CSY is taking aim at the AS/400 promised land It only started as an innocent message on the Internet, but it would appear that the HP 3000 division is finally going to go after IBM’s AS/400 customer base to get some new HP 3000 business. HP was asking after “3000 users who also have first-hand experience with the AS/400. Any information (the more current the better) that could speak to the comparative strengths/weaknesses/differences between the HP 3000 and the AS/400 would be valuable.” The division is apparently after experience in performance comparisons, hardware and software bundle configurations (looking to exploit the IMAGE edge, no doubt) as well as any advantages that could be eked out in manageability, support and reliability. While these kinds of tilts don’t often dislodge customers on either side – witness the fanfare of the AS/400 group’s mission in 1996, and its under-trumpeted outcome a year later – it’s still good to see that CSY has begun to think about where its new customers for 1998 will come from. As our front page story in this issue shows, AS/400 sites are becoming HP 3000 installations on the strength of applications like SFD and Amisys. The CSY effort is also a good thing considering the relative richness of the AS/400 marketplace. It’s true, the IBM group was recently bundled in with the RS/6000 operations in a new all-server operation, a way to keep manufacturing costs manageable and get some leverage between the two Blue systems. But this new target of HP 3000 sales has nearly a half-million systems installed. IBM reached critical mass on the system to survive application vendors’ cut lists, too, so maybe the AS/400 sites will yield some new applications. HP and IBM customers who choose these boxes have a lot in common, both rating systems high in customer satisfaction surveys and preferring high integration. If you’ve got AS/400 experience to share, send them to HP at daren_connor@hp.com. You should be on your way to the MPE Forum For five years an HP 3000-only training fest has been happening in the Bay Area, and the details are online for the latest Interex Programmer’s Forum. It used to be called IPROF, but this year’s version is being called the MPE Programmer’s Forum. We think it’s some of the best time you can spend offsite learning about your HP 3000’s potential. The conference runs three days starting March 19 in Sunnyvale, Calif., and every minute is devoted to your favorite mission-critical platform. The Forum is unique in one important way: you get direct interaction with the CSY engineers working on critical items like your database, networking and compilers, the stuff you rely on everyday. If you’ve ever wished you could tell HP’s engineers exactly how to improve your HP 3000, the Forum is the place to do it. The meeting is held just a few minutes away from the CSY nerve center to give HP’s engineers easy access to customers. A lot of the 1990s success of the HP 3000 is a result of CSY’s Customer First strategy, and the Forum is one of the more intense sampling sessions HP takes to learn what customers need in coming versions of the operating system. You can get agenda details online for the meetings at the Radisson Inn. The Forum costs $495 this year, an increase over last year but apparently necessary since the event hasn’t turned a profit in several years. There’s no show, just meetings. You get seven meals in the price, but what’s priceless is the contact with CSY management and lab-level engineers. 64-bit support for MPE is a promised discussion topic, along with Java, using the 3000 on the Internet and NT interoperability. Call Interex at 408.747.0227 to register, or do it online. We’ll see you there. Whoop up your Web with Apache Keeper of the Apache/iX Web server flame Mark Bixby reports that the latest version of the freeware Web server for HP 3000s is ready to download from his site. The official Apache distribution site offered a slightly older version with some new security features. Apache 1.2.5 now has fixes for possible security issues that were discovered during a security review of the Apache source code. While that release was being prepared an additional denial of service attack was reported by a user, and a patch for this is also included. Bixby’s 1.3b3 version, still in beta test, brings more significant advances such as proxy support and the ability to run on MPE, Unix, Windows 95 and Windows NT. (Now that’s what we call portability). More Web sites are running Apache by now than all other Web servers put together, according to the January Netcraft survey. How many Apaches are working as business-critical intranet servers is anybody’s guess, but lots of ISPs use it to host businesses’ Web pages. Hard to beat the price, too. Users rave over the flexibility of the solution, even if it’s a little on the geek-friendly side. Apache is an even better thing in light of the expected progress of Netscape’s FastTrack Server port to MPE/iX. Some rumors were surfacing this month that HP is having to kick back the release date of the bundled solution into the back half of 1998. That probably matches the real ship date of MPE/iX 6.0 anyway. HP first promised FastTrack for the first quarter of this year when the port was announced in August. While a later ’98 delivery is not much of a surprise – what software port ever came in even close to on-time? – the three-month or more delay is vexing for some application providers who want to Web-enable their HP 3000 applications with a supported solution on a 3000-based Web server. Apache/iX does have some advantages over FastTrack, aside from the obvious one that you can use it today instead of wait on delivery. You have an optional ability to use Perl as a dynamic HTML scripting language if you choose Apache, and it provides virtual host support via the HTTP/1.1 hostname header. As a reminder, you don’t get support other than what you can learn from experts like Bixby over the Internet, and Apache doesn’t have an SSL Version 3 security facility that’s legal in the US and Canada. Not that the security distinction matters a good deal of the time: Microsoft’s Explorer distribution ordering site advises you to turn off Version 3 security in your browser before you order, backing down to Version 2. Imagine how may $4.95 orders Microsoft has processed for the Explorer 4 CD with that lesser security enabled. It looks like at least through this summer, you can either whoop it up with Apache/iX or look into letting Windows NT handle the Web requests in your Intranet. OpenMarket software isn’t for sale on the 3000 anymore, although HP is still supporting it. Java is brewing up a fresh pot of help for the 3000 We’re hearing about more than a few Java projects in the HP 3000 community by now, as tool providers work to deliver software that’s thinner and cheaper than client-server versions but still has most of the muscle of fatter counterparts. Minisoft got to the table first with Javelin for 3000 VPlus connectivity, but now WRQ is beta testing its EnterView offering for a release later this year. WRQ was on the hunt for a public-access Web site to show off the EnterView features, so the code must be in pretty good shape to air it out in public. The software, as yet unreleased, somehow managed to win an award from BackOffice Magazine for its ability to “dynamically deliver host access over an intranet,” and it called WRQ’s preview version of the software “a risk-free solution.” BackOffice, as you might guess, is all about the Microsoft NT product. The award for software still in beta test says a lot about the state of the Java solutions in January – plenty of anticipation, since the need is so great for thin software that behaves well over intranets. It’s been a couple of years since Sun first unveiled the Java concept, and the proof of its utility still lies in the Web page applets and these products in development (or deployment, in the case of Javelin). Some of that time to market is because the tools to make Java more useful to HP 3000 sites are just now surfacing. Over at Advanced Networking Systems, the creator of the ADBC database pipe to Java, there is a set of Java Beans for HP 3000s just about ready to roll off the roaster. Beans are important in writing an ADBC Java applet easily, since they use a visual work area and ADBC components, both with configurable properties. Advanced Networks’ David Thatcher says the software “will act similar to Visual Basic and PowerBuilder, except you will be building applets in a live environment.” That means no compiles, a step that slows down the development in Java today. The ADBC Beans show promise for building Web applets which can access IMAGE databases, something that would perk up the interest of HP 3000 sites mulling over how to put Java to work. (See our February issue for more details, or get them here at early at Always Online.) Order the 918DX anytime you like, in the US HP hadn’t made an announcement formally at presstime, but sparkplug Jeff Vance in CSY reported that the highly-anticipated Series 918DX HP 3000 can be ordered anytime in the US. The box is on a 6-week delivery cycle, so we figure the work on new HP 3000 applications won’t be starting in earnest until March. That’s the same time the DX is available for ordering in Europe. (The contact overseas is Adrian Den Hartog.) The beta test cycle for the system never got performed, according to Vance, so for the “generous third parties” who have donated or discounted software for the system “there will likely be a few quirks in the process since we were unable to run the beta.” Remember, it’s a $200-$250 per month lease for an HP 3000 loaded with software from HP and others. Get your business ideas together for commercial software and send your proposals to the 918DX business development manager (steven_little@hp.com) to get an order placed. Another major database for the 3000? Computer Associates employee Tracy Johnson was probing HP 3000 newsgroup readers for interest in a port of the Ingres database to the HP 3000, a software project that would be getting its second shot at success. Ingres got moved to MPE/iX sometime in 1993, installed at a few large and medium sized customer sites and then pretty much ignored by Ingres (the company) as it got gobbled up by the CA juggernaut. While the porting of the database itself might not spark a lot of uptake in the 3000 community, one positive byproduct would be the capability to port the MK manufacturing solution to the 3000, something to take on MANMAN. Ironically, both MANMAN and MK are part of the CA empire. Any database that would get another mission-critical application onto the 3000 would be a welcome tool – and perhaps easier to port, since it’s already been done once. PAUSE is really there, even if the Express HELP doesn’t show it. Once you’ve done the installation of Express 3 or Express 4, don’t fret if it seems like the new PAUSE intrinsic doesn’t appear to be installed. It’s there, just a little hidden. HP didn’t update the HELP catalog to show how to use the new feature, which lets a task sleep until one or more jobs reach a certain state. The syntax for the new feature is PAUSE [sec] [job=id] [interval], and a complete description of the new CI functionality is on the CSY Jazz Web server. HP says it’s updating HELP to include PAUSE for its 6.0 release.