net.digest – July 2003

 

If you monitored HP3000-L over the last several months you would certainly not get the impression that the HP e3000 was a machine going away anytime soon. The number of quality technical threads continues to increase at a surprising pace. I easily had enough material for two or three month’s worth of “Hidden Value” and “net.digest”. It has been several years since I could say that. Of course this could simply be because there weren’t any “big issues” like war, religion or gun control (which is sort of a religion to some I guess) being debated. However, it could also be that the hype over migration has died off with many organizations deciding to hunker down for the time being and getting back to the work of running their business. Time will tell.

I always like to hear from readers of net.digest and Hidden Value. Even negative comments are welcome. If you think I’m full of it or goofed, or a horse's behind, let me know. If something from these columns helped you, let me know. If you’ve got an idea for something you think I missed, let me know. If you spot something on HP3000-L and would like someone to elaborate on what was discussed, let me know. Are you seeing a pattern here? You can reach me at john@burke-consulting.com.

 

HPWorld 2003 – Let’s all come to praise MPE not to bury it.

 

From August 11 through August 15, Interex will be holding HPWorld 2003 at the Georgia World Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia. As co-Chairman of SIGMPE, I’d like to invite (implore?) everyone possible to join my co-Chair Donna Garverick and myself at the last SIGMPE meeting before end of sales for the HP e3000; and, possibly, the last SIGMPE meeting ever. I hope that is not the case, but it is up to those with a continuing interest in MPE to keep the flame alive. We know that many sites plan to continue running the HP e3000 for years to come. Let’s try to make this the biggest SIGMPE meeting ever. SIGMPE is scheduled to meet Wednesday, August 13 at 2:50 PM, smack dab in the middle of the conference, so there is no excuse not to attend SIGMPE if you make it to HPWorld 2003.

One major topic of discussion will be the 2003 (and possibly final) SIB and HP’s response (see below). At the HPWorld 2003 SIGMPE meeting HP will officially report on its progress. At the 2003 HP e3000 Solutions Symposium Mike Paivenen of HP strongly suggested that vCSY would continue to work on specific enhancements even after October 31, 2003 if there is obvious value to its customers. So, there is at least a chance we will have another SIB. The SIGMPE meeting is your best opportunity to lobby on behalf of your favorite enhancements.

 

HPWorld 2003 – Welcome to the world of Big Brother

 

While I’m on the topic of HPWorld, let me note a few differences this year. From the home page for HPWorld, we have that it is “produced by the Interex and Encompass user groups in partnership with HP”. This little phrase is having big implications. For the first time ever that I am aware of (SIG Softvend excluded), some sessions will be covered by NDAs; i.e. if you do not have an NDA on file, you will not be allowed to attend. Supposedly, as part of your registration materials, will be information about how to file an NDA. Presumably this will be noted on your badge in some fashion. Besides the obvious silliness of requiring NDAs to something you have to pay $$$ to attend (the old HP used to lay out product roadmaps with the stipulation they were not a commitment, just a proposed direction), the HPWorld web site does not indicate, as far as I can tell, which sessions will be subject to NDA. So how are you to know whether you will need to file an NDA? Several attempts to get a response from Interex have been ignored. I guess it’s a secret which sessions are secret. Do you suppose the various roundtables will require NDAs so as to keep out the press? [Remember the absurdity last year of Ron Seybold being barred from the HP e3000 Management Roundtable?]

Big Brother really comes into play this year to reign in speakers. First of all, there is exactly one technical session in the MPE track about MPE. Virtually everything else is about migrating. Second, here are some highlights from the “HP World 2003 Presentation Guidelines”.

 

By the way, if you are still around Friday morning, and I manage to negotiate the minefield that is the “Presentation Guidelines”, come hear me give an unbiased presentation on: “Build, Buy, Port or Stay? Choosing a winning Strategy for your HP e3000 Transition”.

 

Will SPL become freeware?

 

Last month someone posed a question about creating and managing KSAM files from within a BASIC program on the HP 3000. The answer was that you can do it but you need some SPL code to do the heavy lifting. Wirt Atmar even contributed the code to manage both CM and NM KSAM files. Unfortunately, the person asking the original question does not have SPL, which led to a brief posting from Wirt (somewhat of a novelty, the “brief” part that is) on the history of SPL. SPL was the original low-level language, or System Programming Language, for the HP 3000, the language in which everything else was written, including most of the operating system itself. Some things are still written in SPL; for example, Editor and Query. SPL was initially distributed free with all HP 3000s. Later it was put on the price list, which only served to limit its distribution because most new sites did not know what it was or what it could do. Even when they learned, they balked at the $5000 price tag.

The history of BASIC/V is a little different, but it too long since disappeared off the corporate price list. About a year or two ago, HP allowed Wirt Atmar, a long time evangelist for BASIC, and his company, to freely distribute BASIC/V from its web site. In his posting on the history of SPL, Atmar graciously offered to do the same thing with SPL if HP would allow it. There is nothing official yet, but there is a good chance this will happen sometime this fall. Perhaps SPL will also be put on JAZZ?

 

The 2003 SIB: If this were baseball, a 400 average would be considered great.

 

In early June, Jeff Vance reported HP’s response to the 2003 SIB top 10, “We have a positive response for 40% of the top 10 items: we plan on continuing our PowerPatch process through end-of-support, we will keep our documentation on the HP net or allow a 3rd party(ies) to host it, we will ensure that large disk drives and FTP'ing large files work on MPE/iX, and we plan on implementing CI functions.” This generated a negative reaction from several people on HP3000-L. I would like to share my response to HP3000-L:

Putting my SIGMPE co-Chair hat on, first, I would like to thank Jeff Vance and all the folks in vCSY who worked hard to provide a response to the 2003 SIB. We (SIGMPE, etc.) have been pushing to get a response well in advance of HPWorld 2003 and they came through. Considering the results were available only three months ago and the two Solutions Symposia also occurred during this time period, I think having a response now is very impressive and shows the commitment to customers that still exists in what remains of CSY.I think Jeff Vance was being a little too self-critical by claiming only a 40% positive response. I consider the responses to 2, 3, 7, 8 and 10 basically positive (note that when the SIB was conducted, HP had not committed to providing ANY PowerPatches, let alone two per year). This gives a 50% positive responsive.

As for the remaining 5 items, let me give a little perspective. Item 5 (gigabit LAN connectivity) was a late addition to the SIB. We reasoned that this might not be too difficult and would aid some of the larger sites. Finishing 5th indicates there was certainly some interest in this among the user community. I'm disappointed HP has not committed to taking this one on; however, the fact HP has responded with "no plans" does not necessarily consign this item to the scrap heap forever. Had HP responded positively to any of items 1 (remove CPU throttling), 4 (license ss_config to third parties), 6 (enable MPE/iX 7.x to boot on 9x7s) and 9 (bundle all of Allbase with IMAGE/SQL), I would have been shocked - dancing in the street perhaps, but still shocked. We do not believe HP will agree to any of these items, if at all, until after (possibly well after) end of sales. However, we wanted to keep these items on the table so they would not be forgotten. "no plans", while not positive, is certainly much better than "not unless Hell freezes over". If we hold another SIB, I will campaign to again put all 5 "no plans" items back on the ballot.

 

Some CI fun and games compiled from three separate threads

 

Q: I'm wondering how to change the default delimiters for WORD/XWORD? By the way, where is it documented?

Q: I came across a situation where the QUOTE function would be perfect, but I'm getting an unknown variable/function error. It is sort of documented in the HELP system; i.e. you can find it in the text, but HELP QUOTE does not work. What is going on here?

Q: I wrote a long command file today, then tried to execute it from my typical environment (Qedit) and got

 

(YODA/SYS/PUB)/:ABORT4BU.OPERATOR

Command not programmatically executable. (CIERR 12)

 

However, if I instead use :XEQ ABORT4BU.OPERATOR, it works fine. What is going on?

 

Jeff Vance, CI Architect provided the answers: You cannot change the default delimiters for WORD and XWORD, that is, you cannot create new default delimiters, but you can override them by specifying a string value for WORD's or XWORD's second parameter. Examples using WORD and XWORD can be found in Jeff Vance’s CI Programming paper available at http://jazz.external.hp.com/papers/SolSymposium_03/CIProgramming_files/frame.htm. WORD() first appeared in 5.5 (base) and is described at:

http://jazz.external.hp.com/papers/Communicator/5.5/ci_enhancements.html. XWORD() first appeared in 6.0 (base) and is described at:

http://www.docs.hp.com/mpeix/onlinedocs/30216-90269/30216-90269.html.

The QUOTE() function was introduced late in 5.5 (maybe PP 5?). The documentation for QUOTE() was removed in MPE/iX 6.0 base release, and the code was removed in MPE/iX 6.0 Exp 1. The REPL() function should meet your needs.

The character "4" is being interpreted as a terminator when MPE does the parsing and the command thus becomes "ABORT" not the implied run you were expecting. For MPE V compatibility reasons the MPE/iX CI uses the same command name parsing rules as the old MPE V CI.