HP3000 Reunion

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.

I Have A Great Memory

Here’s some biographical information about the blogger:

I have a great memory, but I think it peaked out when I was in the 6th grade in 1960 and it’s been all downhill from there. Still, even at an advanced age, I seem to remember more than about 70% of the people I know (if Jeopardy! is any indication). Maybe I’ve just been exposed to a lot more than most of them.

From childhood to senior citizen, I’ve been, more or less in this order, the son of a farmer and school teacher, brother (to Henry), cowboy, student, musician, hunter, race car driver, oil painting artist, windmill and fence repairer, cattle auction employee, auto mechanic, rodeo star, writer, sailor on an aircraft carrier in the US Navy, husband, college educated hippie (Texas State), carpenter, plumber, mason, home builder (our own geodesic dome), water district chairman, accountant, computer programmer, manufacturing company business manager, father, corporate software company technical manager, computer applications educator, divorcee, entrepreneur: President of five computer-related companies I started, husband again, speaker at major Data Processing and Information Technology conferences, divorcee again, folk festival regular, husband again, property developer, grandfather, and still going strong.

The people who influenced me include (in no particular order): Charles Darwin, Jesus Christ, Grandmothers (Minnie & Molly), parents (Earl and Grace), Henry Floyd, children (David and Callie), Stuart Brand, Buckminster Fuller, Sandra Kurtzig, Hank Williams, Jerry Whatley, Tom Terrific and Deputy Dawg, Mike Tuggle, Mark Ripma, Tom Lavey, Van Purdy, John Banks, Terry Moseley, Dr. Marvin Johnston, Peter Baen, Ronald Hugh Roberts, Champ Hood, Mrs. Derek (sixth grade) and Mrs. Doss (10th grade), Ruth and Dave Ingram, Chester Damron, three wives (Nanci Hudson, Laura Rowny, and Caren Canfield), John Malcosky, Macon Richmond, Kurt Vonnegut, William Shakespeare...

Like Darwin, I’ve been around the entire planet on a large ship, but, being 18 years old and pretty wild, I spent a lot of time in bars and brothels; still I saw a lot of the world and met a lot of interesting people. In the Navy and afterward, I’ve visited many foreign countries: Mexico, Canada, Cuba, Virgin Islands, Brazil, the Philippines, Japan, Hong Kong, Sydney (Australia), Wellington (New Zealand), Iceland, Luxembourg, France, Monaco, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Bermuda, England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Sicily, the Netherlands. I’ve been to all 50 states except Hawaii. I’ve been to Alaska and seen the sun at midnight and I’ve been near enough to Antarctica to see the sun rotate around the sky and not set for several days as we “slowly” cruised across the South Pacific on an aircraft carrier.

Later in life I’ve really gotten back into oil painting which I started in the 7th grade and didn’t touch for 45 years; it takes a lot of time. I decided in 1986 that I did not have time for golf and have not picked up a club since, but oil painting is a creative pastime that leaves a trail that can be called a body of work. Someday maybe I’ll even have time for golf again.

Sustainability is Free

I remember meeting Philip Crosby, author of the book Quality is Free, in the late 1980’s after a speech at a large computer users’ conference. His topic, as always, was “quality” and he had an audience full of enthusiasts in IT departments and large IT vendors from around the world in attendance; he made the most of his opportunity. We all wanted to go home and “do it right the first time.”

As owner of a software support company, I see the cost of (and I profit from) poor quality in manufacturing software development every day. The costs of support for large systems sometimes exceeds the cost of the initial purchase within five years. What if your software never “broke”? You certainly would pay more up front but you would never pay for “annual support.”

Today I read an article in the April 2010 issue of “Material Handling Management” magazine that mentioned John Nofsinger’s ideas that sustainability perhaps is related to ideas about the cost of quality espoused by Crosby. Quality has indeed proven to be free in the last 20 years, in one way or another: Toyota, known for high quality products, recently had “accelerator problems” that have cost it a fortune. Is Sustainability Free also? That ultimately depends on what does it costs to fail. Remember BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill?

Today (May 1, 2010) I googled “sustainability is free” and found one direct reference on the first page of links: “Sustainability for Free?” at www.productinnovationeducators.com. The article references a study published by Elkington, Emerson & Beloe (2006) which defines the triple bottom line (financial, environmental and societal) and, in a link to a different posting in the same blog, relates it to the “3 P’s” of Profit, Planet, and People.

Here’s a quip attributed Crosby (perhaps via Henry Ford): “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” How do we motivate ourselves and our brethren to act sustainably when no one is looking? That is the question, but first I’ll present my ideas on the 3 P’s.

On the sustainability of profit I have only one thing to add because it’s obvious to me that a company must be profitable first. But apparently making money ethically is not as easy as bending morality, so I’d try to be ethically profitable. In a larger sense, it’s the economy that must be profitable to be sustainable. Economic growth has been a boon to mankind, so I’d say ethical “trade” in general is to be encouraged and the sustainability of humanity’s upward march depends on it (see also “the dark ages”).

The sustainability of the planet is a very long term concept to get your head around, involving not only our impact on its environment, but also the possibility of getting wiped out by an asteroid or a comet. Like profit, it is a given that we need to keep the earth from killing us and us from killing it.

People? Are we sustainable? That question could be taken to mean “as a species”, as in extinction is inevitable for our kind. But, I’ll take the other path about whether or not people can actually keep the first two P’s. And can we “respect” each other? All of us? People may be suckers, as PT Barnum said, but they have the internet and can communicate much faster now. New ideas spread around the world instantly. There is hope that education will filter down to the lowest levels, but it’s a long term deal like the sustainability of “the planet.”

Sustainability means doing it profitably, environmentally soundly, with respect for people, and with the best interests of your community, nation, and world in mind - when no one is looking. Surely the answer to how we motivate ourselves to do this involves not only awareness or Nature but also a conscience. That word con-science means “with science” to me.

I have not spent much of my time talking on the phone while driving, but I’ve done it often enough to know that it is difficult. It’s obviously mandatory to focus on the driving but it’s really easy to wander and be using your mind’s eye and not your real eyes. But compared to looking at a screen and typing text messages on a tiny keyboard, it’s easy.

I remember commuting thru the Houston traffic on I-10 West from Katy when I lived there in the 1980’s. As I sat in my car on an 8 lane freeway at 0 MPH, I often had time to ponder what would make the highways more efficient. I decided there would have to be automation because these individual drivers were never going to be able to coordinate their efforts well enough do it alone. Twenty-five years later it would be called smart roads with smart cars.

I could never envision how all that would be paid for so I assumed it would not
happen during my lifetime. Maybe I was wrong. The way things are going, what finally might make young people want to pay taxes and/or tolls for smart roads and to pay extra for smart cars could be the desire of the drivers to talk/text while moving. It seems to be something some people cannot live without.

HP Muvee (.wmv)

Terry's 2009 Big Bend Tour; Austin to Marfa, Presidio, Terlingua Trading Post, Big Bend Ranch State Park, Big Bend National Park, the front porch at Terlingua, Chisos Basin, Alpine, Austin. Push that little play arrow below the Miata photo (or in the center); use F11 for full screen?

Don’t “Take a Message”

My attitude about responsive telephone communications is represented by the fact that we don’t use Voice Mail at our office. This was a conscious decision made in 1994, before the impact of email, IM, and the web. Being in the technical support area, we advertise our responsiveness and value it as a primary differentiator. Even though the mentioned wonders are now the mode of support for over half of our cases, there is still a need to continue to improve our phone communications.

The point of having no VM is to minimize the number of contacts on each case (to one). We want to eliminate phone tag and “we’ll get back to you.” An extension to this philosophy is handling calls for others: try to get it handled NOW instead of saying “I’ll have them call you back.”

Here’s an example: I ordered some cables online today but one of the parts was a special factory order line item. They may have to call us to confirm. If I’m not here, I hope the staff will pass the call to David. He’s somewhat aware of what I wanted. So is Bob. Perhaps one of them could make a decision or answer a question. Maybe Rob or Pam could decide what’s best. It’s worth a try.

Objective: don’t just say “I’ll take a message” before digging into what they really want and seeing if someone else can help them.

My ideal is to empower everyone to try to make decisions for others when it’s a “safe” call and time is of the essence. An impossible ideal, to be certain; mistakes will be made. But it’s worth a shot to try.

Ever since I was playing with one-inch tall green army soldiers on the dirt floor of a barn in Central Texas in 1955, I have wanted to build an “indestructible” concrete building that would last 500 years. The plan was set into my brain a couple of years later when my younger brother and I discovered that there was an old well about 20 feet deep on the back side of the ranch where we grew up. When we were about 8 and 9 years old, we used a rope to lower ourselves into that well and pretend it was a fort.

Now, at age 60, the company I own has built a datacenter on the 2 acres at Lake Travis where our office is located. It has tons of concrete and steel, no windows, and steel doors. There is even steel on the roof under a 4-inch concrete slab. It may not last 500 years, but it’s going to be very difficult for someone to tear down someday.

Why a datacenter? I must confess that one of my greatest fears as a small business person is that fire will destroy all of our assets. Insurance would help, but loss of everything would certainly damage or even destroy the business as well. It’s worse if some of the assets are not yours. I wanted to make sure that if my company became the guardian of the legacy hp3000’s of our customers, with all of their confidential data, we would be very sure that we would not lose anything or ever have to stop processing because of fire.

Ain’t it funny how mere ideas turn into reality, sometimes many years late? And reality bites us when we least expect it. Are you prepared for the worst? Systems redundancy is one possible way to protect your own company’s valuable assets and your own sanity. Ask us how we can help you cover your assets.