By Shawn Gordon

If I see one more product that starts with an ‘e’ I think I will have to kill someone. I heard Ann Livermore’s keynote speech at HP World, where everything was “eBusiness” and “eCommerce” and “eSpeak.” It left my head spinning and empty. I had lunch with an HP 3000 R&D person and asked about eSpeak (which is getting a lot of general industry press), and she said she had seen it running on a 3000 — but when pressed on what “it” was, the explanation left me wondering what she was talking about. The explanation I heard sounds like sockets and TCP/IP. Don’t get me wrong — I’m really glad to see that HP appears to be excited about what is going on, and is pushing it to the HP 3000. I just need to see something tangible, because the explanations aren’t making any sense at this point.

There wasn’t anything earth-shaking at the show (short of the actual 5.0 earthquake) as far as I was concerned, but it felt better than the last few years to me. I thought the most exciting thing was that Orbit Software is putting out its MPE pocket guide again. The last version was for MPE/iX 4.0, and this new one is incredibly thorough and complete. I’ve always lived from the pocket guide — it is just so convenient to take with you and look things up from, much faster than trying to use HP’s CD ROM documentation or Web sites. A big personal thanks to Orbit for the hard work and expense that must have gone into this.

I’m not going to talk about the big announcements, because you’ll see them covered elsewhere in this issue. But I have to say that Wirt Atmar’s plans for his built-in HP 3000 graphical interface for his freeware QCTerm emulator are nothing short of astounding. I’m going to be very curious to see how this plays out in the future. I can see lots of uses for it, but I’m wondering if it’s almost too late to have a significant impact on 3000-based software developers. Maybe it will inspire a new generation of vertical market development. In any case, its acceptance doesn’t really affect Wirt, because all the QCTerm work is geared towards the thin client of his HP 3000 QueryCalc application anyway. He is just being nice by making it publicly available.

I stopped by the Xerox booth because I was curious about how fast their printers are by now. Apparently on continuous feed paper they can do 1300 PPM — that’s about 20 pages per second. How in the name of sanity can you burn an image on a page that fast? I was amazed. They also had some very neat stuff in terms of doing forms and images from a 3000 and Xerox printers. Xerox is working with RAC and RAC’s ESPUL product (a portion of which is available as NetPrint from MiniSoft). It was a whole new way of doing forms and data merging, as the processing took place in the printer.

I decided to swing by the Tidal Software booth and see what was up. For those of you who don’t know, Tidal used to be OCS and they used to have a whole bunch of products — but are mostly down to doing job scheduling, from what I can see. They also had a version control package called Librarian that wasn’t at all bad — probably the best thing they had. Tidal hadn’t said anything about it in ages, so I asked about its future. Their response was that they will still sell and support Librarian, but they were really pushing their batch scheduling product Sys*Admiral. (See our June story “Tidal signs on Allegro for 3000 scheduling” for more details.)

I spent way too much time at the Whisper Tech booth. I just love Programmer Studio, and the guys who work there are a lot of fun to chat with. Even other vendors I talked to were talking about Programmer Studio. They gave me a run down of the features for the next couple of versions, and it’s looking pretty exciting.

There was pretty much nothing new at the show on the COBOL front. Just a few years ago at the Anaheim Interex show there were Fujitsu and Hitachi showing their COBOL wares, but I couldn’t find them this time. I did run into Chuck Townsend of Synkronix (makers of PERCobol). Apparently they will be changing the company name soon because no one can spell it. It appears that Synkronix is going to be working with HP on some of its Java interface plans for the 3000.

The biggest challenge for PERCobol on the 3000 is the speed of Java, or lack thereof. I hear that HP is going to be tweaking its JIT and coming out with an actual compiler. If that is the case then you should be set for speed. I don’t know how PERCobol compares to the latest ANSI draft of COBOL, but I’m going to find out in the next few months. Since Chuck was officially hanging out in the HP booth, it would seem that there could be some interesting stuff coming out.

The product that most impressed me was MPE Command Center from Bradmark. I looked at this product a few years ago and it was pretty weak at the time. It appears to have gone through a complete rewrite by a very competent programmer, and it is very very slick now. I understand the version that I saw is still in beta, but it was really a nice piece of work. I will do a review in the future with all the details.

Most people know that MiniSoft and Omni Solutions sell my TimeWarp software, so I’ll be careful not to gush about them. MiniSoft was showing off JDBC and its Javelin Java-based terminal emulator; both look very nice. JDBC/32 worked just like MiniSoft’s ODBC/32, but obviously for Java. I’m curious how it will compare with the bundled HP offering coming out this month, but since MiniSoft is offering direct access to IMAGE, MPE and KSAM files, I imagine the MiniSoft JDBC will be more powerful. There is a buzz about some new products coming from MiniSoft in the near future, so keep your eyes open.

Omni Solutions was showing off the latest version of GUI3000, which I have always liked, even before we were connected by a distributor. The newer features, such as database queries, are very convenient. There is tight integration with the VESOFT product line (big surprise, since Omni Solutions sells that too) which will be convenient for many people. Speaking of VESOFT, I ran into founder Vladimir Volokh (I always run into Vladimir for some reason; last year it was at a rest stop on the way to the San Diego show). We got talking, and now I am going to start an every-other-month “Inside VESOFT” column for the NewsWire beginning next issue, so if you have any tips, send them along to me at shawn@smga3000.com.

Taurus was showing how to make data liquid with their DataBridge product. Taurus has been slowly evolving and improving over the years and is pretty much the dominant force in data movement on the HP 3000. I don’t know how they do on other platforms, but they are pretty big on strategic alliances such as BridgeWare with Quest for real-time data archiving and with DISC for creating ultra-high-speed data warehouses. The rumor is that they are going to rewrite their client-server Forklift interface again. I like the product, but it could use some tweaks, so that is good news.

The Lund booth is always a fun place to stop and chat. I was sorry I missed founder Bob Lund, but he’s a busy guy. Apparently his new release of Performance Gallery Gold will read HP’s Glance log files, so you can use the Lund graphing tools instead of HP’s LaserRX. I haven’t used LaserRX in a long time, but as I recall, it was pretty clunky and obnoxious when I last used it.

I’d like to share my overall impression of the show. Interest in the 3000 was higher this year than in the last few years. The big thing is ‘e’ everything. HP appears to have a renewed interest in the 3000, but we will have to see what comes out in the next six months. “Apps on tap” is the latest phrase from HP, and appears to be an opportunity for 3000 vendors to get involved with HP. Finally, while there was no big product that made you go “wow,” it appears that a lot of the building blocks are coming together — so that in the next year or two you’re going to say “WOW.”