3000 engineers taking notes, often showed the public new directions for upcoming releases of the MPE/iX operating systems. HP system architects who were rarely seen in public forums were available for discussions at the meetings, but attendance had declined in the last three years. At the same time, HP began to narrow the scope of enhancement prospects which the SIG 3000 talks might impact.

One regret we have about the cancelled meeting is that it cut short the chance for younger blood to lead the seasoned 3000 community. David Floyd, son of the HP ERP expert Terry Floyd and a SIG leader for the 3000’s Fortran group, was set to chair this year’s SIG 3000. The younger Floyd said the dwindling attendance of SIG 3000 coincided with the community’s haste to offer up items to HP for this year’s HP 3000 System Improvement Ballot. Winnowing many user enhancement requests into a manageable ballot which the whole community could vote upon was the chief accomplishment of last year’s meeting. Floyd said that work for this year has already been done by conference call and e-mail among SIG leaders, MPE Forum leaders and Interex organizer Stephanie Gray.

“We decided we’re going to do it all on the Internet nowadays,” Floyd said, “a conference call to get [the ballot] organized, and then put it out there on the Internet for the voting.” Interex will release documents explaining the items on the ballot along with the ballot itself, “probably to the 3000-L [mailing list and newsgroup],” Floyd added. As for face-time between HP engineers and anyone who paid the $100 to attend SIG 3000, Interex’s flagship conference will handle that. “The only ones needing the face-to-face time with the HP engineers were SIG-IMAGE and SIG-MPE,” Floyd said, “and they get that at HP World. We didn’t see the point of SIG 3000 with more than half of its attendees being SIG leaders.”