Perl upgraded for 3000, but without HP’s support; Free Secure Web server goes beta

A new version of the scripting language Perl has been released for the HP 3000, but HP will not be supporting the language as part of the computer’s fundamental operating system. The 5.8.0 release is available as unsupported freeware from HP engineer Mark Bixby’s personal site, www.bixby.org.

“MPE users will be able to enjoy the same leading-edge Perl functionality that will be available to the rest of the Perl world once 5.8.0 is formally released,” Bixby said. Support for the software is available through the Perl community.

The HP engineer is running an official HP software beta test as well for sendmail and HP WebWise MPE/iX Secure Web server. HP plans to release patches to the 7.0 MPE/iX to enable this software, which will be included in the 7.5 release shipping this fall. “These are the same software bits that will be in 7.5 FOS,” Bixby said, “and they are being released as 7.0 FOS via the new patches. These are genuine AUTOPAT/PATCHIX/etc patches, rather than informal tarballs.” Bixby hoped to get the patches general released by this month.