Recent News and Tips

Do You Know What a Kibibyte Is?

A kibibyte is 2^10 bytes, while a kilobyte is 10^3. The International Electrotechnical Commission says so. Click the link to read all about it.

3/31/2004

Our move into our new quarters in Surrey BC went fine last Friday and Saturday. By Monday we were open for business, phones were ringing, email was being answered, and our servers were functioning. Here is Tammy at her new desk, not quite moved in yet!

And here is the old office, empty:

Thanks to Hans for the pictures.

3/30/2004

DDS Cartridge-Drive Compatibility

This chart by APPIC on the OpenMPE site shows DDS tape cartridges from 60m to 170m in size (1.6 Gbyte to 72 Gbyte) versus DDS drives from DDS-1 to DDS-5. For each combination, it shows whether the drive can read or read and write the media. Warning: the chart is in French and English.

3/29/2004

New Robelle Phone Numbers

Since we moved across town we had to get new phone numbers:

Office Phone : 604.501.2001
Fax : 604.501.2003

The old numbers will be forwarded for 6 months. The Tech support phone is unchanged at 800.453.8970

3/26/2004

Some Useful Free Programs for the 3000

Allegro provides a web home for many useful 3000 tools, including CHKTAPE to check tape drive state (by Terry Tipton) and MASTEROP for job scheduling (by Carl Kemp). Also programs that have been ported to the 3000: the Ruby and Python programming languages, Analog to analyze web stats, Ploticus to display data, and Tidy for format HTML. And many others that they wrote themselves, separate link.

3/26/2004

What Are Your Favorite Enhancements?

As our all-time favorite improvements to HP 3000 Software, we all agreed that disc caching for the original MPE was a fabulous. It not only boosted the performance of the existing HP 3000s dramatically, but the timing was perfect. It was released just in time to save the bacon of a lot of HP sites while they were waiting for the new RISC processors to be released. Click the link to see all-star improvements to MPEX, IMAGE, Qedit, Suprtool and more.

3/25/2004

SIB (System Improvement Ballot) Results

The SIB results are posted on the OpenMPE web site. Check out the bottom of the page and the number of homesteaders -- not sure that this is an accurate reflection of the market, but is still quite a lot of homesteaders. The number one requested tactical improvement was "network printing to work with non-HP printers" via addition of a new pcl_supported = false option.

3/22/2004

Sector 7 Migration Services

This migration services firm uses the Sungard-Bitech Transport toolset, linked below.

3/19/2004

Transport Migration Tools

From Sungard-Bitech, developed since 1988, tools for migrating COBOL, KSAM, IMAGE, VPLUS applications to UNIX.

3/18/2004

Laws of Computer Programming

Such as "Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find that programmers cannot write in English. " And many more.

3/17/2004

Fast Suprtool-Eloquence Reads

Suprtool/UX version 4.7.12 has a new option that enables "fast block reading" for Eloquence databases. Performance improvements can be up to five times. Another important enhancement for Eloquence is that Suprtool will now dynamically load whatever version of the Eloquence routines you have on your system. You can also dynamically load test versions of the Eloquence libraries, to try with Suprtool.

3/16/2004

Feedback on Qedit/HP-UX

"I absolutely LOVE QEDIT! It is helping to make the move off the HP3000 at least bearable. I could never have lived with vi."

Rex Dickey, IT Director
Columbia Steel Casting Co., Inc.

3/15/2004

HP 3000 Support: Azurri

Azurri Computer Systems offer support (both hardware & software) on all HP 3000 servers (whether currently supported or not by HP). Their support services will continue well past 2006 with no plans to discontinue HP 3000 support. Hat tip for the link to: John Dunlop

3/12/2004

HP 3000 Freeware

This Beechglen web site has many useful scripts and programs (store-to-disk format) such as a utility to dynamically change the logon prompt to display a message *before* users attempt to log on, and a command file to translate sybsys and err numbers, plus many others.

3/11/2004

We are moving our Surrey BC office on Friday, March 26th. But since most of us don't work in the office anyway and the telephone lines will be call-forwarded and we have spare servers in California, there should be no disruption in customer service!

3/10/2004

Hidden Value for February

The second February column from The 3000 Newswire is up at John Burke's web site, with answers to questions such as "how do I find all the IMAGE databases on a system?" and "What is the command to kill a session that refuses to die?" - lots more good information.

3/09/2004

net.digest for February

The February column from The 3000 Newswire is up at John Burke's web site, with good information on patches, Stage/iX, MPE/iX date formats on :Store tapes, and DSCOPY vs FTP.

3/08/2004

Feedback from a Customer

John Bawden of QualChoice writes: "Been reading the newsletter since 1988 and it has provided many good tips that have saved me time and effort and increased my HP 3000 knowledge. Robelle's support and service are consistently among the best in the business."

3/05/2004

Credit Union Migration Story

Summit is converting a number of sites from MPE to HP-UX every month, using Robelle's Suprtool and Qedit in the process. Here are comments from one credit union.

3/04/2004

Information for New Customers

We have added a web page with information for new users of Suprtool and Qedit, including installating the software.

3/03/2004

March Robelle Newsletter Online

We have posted our latest newsletter, which customers will receive in the mail as well:

"Qedit and Suprtool rock!"
Allegro's 20th anniversary
Suprtool performance, migration and latest enhancements
Merging lines horizontally in Qedit
And lots of industry news and links.

3/01/2004

Archived News and Tips...

HP 3000 Book

Edited by Bob Green of Robelle, from articles written by Robelle, by The 3000 Newswire, and by other experts in the HP 3000 field.

This 300-page book contains the latest information on three important topics:
Homesteading
HP 3000 Tune Up
Migrating a 3000 application.