Talk:HP 3000

End of Life Migration
Can anybody post some case-studies on HP 3000 migration to other platforms such as IBM AS400? Thanks!

~Paul C.   Nov, 2006

In other words, you think this article would be improved if it contained a section on the effects the end of HP3000 is having on its customers, with external links to actual cases? 206.53.196.129 (talk) 18:59, 24 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Not unless the additions are sourced from reliable sources and contains no spam. Rilak (talk) 08:50, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Added references to migrations at the Washington State College Consortium, as well as the update on the Stromasys HPA/3000 virtualization engine for homesteading customers. Added data and links to independent suppliers of support for the system beyond HP's 2010 date. Clarified the link between the 3000's success and the bundling of IMAGE, adding information on the Datamation award this database won in 1976.

Also added many website references to useful data hosted by Robelle, Adager, OpenMPE and Applied Technologies on 3000 history, homesteading practices, IMAGE technical papers, VEsoft MPE papers and more.

Ronseybold (talk) 00:15, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

The link to the Stromasys article (footnote 21) is a dead link. emesselt (talk) 04:50, 25 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Fixed to use a more up-to-date link, and bare URL clothed. Guy Harris (talk) 07:28, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Need some citations.
This section needs some citations. Rthiebaud (talk) 04:01, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

The bit about "almost unique in computer history" might escape the need for citation by being changed to "probably unique in computer history" or "certainly unique at such scale". 164.119.5.158 (talk) 22:48, 3 December 2015 (UTC)


 * The bit about "forward compatibility" would definitely not be "almost unique in computer history" if it's actually referring to backward compatibility rather than forward compatibility. If they really do mean forward compatibility, as in, for example, "I can take a program compiled for the last of the PA-RISC HP 3000s and run it on an earlier stack-machine HP 3000", that would at least be uncommon at that scale; backward compatibility for application programs is standard operating procedure for most commercial computer hardware and operating systems out there.  So we need to figure out whether they really mean "forward compatibility" or not; the example they gave is an example of backward compatibility, i.e. the ability to "work with input generated by or meant to an older product or technology" - the ability for a newer HP 3000 to run software for an older HP 3000 - not forward compatibility, i.e. the ability for "a system to gracefully accept input intended for a later version of itself" - the ability for an older HP 300 to "gracefully accept" software for a newer HP 3000.  I suppose "failing to run it but not crashing or damaging any files" could be considered a loose way of "gracefully" accepting that software, but I doubt something that loose is very unique (although UN*X shells' "if it has execute permissions but an attempt to execute it failed, run it as a shell script" is an ungraceful way of handling newer executable image formats and instruction sets, but I digress; I suspect VMS, OS/400, OS/360 and its successors, etc. did better). Guy Harris (talk) 23:37, 3 December 2015 (UTC)


 * While I haven't used an MPE/iX box in a while, running Classic executables (PROG files) was done with emulation and (JIT?) translation. The classic loader links PROG files to the segmented library (SL.PUB.SYS) providing the OS and compiler library, by name rather than magic numbers, or shared library filename and number as on current ELF unix systems. The PROG file structure documenting this should be in the System Tables Manual or maybe the Segmenter Manual. I think that made calls to System intrinsics like external segment calls in the program. Privileged mode programs weren't expected to be backwards compatible. RDBrown (talk) 05:45, 4 December 2015 (UTC)


 * If you mean "running Classic executables on a RISC machine", that's backward compatibility, not forward compatibility, and several of OSes can do that sort of thing - it's far from unique. See, for example:


 * "Classic" Mac OS's Mac 68k emulator and OS X's Rosetta, both of which allowed binaries for processors in older machines to run on processors with new machines;
 * OS/400, which continued the System/38 tradition of having compilers generate code for a very high-level virtual machine and translated that code to native machine code the first time it's executed, allowing AS/400 machines with PowerPC processors to run binaries built on the older IMPI processors;
 * OS X's Classic Environment, which executed binaries for the old "Classic" Mac OS in a virtual environment on top of OS X;


 * so either "forward compatibility" needs to be replaced with "backward compatibility" and the claim about uniqueness needs to be removed, or a citation needs to be provided for forward compatibility - meaning the ability to run applications developed for later versions of MPE on older versions of MPE, or to run applications for PA-RISC on "classic" hardware, or something such as that - which might actually be unique. Guy Harris (talk) 09:10, 4 December 2015 (UTC)


 * No citations since they were requested in 2015, so no reason to believe in this supposed forward compatibility; I've removed that part. If somebody has a citation, so we can believe that older versions of the OS can run software developed for newer versions of the OS, using features of those newer versions, or that PA-RISC executables could run on Classic machines, then they can put it back. Guy Harris (talk) 07:32, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160818003327/http://hardware-museum.livejournal.com/163637.html to http://hardware-museum.livejournal.com/163637.html

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 * I found a new location for the first link, and put that in. The second link wasn't broken, so I just backed that change out. Guy Harris (talk) 20:50, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061010164804/http://www.3k.com/index_papers_hp3000_history.html to http://www.3k.com/index_papers_hp3000_history.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20071012023302/http://www.3k.com/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/HP3000FAQ to http://www.3k.com/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/HP3000FAQ
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060214105120/http://aics-research.com/first3k.html to http://aics-research.com/first3k.html
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