After promising in February the latest operating system would ship in March, HP sent its first customer shipment of MPE/iX 6.5 off on March 30, just a day short of its deadline. Within days, customers were asking on the Internet when the first PowerPatch or Express release of 6.5 would be available — a typical reaction to a base-level release which hasn’t had much exposure to the customer base. The release isn’t a push, meaning you’ve got to request it to get HP to send it to your site. For the record, 6.5 will be the first release that doesn’t support HP-IB devices, and the first to support Apache/iX Web through the HP Response Center. It also ships with a swell new CD that includes PDF (Acrobat) versions of the HP manuals. MPE release manager Jon Cohen said the first PowerPatch for the release couldn’t be expected any earlier than “several months” after 6.5 shipped. A lot of HP resource was immediately refocused on the 7.0 release of MPE/iX, a crucial element of the N-Class e3000 rollout scheduled for year’s end — a schedule looking optimistic to some in the development community.