HP's MPE Operating System

HP's MPE Operating System

MPE stands for Multi-Programming Executive. It is a multiuser operating system that Hewlett-Packard created in the early 70's for the HP 3000 line of computers and it is still going strong. The last release of MPE for the Classic HP 3000 is called MPE V. The first release for the RISC machines was known as MPE/XL. Although the underlying hardware had a radically different design, MPE/XL was 99.99 percent backward compatible with MPE V.

The current version is called MPE/iX because it includes a hierarchical file system and supports the UNIX function calls (MPE is now POSIX compliant). Programmers are now busy porting UNIX and Internet tools to MPE, as well as entire UNIX application packages.

There is a list server for MPE called the HP 3000-L (all machines that run MPE are HP 3000 systems, and vice versa). A list server is an automatic mailing list of Internet e-mail users which allows people to post messages and reply to those from other members of the list.