A bigger CSY R&D lab, and performance boosts, spark IPROF CSY R&D manager Winston Prather let attendees at IPROF '98 know that there's real growth going on in places than the customer base and HP 3000 sales figures. For the first time in the 90s, the 3000 division's lab is growing in size. Prather said during his State of the 3000 talk that "I have a bigger lab this year than last year, and I'll have a bigger lab next year than I have this year." Real growth in CSY development goes beyond the extra help the division is hiring from places like Allegro Consultants for contract programming on MPE/iX 6.0. The division is also hiring full time engineers for new positions. There hasn't been this kind of growth in CSY since the Spectrum project of the 1980s, when the current PA-RISC architecture was born. The numbers hired may not compare, but we heard here that for many years CSY managers were expected to reduce head counts each year. Things have obviously changed. The group also is saying out loud that its sales are the strongest they've been in five years. Meanwhile, in a look far into the future for the system, CSY's development plans include just about a ten-fold increase in HP 3000 performance. It only happened during a few seconds of Prather's talk on the State of the HP 3000, but attendees at IPROF saw a slide that showed an HP 3000 with a performance rating of about 250.0, set for release in the Year 2005. Today's most powerful HP 3000, the 997/500, offers about a 26.2 rating. The slide has specific product names underneath each bar representing steps along the way, about one product to a year between now and then. HP is planning release of 18Gb drives for the 3000. CSY's 64-bit team members said that their work, which won't make it into the 6.0 release, will make 1-terabyte files possible -- although nobody quite knows how long it might take to copy something that big, or how to edit it. CSY's Roy Breslawski also promised improvement on the 3000 upgrade pricing issue, with an announcement in the next two weeks. "We need to address this," Breslawski said at the Management Roundtable. "I agree completely." Full Java/iX support, and DNS services for MPE/iX, fully supported, were also part of the 6.0 announcements on IPROF's first day. Customer confidence was running high here. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved