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3000 NewsWire Online Extra Welcome to our 24th edition of Online Extra -- the e-mail update of articles in the December 1997 3000 NewsWire, plus items that have surfaced since we mailed our latest First Class issue. This service is an exclusive to our paid subscribers. We also e-mail you this file between the First Class issues you receive by mail, updating the stories you've read and adding articles that have developed between issues. If you want to get the Extra by e-mail, drop us a line to update your e-mail address. Amisys means more opportunity for 3000s It's been easy to see the advantages that the Amisys healthcare application has brought to the HP 3000 community -- new installs for HP 3000s and plenty of growth at existing sites as they move up the processing and storage curve. Now there's another benefit that's surfacing, available to more than just the 3000 installed base. It's jobs in the world of Amisys systems management. At first healthcare companies commit to the 3000 to handle business opportunities, and then they need expertise to manage the business problems using that deep Amisys solution. SW Consulting posted a few of these positions just this weekend, and the pay scale is healthy. Positions pay between $45,000 and $65,000 if you have Amisys experience, while consulting rates usually range from $35 to $55 an hour and more depending upon skills and experience. SW also has contract-to-hire job opportunities of six months working as a contractor with a commitment to convert to a full time employee at the end of the contract. There's also other work all over the US if you know COBOL, IMAGE, Speedware and Suprtool, in posts that pay between $30K and $45K. You can contact Bruce Ragain or Maggie Richtfort at SW Consulting (800.494.4977 or e-mail at SWCI@msn.com) for more details. Watch out which fields you apply b-trees to While Wirt Atmar explained the immediate advantages of implementing b-tree indices on your TurboIMAGE and IMAGE/SQL databases in our December issue – like a 100-times speed increase, for free -- at least one database expert advised some caution about applying b-trees to every field in your database. Ken Paul of the Adager support team says that in some cases using b-trees on fields that aren't hashed by IMAGE can actually slow down your performance: “Having b-trees on real number fields or integer number fields may not be a good idea, because these values are not 'hashed' by IMAGE and can cause serious performance problems in the associated master datasets if the capacity of the master is not defined correctly after taking the actual data into account. I remember dealing with a database years ago where a key value had a Real data type and the master ended up with about 3 primaries and thousands of secondaries hanging off of these primaries because IMAGE used the right-most 31 bits and in most cases the key values had the same number represented in these 31 bits. I have also seen problems with I4, I2 and I datatypes as well as their J counterparts so please be careful when adding additional masters to your databases in order to take advantage of b-trees. The addition or deletion of records from the detail datasets will proceed as they always have in the past. The appropriate search chains for that value in that dataset are simply made longer or shorter. The master and its attached b-tree are untouched. Wirt may have been talking about the fact that no new entries are added to the master dataset when a record is added to an existing chain, but I must point out that every time a record is added or deleted from a detail dataset the associated master(s) are always 'touched' to update the ChainHead counter and possibly the pointers." More free stuff for experimental sites Atmar might take this season's prize for most prolific contributor to the HP 3000 community, judging by his output of information and useful code. Awhile back he made his Equater! product available for free, a super-calculator useful in solving many kinds of problems that runs on an HP 3000. For the past year Atmar has also talked up the QCTerm project that his AICS Research firm has been developing. It's a free HP 3000 terminal emulator that does limited Telnet emulation and is working out the bugs in block mode connectivity. Atmar freely admits the software is in "pre-alpha" state, and is glad to point out what it won't do yet: NS/VT connectivity, file transfers and simple scripting. He says he doesn't ever intend to sell the product; it will always be free with four-hour-a-day, five day-a-week limited phone support. Experimental site managers who are curious can download a copy of QCTerm's 0.3 version. Information on the relative merits of different types of HP connectivity -- such as Telnet and NS/VT -- is available at another page. Atmar says on the page in part, "Telnet recapitulates the design of the early ADCC cards – and could easily be described as a 25-year step backwards in time. However, in Telnet's favor, HP 3000 CPUs have become 50,000% faster during those 25 years. Telnet character interruptions simply no longer seem to be a substantial bother to the new machines." There's another free terminal emulator for HP 3000s out on the Internet as well. An Australian named Ewan Thompson posted a notice about Zebra, an HP block mode terminal emulator released as freeware under the GNU General Public License. That's the same kind of license under which the only C++ compiler for the HP 3000 was released. That compiler was a freeware port that has made ports like DNS services for the HP 3000 possible. Zebra runs under Windows, and Thompson says it supports most HP700/92 escape sequences and should run most VPlus applications. Connectivity is via serial link, modem or VT. The VT support is provided via a subset of the FreeVT3K package, slightly modified to run with Winsock. Like QCTerm, the software is pre-beta by the author's admission. The software allows VPlus screens to be mapped to GUI controls such as radio buttons and check boxes. Thompson said he's making Zebra available over the Web because it's "a proof-of concept for GUI VPlus," code that the author has been working on in his spare time for the past three years. Editorial: What the 3000 really needs more of In our December issue we profiled the advance of MM II into the current decade of functionality with additions of middleware and GUI capabilities. As much as we'd like to think of MM II as being a great killer of competition for HP 3000s, we've got to be realistic and say it's only going to play a part in the progress of the 3000 renaissance. It's an easier call to say that a big-name application could do wonders to get the 3000 into some new sites. Since now there doesn't seem to be any shortage of helper software such as terminal emulators for HP 3000s, it's high time to turn energies and attention to a question that has vexed CSY since the early 90s: How do you get a big-name application software provider to include MPE in their business plans? Say you run a software company. You have a finite set of quality technical people. (You don't have to run a software company for that to be true today. Lots of computer using companies are hungry for help.) As software company director, you must decide how to deploy your people for the coming year. What kind of a business case can you hear from HP, or its customers, that will make you peel off 1,000 programmer hours over the next 12 months for an MPE port, as well as the technical support hours you need to back it up? One big company, Oracle, made this commitment to the HP 3000. But HP 3000 customers report that to get good technical support for Oracle on the 3000 from Oracle you're likely to be talking with less than a handful of people. People report this Oracle fact with a little uncertainty in their voices, as if having a thin crew of support isn't good. Applications are crucial to the 3000's existence. Several people who are part of the Vision Pages in our upcoming January '98 3000 NewsWire -- a comprehensive look ahead at the 3000's 1998 prospects and challenges -- mentioned applications as key to the continued success of the platform. The issue of how to attract the 'big name vendors' resources to a platform far behind on installed base numbers still needs to be resolved. CSY's financial support for Progress and SAP in the 90s didn't yield products, in part because the commitment wasn't at a high enough level. The new deals are being made at a higher level. Customers should probably look at the arrangement with Netscape for a peek at how the new CSY will be luring top-line software names to the 3000. Some people might not consider FastTrack an application. Some might say that the assistance that is necessary to woo application vendors to the 3000 is people. At the risk of raining on anybody's good work to produce free stuff, we'll argue that people developing tools which already exist for the 3000 might better help the community have a Happy New Year by writing an application, or making their technical resource available (at a fair price) to big name vendors. Those vendors will need MPE intelligence -- market and technical -- to get applications into the 3000 market. Another thing windowed editors buy you While outlining the expanded range of choices for GUI-based programming tools for HP 3000 developers, we overlooked another benefit to programming from something other than the command line. Deploying these tools can help you get the most from the younger talent that’s coming into your coding teams. Subscriber Rob Joseph explained how this works in a glowing review of WhisperTech's Programmer Studio, software we reviewed a few issues ago that went into full production shipping during December: "Many of you are grizzled veterans who are quite satisfied with Qedit, Quad, vi, etc. You may not be as impressed with Programmer Studio or Qedit for Windows given that you have become comfortable with those other products. But that is a very narrow view of the world. If you, like us, are hiring young, entry level staff, and paying them well, you owe it to them to provide the best available tools. And Programmer Studio is one of those tools that can make a difference.” “While new staff still will need to learn about MPE and your applications, at least they will no longer have a learning curve for entering and editing source code. Anyone who has ever used a Windows text editor can get started in PS." Upgrades from the new 939s In our front page story about the new 939KS/020 in December, we noted that HP intends for the new bottom of its midrange to be a full player in the broad array of 9x9 processor power in the line. For example, the new systems have the same memory capacity as any other 9x9 system currently shipping. That wasn't the case with the old Series 939s. This kind of parity also means there's got to be a reasonable upgrade between the 939 and the Series 969 X20 systems, those with the same "fat cache" as the 939. HP said the 969/120 is the first upgrade that makes any sense from the new 939s, giving you the capability to add processors, and faster ones, too. HP's come forward with the cost for such an upgrade: a net of $22,000, once you factor in the processor trade-in credit. Considering how cheap you're getting into the 9x9 line at the 939 end, that's reasonable for a system that costs $76,139 ready to compute. The $22K buys you about 45 percent more processing power, plus the extra headroom of being able to add more processors. A year ago HP ran a special on a similar upgrade between the old 939 and the Series 969s, a short-lived $18,000 special. The new version of the upgrade delivers an almost identical performance increase, but now you get a processor 20 percent faster than the old 969s. HP's Darren Connor also pointed out that the mass storage capacity of the new 939s is exactly the same as the rest of the 9x9 line, more evidence that it's a full partner in the lineup: "Using disk arrays, a maximum of 4 terabytes (4,068 gigabytes) of disk storage is achievable. Remember, using the built-in Multi-function Core I/O card you could connect back up devices via the single-ended SCSI connection as well as use its 802.3 connection for LAN network connections -- so you wouldn't necessarily need to use up additional slots. Of course, practically speaking you might need to arrange things differently if you have a lot of disk to back up..." Express 3 is history by now If you haven't taken delivery of MPE/iX 5.5 Express 3 -- sometimes called PowerPatch 3 -- by now, you can forget about it. Not because there's anything wrong with the release -- people report that except for some problems with the new FTP/iX version, the software runs reliably once you get over some complicated install processes. (See our December 1997 FlashPaper for some advice on how to ensure you get all the new functionality -- it's not automatically installed.) No, the reason that Express 3 is history is because HP has started shipping Express 4, and it automatically cuts off delivery of all prior Express releases when a new one ships. That's because Expresses are cumulative -- they contain all the advances and fixes of the prior Express. Getting back to a working FTP for the 3000 Since the Express releases are cumulative, it also means that those problems with the FTP server in Express 3 are also in Express 4, unfortunately. You can :RESTORE your pre-Express 3 or Express 4 FTP files in the group ARPA.SYS and everything should be okay. Use this set of commands :HELLO MANAGER.SYS :NEWGROUP FTPEXP3 :SH.HPBIN.SYS '-c "cp /SYS/ARPA/*FTP* /SYS/FTPEXP3"' :RESTORE ;@FTP@.ARPA.SYS;OLDDATE Express 4 also doesn't contain another eagerly anticipated fix for the 3000 -- a repair for the DDX bug that can corrupt databases if it's not replaced with new versions of TurboIMAGE or IMAGE/SQL. We're still waiting to hear when the DDX bug fix has cleared beta testing and is in general release. WRQ steps up for watershed Christmas arrived a little early for some of the more noble denizens of Washington state when WRQ announced it was donating $600,000 to help protect the Skagit River watershed. The gift to the Nature Conservancy will help purchase and manage key natural areas of the Greater Skagit River Delta in Skagit and Snohomish counties. The gift brings the total donations from the maker of HP 3000 connectivity software to more than $1.35 million in the last four years. Hundreds of bald eagles winter in the region, along with other migratory birds along the US West Coast. “With the tremendous growth our state is experiencing, we need to focus our attention on saving the best examples of all of our vanishing habitats before it’s too late,” said WRQ founder Doug Walker. WRQ has been growing itself this year, expanding operations outside of the US. The company recently appointed Chris Crane as general manager of its Southeast Asia operations, including a nine-distributor network in the region. Crane, who is based at WRQ’s regional headquarters in Singapore, will be developing and managing strategic business alliances to enhance sales, marketing and technical activities in the region. WRQ discounted its products to Malaysia and Thailand distributors 10 to 14 percent through year’s end to help them cushion against currency turbulence. Lower-cost HP 3000 books Prentice-Hall, the publishers of "The Legacy Continues: Using the HP 3000 with HP UX and Windows NT," has knocked 20 percent off the price of the only HP 3000-specific book in the last five years. You can get the 416-page book for just $36 (plus shipping and sales tax), by ordering from Advanced Information Technology, Inc. 406 Main Street Suite 5 Metuchen NJ USA 08840. Call toll free in the US (888.906.8410) or 732.906.8410 outside of the US, or leave orders at on the Web at www.advaninfo.com or e-mail to Advaninfo@aol.com. The book, written by HP engineers Perry Sellars, George Stachnik and Michael Yawn, is based on hands-on experience with customers using HP-UX, Windows NT and HP 3000s. It covers planning, software architectures, development tools and methodologies, as well as managing, multiple network operating systems and heterogeneous client environments. HP says it’s “THE guide to the evolution of your HP 3000 system into the next century.” For more information browse to the Prentice Hall Web site. Copyright 1997, The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved.