Key 3000 resource Jeff Vance is back on his feet

September 2004

Key 3000 resource Jeff Vance is back on his feet

Some members of the HP 3000 community held their breath during August when they heard the news that HP’s virtual CSY engineer Jeff Vance injured himself seriously in a mountain biking accident. Vance, who’d taken a primary role over the last two years as a liaison between the 3000 community and HP’s lab engineers, crashed his bike on a Canadian vacation just before the HP World conference. But just a few weeks after a crash bad enough to leave Vance immobilized for a short time, HP’s e3000 business manager Dave Wilde reported that Vance visited the 3000 labs — out of a wheelchair and walking again, beginning the physical therapy he will require to recover.

At HP World, Vance was scheduled to deliver an update on the SIB enhancements along with his latest version of the Command Interpreter (CI) talk he gives each year. Although he was ready to start to split his time between the HP 3000 and other HP server duties, Vance has taken an essential role in keeping the 3000 enhanced. Improvements like the JINFO function came straight off his desk, and he’d stepped up to communicate HP’s intentions about continued improvements to the platform.

Before the conference, we’d asked Vance what the term “in plan” meant in relation to the tactical improvement ballot requests of 2004 which HP has approved. “From my perspective, ‘in plan’ means that we plan on doing these enhancements, but we do not have a schedule worked and we do not have target releases nailed down,” he said a few weeks before his accident. “Of course we will target MPE/iX 7.5, but we have not decided on 7.0 or 6.5. Work on some of the items has started and other items have not been investigated much or at all. Anything can be canceled depending on what happens in the lab.”

Developments outside the lab, such as Vance’s accident, can also have an impact on a 3000 lab which is staffed shorter. In something of a prescient comment, he said in July, “If we lost a bunch of engineers, we would not be able to deliver these SIB enhancements. Our highest priority remains keeping customers up and running, so enhancements are a lower priority.”