The 2011 HP3000 Reunion was held Thursday, 9/22 through Saturday night, 9/24, at the Computer History Museum in San Jose California. I flew out from Austin Wednesday morning (thank you Southwest Airlines for the direct flight) and went to the new offices of Kenandy in Redwood City for an hour and a half meeting with Peter Stern, Rod Butters, and Pravin Kumar. I flew back Sunday morning after four days of intense knowledge transfer and fun.
CAMUS played a big part in the Reunion with a MANMAN Users Group meeting Friday from 4pm to 6pm in the Boole Room at the Museum, a party for ex-ASK employees and MANMAN users Friday night at the Cupertino Inn, partial sponsorship of the Stromasys technical presentation Saturday morning, and recognition along with Marxmeier, ScreenJet, The HP3000 Newswire, Speedware, and Robelle as major contributors to the Saturday night HP3000 Reunion Party.
Thursday’s all-day presentation on recent enhancements to the Eloquence database system (an IMAGE replacement on Linux, Windows, etc) by Michael Marxmeier was well attended. There was all the technical depth one could consume and Eloquence has grown into a wonderful product. Go check it out; it’s very reasonably priced (especially when compared to Oracle).
I think Sandra Kurtzig has done it again with the new Kenandy “no-erp” manufacturing applications. Peter Stern, Rod Butters, and Pravin Kumar gave a succinct (30 minute) presentation to kick off the CAMUS meeting at 3:30pm Friday in the Boole Room. Kenandy was developed over the last year and a half using the SalesForce toolsets which really gave them a good head start. It will be very recognizable to any MANMAN/MFG user, having an Item Master, BOMs, Routings, WO’s, PO’s, demand management and MRP. Apparently Sandy wrote some of the code herself, just like the early days of MANMAN. Check it out at www.kenandy.com …
Linda J. Tuerk’s 10 minute overview of why and how to use LinkedIn to enhance your image was well received and to the point. Go to www.SiliconValleySearch.com for details, and, of course, you can find her on LinkedIn.
Following Kenandy and Silicon Valley Search, Dr. Robert Boers delivered an hour and a half presentation on the latest Stromasys CHARON HPA/3000 virtual HP3000 product. It was amazing to learn that within a year, MANMAN (and everything else that runs on MPE/iX 7.5) will be running on Intel/AMD 64-bit machines. MPE Virtualization: what a home run! Dr. Boer, who came all the way from Switzerland to give his speech, showed MPE/iX running on a small Linux PC costing about $600 and it is expected to run many times faster than on an HP3000 “A” Class machine. They also had it running on Craig Lalley’s laptop in the same room; he’s been consulting on this project, but now it’s open to any developer with a good reason to download it… Look up HP3000 info at www.stromasys.com .
It was non-obvious to me that MPE would boot up in 2 or 3 minutes, mainly because all the memory, IO, and disc checking had been done by the underlying OS (ubuntu Linux in this case), but also because of the PDC rewrite they must have done. No more watching all the dots and 1’s, 2’s, and 3’s etc. going by on the console for 10 or 20 minutes (or longer on large-memory machines). It was a fairly technical presentation, but nothing compared to the following morning at 10:00 am in Room 336 at the Cupertino Inn (more on that later). CAMUS has a fairly accurate list of attendees and perhaps Terri G. Lanza will find time to publish it.
We all drove the 10 minutes back down 85 to the Cupertino Inn where the Ex-ASK Reunion Party had already started. There were over 40 former ASK employees and customers plus numerous MANMAN and MPE groupies enjoying the bar in the courtyard. Altho’ the conference call failed to happen, those present mingled for nearly 5 hours as food and beverage flowed and conversations got louder. Oh the stories we told! And the fond memories we revived…
Saturday morning in Room 336, about 30 hard-core MPE zealots gathered for a question/answer period with Dr. Boers and Igor Abramov (on Skype from Moscow). After most of us squeezed into the comfortable chairs around small circular tables in a hotel-room sized space, with many standing around the walls, Paul Taffel walked in, took one look at the big TV set and said “Now I see why Igor couldn’t get his visa to leave Russia.” Cracked me up because he did look like a mad scientist or perhaps Tolstoy himself with slightly more black hair in his beard.
The meeting began a bit awkwardly because almost none of the people present had seen the prior day’s presentation about CHARON HP3000 at the CAMUS Meeting yet we began with a question and answer session. After all, it was a room full of geniuses, so they were the bulk of the presentation themselves and didn’t know it. Since it was somewhere around midnight in Moscow and Igor Abramov is the chief architect of the project, he wanted to get on with it.
When nobody asked a question (hard to believe Dr. Boer had stunned this crowd), he handed the headset to Ron Seybold and said, “Surely you have a question, Ron.” Although I muttered under my breath (I thought) that this won’t be as technical a question as they were hoping for, never doubt that Ron Seybold will have a great question ready. And it was technical enough to get the ball rolling. It went on for an hour with Igor being a little difficult to understand because the Skype connection would sometimes hide the motion of his lips and he does have a Russian accent. Then it went another hour and a half with Dr. Boer and Craig Lalley taking on all questions and delivering all the right answers. It was like Christmas and Robert Boers was Santa Claus (there is a slight resemblance). MPE booted on both the laptop and the little Stromasys server Dr. Boers carried under his arm on his flight from Europe. Fun was had; DEBUG was run; Glance worked in Block Mode! Stan Sieler asked if it crashed in all known ways and pointed out that if it didn’t, it wasn’t right yet. Go to www.stromasys.com and follow HP3000 links for more details.
Saturday afternoon, after a CAMUS board meeting (myself, Terri G. Lanza, Mike Anderson, and John Serdensky), we went to the Computer History Museum about 5pm. I really want to thank John for taking all those photos and I can’t wait to see them. We were greeted at the registration table ($49 in advance, $60 at the door) by Abby Lentz and Ron Seybold who had pre-printed the name tags. Abby directed us to sign the huge “Dancing with the HP3000” poster velcro’d to the wall with the date we had first touched an HP3000. There were a lot of names on that poster and my 1978 was 11 years after the first date I spotted. 1967? Amazing – the guy who had the original ideas to build an HP business computer was there? Many of the early managers, designers, engineers, and programmers were present; some are still HP employees and contractors.
There was beer plus burgers and dogs then Stan Sieler, a recognized MPE guru and experienced docent at the Computer History Museum, lead a tour at 6:30pm, sidestepping some displays and highlighting the really important ones. That hour flew by – thanks Stan. The only mention of the HP3000 was an OpenMPE button in a large collection mounted on the wall, going back many years into the history of our business.
Alan Yoe from Screenjet in the UK, who had the idea for this meeting, gave a wonderful speech to the crowd from a large spiral staircase with an HP3000 Reunion 2011 banner strung on the railing below him. I hope we can obtain the words he said because I can’t remember the funny jokes and slams at HP (Carly and Meg, etc.) but I do remember he said they’ve attained a new level in the race for “time-to-out-of-market” with the HP Touchpad’s 4 month lifespan. His comparisons to the 40+ years in the lifespan of the HP3000 were moving to this biased crowd. We raised a toast to those no longer with us (and every mind in the room thought of Wirt Atmar at the same time during that brief instant, I’m sure).
Ron Seybold’s inspiring speech after Alan’s focused on “the HP3000 Community” and why it was the people, those present and many others like them, who made this platform so strong and enduring. He then proceeded to draw raffle tickets for copies of Bob Green’s and Jon Diercks’s great books on MPE and the History of the HP3000 and then he announced that there would be a reverse auction for the poster we’d all signed on the way in. After another toast to community and continuing to stay in touch (the wine was donated by a local California winery that was very fond of the HP3000) Ron began the bidding (backwards) at $3000. Of course he would start with that number. But as the number continued to fall to $2000 and $1000 and $500 I began to wonder if I was going to have to buy it. It was a tax free donation to the Computer History Museum after all; and they took MasterCard or PayPal. Finally, at $175, Terri G. L. jumped up and said, “Yes!” What a packrat. On the way out the door Terri and I were eyeballing the big 12-foot HP3000 Reunion banner above the door of the main entrance and wondering how we were going to steal it without a ladder. That’s when I remembered the other one and went and asked Alan Yoe if I could have it and he pointed me to the wire snips and it is now hanging in our datacenter here in Austin.
2011 HP3000 Reunion: Two great parties, half a dozen good speeches, and a lot of talking to old (and a few new) friends over four days. My brain has the overflow bit set again, but writing it down helps to bring it into focus. There are literally hundreds of little stories to tell. The weather was typically ideal, especially after 87 days above 100 degrees here in Austin this summer. All of you think about a trip out to the Computer History Museum in San Jose for the 50th anniversary party for the HP3000 in a few years.
CAMUS played a big part in the Reunion with a MANMAN Users Group meeting Friday from 4pm to 6pm in the Boole Room at the Museum, a party for ex-ASK employees and MANMAN users Friday night at the Cupertino Inn, partial sponsorship of the Stromasys technical presentation Saturday morning, and recognition along with Marxmeier, ScreenJet, The HP3000 Newswire, Speedware, and Robelle as major contributors to the Saturday night HP3000 Reunion Party.
Thursday’s all-day presentation on recent enhancements to the Eloquence database system (an IMAGE replacement on Linux, Windows, etc) by Michael Marxmeier was well attended. There was all the technical depth one could consume and Eloquence has grown into a wonderful product. Go check it out; it’s very reasonably priced (especially when compared to Oracle).
I think Sandra Kurtzig has done it again with the new Kenandy “no-erp” manufacturing applications. Peter Stern, Rod Butters, and Pravin Kumar gave a succinct (30 minute) presentation to kick off the CAMUS meeting at 3:30pm Friday in the Boole Room. Kenandy was developed over the last year and a half using the SalesForce toolsets which really gave them a good head start. It will be very recognizable to any MANMAN/MFG user, having an Item Master, BOMs, Routings, WO’s, PO’s, demand management and MRP. Apparently Sandy wrote some of the code herself, just like the early days of MANMAN. Check it out at www.kenandy.com …
Linda J. Tuerk’s 10 minute overview of why and how to use LinkedIn to enhance your image was well received and to the point. Go to www.SiliconValleySearch.com for details, and, of course, you can find her on LinkedIn.
Following Kenandy and Silicon Valley Search, Dr. Robert Boers delivered an hour and a half presentation on the latest Stromasys CHARON HPA/3000 virtual HP3000 product. It was amazing to learn that within a year, MANMAN (and everything else that runs on MPE/iX 7.5) will be running on Intel/AMD 64-bit machines. MPE Virtualization: what a home run! Dr. Boer, who came all the way from Switzerland to give his speech, showed MPE/iX running on a small Linux PC costing about $600 and it is expected to run many times faster than on an HP3000 “A” Class machine. They also had it running on Craig Lalley’s laptop in the same room; he’s been consulting on this project, but now it’s open to any developer with a good reason to download it… Look up HP3000 info at www.stromasys.com .
It was non-obvious to me that MPE would boot up in 2 or 3 minutes, mainly because all the memory, IO, and disc checking had been done by the underlying OS (ubuntu Linux in this case), but also because of the PDC rewrite they must have done. No more watching all the dots and 1’s, 2’s, and 3’s etc. going by on the console for 10 or 20 minutes (or longer on large-memory machines). It was a fairly technical presentation, but nothing compared to the following morning at 10:00 am in Room 336 at the Cupertino Inn (more on that later). CAMUS has a fairly accurate list of attendees and perhaps Terri G. Lanza will find time to publish it.
We all drove the 10 minutes back down 85 to the Cupertino Inn where the Ex-ASK Reunion Party had already started. There were over 40 former ASK employees and customers plus numerous MANMAN and MPE groupies enjoying the bar in the courtyard. Altho’ the conference call failed to happen, those present mingled for nearly 5 hours as food and beverage flowed and conversations got louder. Oh the stories we told! And the fond memories we revived…
Saturday morning in Room 336, about 30 hard-core MPE zealots gathered for a question/answer period with Dr. Boers and Igor Abramov (on Skype from Moscow). After most of us squeezed into the comfortable chairs around small circular tables in a hotel-room sized space, with many standing around the walls, Paul Taffel walked in, took one look at the big TV set and said “Now I see why Igor couldn’t get his visa to leave Russia.” Cracked me up because he did look like a mad scientist or perhaps Tolstoy himself with slightly more black hair in his beard.
The meeting began a bit awkwardly because almost none of the people present had seen the prior day’s presentation about CHARON HP3000 at the CAMUS Meeting yet we began with a question and answer session. After all, it was a room full of geniuses, so they were the bulk of the presentation themselves and didn’t know it. Since it was somewhere around midnight in Moscow and Igor Abramov is the chief architect of the project, he wanted to get on with it.
When nobody asked a question (hard to believe Dr. Boer had stunned this crowd), he handed the headset to Ron Seybold and said, “Surely you have a question, Ron.” Although I muttered under my breath (I thought) that this won’t be as technical a question as they were hoping for, never doubt that Ron Seybold will have a great question ready. And it was technical enough to get the ball rolling. It went on for an hour with Igor being a little difficult to understand because the Skype connection would sometimes hide the motion of his lips and he does have a Russian accent. Then it went another hour and a half with Dr. Boer and Craig Lalley taking on all questions and delivering all the right answers. It was like Christmas and Robert Boers was Santa Claus (there is a slight resemblance). MPE booted on both the laptop and the little Stromasys server Dr. Boers carried under his arm on his flight from Europe. Fun was had; DEBUG was run; Glance worked in Block Mode! Stan Sieler asked if it crashed in all known ways and pointed out that if it didn’t, it wasn’t right yet. Go to www.stromasys.com and follow HP3000 links for more details.
Saturday afternoon, after a CAMUS board meeting (myself, Terri G. Lanza, Mike Anderson, and John Serdensky), we went to the Computer History Museum about 5pm. I really want to thank John for taking all those photos and I can’t wait to see them. We were greeted at the registration table ($49 in advance, $60 at the door) by Abby Lentz and Ron Seybold who had pre-printed the name tags. Abby directed us to sign the huge “Dancing with the HP3000” poster velcro’d to the wall with the date we had first touched an HP3000. There were a lot of names on that poster and my 1978 was 11 years after the first date I spotted. 1967? Amazing – the guy who had the original ideas to build an HP business computer was there? Many of the early managers, designers, engineers, and programmers were present; some are still HP employees and contractors.
There was beer plus burgers and dogs then Stan Sieler, a recognized MPE guru and experienced docent at the Computer History Museum, lead a tour at 6:30pm, sidestepping some displays and highlighting the really important ones. That hour flew by – thanks Stan. The only mention of the HP3000 was an OpenMPE button in a large collection mounted on the wall, going back many years into the history of our business.
Alan Yoe from Screenjet in the UK, who had the idea for this meeting, gave a wonderful speech to the crowd from a large spiral staircase with an HP3000 Reunion 2011 banner strung on the railing below him. I hope we can obtain the words he said because I can’t remember the funny jokes and slams at HP (Carly and Meg, etc.) but I do remember he said they’ve attained a new level in the race for “time-to-out-of-market” with the HP Touchpad’s 4 month lifespan. His comparisons to the 40+ years in the lifespan of the HP3000 were moving to this biased crowd. We raised a toast to those no longer with us (and every mind in the room thought of Wirt Atmar at the same time during that brief instant, I’m sure).
Ron Seybold’s inspiring speech after Alan’s focused on “the HP3000 Community” and why it was the people, those present and many others like them, who made this platform so strong and enduring. He then proceeded to draw raffle tickets for copies of Bob Green’s and Jon Diercks’s great books on MPE and the History of the HP3000 and then he announced that there would be a reverse auction for the poster we’d all signed on the way in. After another toast to community and continuing to stay in touch (the wine was donated by a local California winery that was very fond of the HP3000) Ron began the bidding (backwards) at $3000. Of course he would start with that number. But as the number continued to fall to $2000 and $1000 and $500 I began to wonder if I was going to have to buy it. It was a tax free donation to the Computer History Museum after all; and they took MasterCard or PayPal. Finally, at $175, Terri G. L. jumped up and said, “Yes!” What a packrat. On the way out the door Terri and I were eyeballing the big 12-foot HP3000 Reunion banner above the door of the main entrance and wondering how we were going to steal it without a ladder. That’s when I remembered the other one and went and asked Alan Yoe if I could have it and he pointed me to the wire snips and it is now hanging in our datacenter here in Austin.
2011 HP3000 Reunion: Two great parties, half a dozen good speeches, and a lot of talking to old (and a few new) friends over four days. My brain has the overflow bit set again, but writing it down helps to bring it into focus. There are literally hundreds of little stories to tell. The weather was typically ideal, especially after 87 days above 100 degrees here in Austin this summer. All of you think about a trip out to the Computer History Museum in San Jose for the 50th anniversary party for the HP3000 in a few years.
