Recent News and Tips

Sales & Admin office will be closed Monday Aug 1st for a Canadian Holiday. Tech support will be open.

7/29/2005

HPWorld Cancelled

Interex has gone into bankruptcy, cancelled the HPWorld conference in San Francisco and stopped operating. From their web site: "Unfortunately our publications, newsletters, services and conference (HPWorld 2005) will be terminated immediately."

From the Newswire Blog: "The HP 3000 is going to outlive the HP user group that was founded to serve it." More thoughts from Newswire: "Unresolved issues around the closing were still numerous today. Conference attendees who'd paid for show admission wondered about refunds on the 3000-L mailing list. Sponsors such as Acucorp have sent deposits on booth space for the show, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Speakers are holding non-refundable tickets to the San Francisco event, and some are talking of alternative meeting plans in the city during that week. There's more. Interex operates mail list servers that host groups such as the MANMAN ERP mailing list, which was discussing how to continue its communications on alternative servers once the Interex systems go dark. And technical experts in the 3000 community were wondering how much of the user group's technical archives and resources would survive in the wake of such a sudden closing. "

Typical comments from a user on the 3000-L: :I guess I am not really too shocked, but very disappointed. Not as disappointed as when HP announced the death of the 3000. Just confirms that my early retirement co-incides with my companies going off of the 3000. Been a 3000 user (definately not guru) since November 15, 1978 when I got my Series III. Or June of 1978 when I started the sys mgrs course."

For much more discussion, visit 3000-L and the links above.

HP is offering a complimentary, comparable registration to the HP Technology Forum in New Orleans for paid, registered attendees of HP World 2005. Additionally, HP will offer discounted exhibition space at the 2005 HP Technology Forum to non-HP competitors exhibiting at or sponsoring HP World 2005. www.HPWorldParticipants.com

7/20/2005

Clean Command for Masking Data!

A customer called with a problem. They were trying to mask sensitive data in a report. They did not want to mask all of the data in a field, just parts of it so that it was unreadable.

What the customer was doing was just doing Defines and replacing every 5th character with an "*" so that the data would look like:

Barr* Pau* Dur*nd

So, Barry Durand suggested that the customer use the Clean command to change certain characters to "*". So replacing all of the vowels would make the data look like:

B*rry P**l D*r*nd

Note: here are the commands:

>set cleanchar "*"
>clean "a","e","i","o","u"

7/13/2005

HP Garage Restored 'The garage was the reason Bill Hewlett decided to rent the Addison Avenue property in 1938. He needed a spot that he and his friend, David Packard, could transform into a lab and workshop. The Professorville home was "A-number-1," Hewlett assured Packard in a letter. He paid $45 rent to hold it. The young engineers divided the garage into two sections: the left side for design and the right for manufacturing. The table saw sat outside.'

7/09/2005

How to Order Printed Manuals

Of course, the product downloads for Qedit and Suprtool include the user manuals and help files in digital format.

But did you know that you can also order printed manuals? You can have your own personal manual to hold, mark up and dog ear!

Robelle allows you to order the most recent manuals on-line. These professionally bound manuals will be printed immediately upon your request and billed to your credit card (via a service called OnDemandManuals.com). The price is $25 US.

7/07/2005

SM For Everyone!

Vladimir Volokh of VESOFT fame called us recently, and passed on an interesting story.

He was doing MPE system and security consulting at a user site. One of his regular steps is to run VESOFT's Veaudit tool on the system. From this he learned that every user in the production account had System Manager (SM) capabiity!

Giving a regular user SM capability is a really bad thing. It means that the users can purge the entire system, look at any data on the system, insert nasty code into the system, etc. And this site had recently passed their Sarbanes-Oxley audit.

Vladimir removed SM capability from the users and sat back to see what would happen. The first problem to occur was a job stream failure. The reason it failed was because the user did not have Read access to the STUSE group, which contained the Suprtool "Use" scripts. So, Suprtool aborted.

Click the link above to read the rest of this interesting story.

7/03/2005

HP 2000 Running on Emulator!

Mike Gemeny (MGemeny at pgcpsdot org) dropped me this note about the original HP 2000 Time-shared Basic operating system, which preceded the HP 3000:

HP2000 Access Date Code 1812 up and running after all this time.

I just wanted to drop you a note and let you know that we have recovered the original HP2000 operating systems for versions E, F, and Access and have a simulator running which simulates the original hardware. We are able to boot and run these original HP2000 operating systems and are in the process of recovering the contributed libraries.

We have a Yahoo group for the HP2000 if you have an interest. (Click link above for Yahoo group).

7/02/2005

Robelle News for July

We have published our customer newsletter for July, with stories on the Last PA-RISC chip, the HP 3000 Community Booth at HP World, More on IMAGE Logging, Catchlog, Converting a Quad Script to Qedit, and the upcoming Suprtool 4.9 version.

7/01/2005

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.