As you read this, we are less then two weeks from the end of sales for
the HP 3000 – and little closer to answers for many of the questions asked
almost two years ago when HP first made its discontinuance announcement. Will
there ever be an emulator of any kind? Will HP allow the transfer of source
code to OpenMPE, Interex or any other third party under any circumstances? Will
HP allow the conversion of used HP9000s that correspond to HP 3000 models? Etc.
Let me be perfectly blunt. In my opinion, HP has done little more than throw
its HP 3000 customers enough crumbs to prevent mass defections. Furthermore, it
has no real intention to allow MPE-IMAGE to survive in any form. It has dragged
its collective feet at every opportunity; searching for reasons why something
cannot be done, rather than searching for ways to make something positive
happen for its once loyal HP 3000 customers. The truth is that when HP made its
announcement it had no reasonable solution for its SMB HP 3000 customers
running mostly homegrown software. In my opinion it still has no reasonable
solution two years later.
September marked
the 58th anniversary of the first real computer “bug” when a "moth
[was] found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken
Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University”. In the same
vein we had a pun-fest on HP3000-L when someone quoted HP’s new ad that claims
it might be able someday to make a cell phone so small an ant could use it. We had the “antsaphone”, text messaging
as an “antscillary” function, “ANTicipation” of the first shipment, a question
whether it would have an “ANTenna”, and of course the observation that HP
marketing has “HIGH hopes. They've got HIGH hopes. They've got high, apple pie
in the sky hopes...” On a less amusing note was the report that this summer HP
bought TWO $30 million Gulfstream jets. Many people wondered how many layoffs
would have to occur to pay for HP execs to fly around the world in style. The
there was the ironic comment on HP’s “Invent” slogan when CNET News reported
that “HP buys into Web services management - The company plans to acquire
start-up Talking Blocks to accelerate its push into the Web services management
market.” There were many more off-topic threads of interest as well as the
usual political and religious rants; however, there was still a lot of good
technical comment for Hidden Value and net.digest, some of which follows.
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.
Paul Edwards, former HP SE, long time independent MPE and IMAGE trainer and MPE and IMAGE consultant recently faced the problem of replacing the disk drives in his 9x8 system. He decided to pretend to be a homesteader or self-maintainer, go out on the Internet and acquire the new drives, and install them in his system. His experience and the checklist he developed along with some commentary follows:
LDEV 2 on my 9x8 with MPE/iX 7.5 was not responding. A power down and restart resolved the problem for a few hours, but then it would stop responding again. The drive was an internal HP branded Seagate ST34573N 4gb device. I decided to replace both internal drives with larger drives to test 7.5's solution to the 4gb limit on LDEV 1. After I consulted IODFAULT.PUB.SYS for SE disk drives, I purchased 2 Seagate ST19171N 9gb drives on the Internet. When I first tried to do an INSTALL to the two new drives, I received the following error:
Start reading and
building labels
Status -4 ($FFFC)
From subsystem 113 ($71)
ERROR on first
read disk page 1 from rendezvousio
System Abort 341
from SUBSYSTEM 148
Secondary Status:
Info= -4, Subsystem 113
SYSTEM HALT 7,
$0155
I could see the drives with ODE MAPPER, so they were configured OK and there were no problems with jumpers or terminators. It turns out the drives needed low-level formatting before MPE could use them.
After several false starts, I came up with the following guide for installing disk drives. Of course if you do not need to replace the system volume set or any of its components, you do not need to do an INSTALL. [Caveat: This may not be the only solution but it worked for me. Other system configurations may not work this way.]:
Debug
>msec #n.0,8
>msec #n.100,40
>exit
There will be a lot of prompts for each line and enter zero to each one. This resets the drive header information. [Editor’s note: Someone asked about using the SCRATCHVOL command in Volutil. This will not work in this case; you need to reset more. Stan Sieler contributed the following: SCRATCHVOL only flips a bit somewhere in one of the first two sectors, while the two "Modify Secondary storage" commands above zap a lot more data (68 bytes worth, to be exact, assuming current input base is still hex).]
Thanks to Paul
for this great guide for homesteaders and self-maintainers.
A user writes,
"The console port on our N-Class locked up. HP says the control board the
console is hooked into needs to be reset. The memory on the board filled up
because console messages were routed to memory becasue there was no display for
the messages to go to. So it's not possible to go headless? This seems strange
since the console logs are going to a file. Is there anyway to prevent this?"
One suggestion involved configuring the port to ignore flow control. The other
suggestion, and the reason for including this here, was from Mike Hornsby, with
some additional information supplied by Lars Appel: "Take a look at
EASYTIME.PUB.SYS. When enabled it buffers the console messages to a file and
nothing goes to ldev 20. And if you change your mind and want console messages
back on the console, you can use ETSETUP.PUB.SYS to change the settings."
I always thought
Easytime had a lot of potential, but was pretty much ignored by HP for some
reason. It seemed to me the trapping mechanism could have been used as the
basis for a client server management console.
It is always a good idea to refresh one’s memory of how IMAGE works. And, it is especially good when the Father of IMAGE, Fred White, can do it. Here was the question: Say you have a record in a master set that lives at address 100, a second record tries to write to the same address, but is sent to record 133 with a pointer written at record 100. This process continues and we have a synonym chain. If you have a program that deletes records by record address (probably a bad choice), do the records move up in the chain? (i.e. the record at location 133 is deleted, what happens to the records further down in the chain, do the move up 1 slot? Say you delete record 100, does record 133 move to slot 100?
David Powell
replied: I think the only time records actually move is when you delete the
chain head (address 100 in your example). When you nuke a secondary, all that
happens to other records is that pointers get updated." This prompted Fred
White to note: "David is absolutely right (almost). The chain count in the
primary also gets decremented. Master entries may be moved but only if they are
Secondaries (of a Synonym chain) and only under one of the following two
circumstances: