HP has confirmed that the release of its latest version of MPE/iX has been delayed to the end of July or early August. Officials at the Commercial Systems Division (CSY) had reported during May that the Express 1 release of MPE/iX 6.0 was supposed to ship this month, and a new PowerPatch 7 for MPE/iX was supposed to go into the mail in late May. Both releases are going out later than expected. HP said that it had to slip 5.5 Express 7 due to “product structure issues,” while 6.0 Express 1 “suffered from resource contention.”

What are you missing from Express 1? Most significant might be the JDBC driver for IMAGE/SQL that HP has been talking about since last summer’s HP World. The driver needs Allbase/SQL to access IMAGE data for Java applications, just like the ODBCLink/SE driver that’s in the 5.5 version of MPE/iX. Because of a lack of Express 1, HP won’t be able to start delivery of its newest 989/x50 systems, either. You might also miss a version of MPE/iX with the latest support for Y2K as well as supported Java/iX. MPE/iX 6.0 has Java/iX, but the latest Y2K patches are in 5.5 PowerPatch 6 — because HP expects much of its customer base to stay on 5.5 through the millennium change. And HP won’t support Java/iX, officially, if it's running under MPE/iX 5.5. Everybody expects MPE/iX 6.0 Express 1 to leapfrog PowerPatch 6 for Y2K compliance, once it resolves those resource contention issues.