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Suprtool and Qedit: still enhancing, always backwards compatible
Suprtool/Open: our latest product offering, can go wherever you want to go:
With other products, migration may involve recoding and retesting with only a subset of functionality. But our new Suprtool/Open is a complete migration of Suprtool. See the latest information at: Suprtool/Open.
October 2024 Newsletter.
The latest Newsletter has been distributed and is available
here.
2024/11/01
The latest Newsletter has been distributed and is available here.
2023/06/27
The latest Newsletter has been distributed and is available in the newsletter section.
2022/10/28
Our Fax Number is no More.
Much like the Parrot in the infamous Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch, our Fax machine will soon be no more. In all seriousness, though we will be getting rid of the separate fax number, you may still be able to send a fax, however, you would need to call in to the office beforehand.
2022/09/28
Qedit/ Open Now Supports Visual Mode
Qedit/Open now supports visual mode on HP terminals. We are looking for beta testers to play with Qedit on Linux and give us some feedback.
2022/08/25
Qedit and Suprtool 6.4 released.
Suprtool and Qedit 6.4 have been released, the big news on Qedit is that the majority of the code and features have been ported to Linux, just like Suprtool has. Rport, the report writer has had some spacing improvements. Suprtool/Open has had some bug fixes to the Big Endian to Little Endian transformation.
This is the biggest request we have had to add to Qedit in quite some time, mainly to port their applications from HP-UX to Linux. While, Qedit / Open doesn't currently have visual/screen mode or server mode, the line editor functions are all working as you would expect. So text/keep, change, delete, add, append, etc all work as expected.
If you're interested in trying out Qedit on Linux or need additional information? Contact Neil Armstrong.
10/05/2021
10/29/2020
03/29/2020
03/21/2020
03/01/2020
I was asked for a method/trick for roughly calculating age. The customer was finding sometimes they were off by one. I realized that this may be due to rounding and came up with the following calculation.
>in dates >list >xeq >IN DATES.NEIL.GREEN (0) >OUT $NULL (0) CURR-DATE = 20200121 BIRTH-DATE = 19480526 >in dates >item curr-date,date,ccyymmdd >item birth-date,date,ccyymmdd >def age,1,4,double >ext age=$truncate($abs($days(birth-date) - $days(curr-date)) / 365) >list >xeq >IN DATES.NEIL.GREEN (0) >OUT $NULL (0) AGE = 71In retrospect it might be worthwhile using 365.25 as the dividing factor, but it likely won't make much of a difference.
02/21/2020
Hello, I have a question for youis there a way to replace all nulls with spaces in Qedit?
Tq filename Set decimal on Cq '0 " " all Kq,yes ExitSo the set decimal on is the key which tells qedit that the single quote followed by a number will be treated as the decimal equivalent, which for null is a single quote, so the two key things here are:
Set decimal on Cq '0 " " all
01/21/2020
It is advisable to check your suprmgr files for the Set Date Cutoff Command value and increase it to be greater than 20. If not it is likely that you will have issues with dates in 2020, will end up with a century value of 19, instead of 20. For details on Set Date Cutoff please see: Set Date Cutoff.
01/01/2020
The latest Robelle Newsletter has been sent out and is available online.
11/20/2019
We received some sad news in the 3000 community, Alan Yeo, founder of Screenjet has passed away, details in a letter from Michael Marxmeier of MarxMeier Software:
It is with great sadness that we write to inform you that Alan Yeo, founder of Screenjet Ltd. has passed away. He will be greatly missed as a friend and colleague, having worked with many of us for decades.
ScreenJet and Marxmeier Software have had close ties for a long time. Alan Yeo was a valued board member for Marxmeier Software and Michael Marxmeier is a director at ScreenJet.
Marxmeier Software has assumed additional responsibilities to ensure the continuation of ScreenJet products and services. As of June 2019 all support, license renewals and upgrades are being administered by Marxmeier Software. This will not affect any ScreenJet customer product licenses or agreements which will remain with ScreenJet Ltd. The teams at ScreenJet and Marxmeier will combine there long time experience and resources to guarantee efficient and reliable ongoing support and services. We look forward to continue working with you in the future.
If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact us at anytime. You can reach us at mike@marxmeier.com or by phone at +49 202 243140.
Sincerely,
Michael Marxmeier
for the Marxmeier and ScreenJet team
10/17/2019
The first week of June is my work anniversary at Robelle, so to celebrate
I am putting out a call for Alpha testers of a new Report Writer.
If interested, please e-mail me at neil@robelle.com.
Primarily to start we can send MPE and HP-UX versions out, the Open version will be made available soon.
06/03/2019
The April 2019 Newsletter is out and has been distributed, with lots of good feedback.
04/18/2019
03/21/2019
03/21/2019
I got a chuckle when I read your chronology of the HP3000, and in particular this message on the webpage brought a smile.
Early in my career with HP (I started in 1975), I was attending training in Cupertino, and toured the area where the HP3000 units were in final test. These were the original HP3000 units, before the HP3000 CX. They had wire-wrapped boards, and all of the sudden, none of the machines would run for more than a short time.
When a wire wrap board is manufactured, the operator of the wire-wrap machine will insert a wire into the unit, then place the units small cylinder over a pin on the back of the board (the boards looked like a bed of nails onto back, with a pin for every connection that was possible). The operator would then pull a trigger to cause the wire to be wrapped around the pin, stripping the insulation from the wire as it was wrapped. The operator would then route the wire to the pin it was to be connected with, and repeated the process. You could wrap several wires on the same pin, so that the signal could be sent to other pins.
My memory was that there was one operator who did the wire wrapping for every HP3000 made. HP manufacturing engineering folks were in a panic, because none of the newly made HP3000 units would work, and no one knew why.
I remember the revelation when it was found that only the neat looking boards failed, the messy ones seemed to work OK. The wire-wrap operator had decided to improve the aesthetics of her work, and began to route the wires vertically and horizontally to make the resulting boards look neat and tidy. She did not realize that when two wires are routed side by side, interference will be transmitted from one wire to a neighboring wire. When the wires are routed point to point, and not vertically and horizontally, the wires typically cross one another, and no cross talk.
When we had new boards made, and requested that the wires be routed "point to point, everything started to work again. It was not very long until the wire wrap boards were replaced with printed circuit boards.
Ted Workman
Taunton, Mass
05/18/2018
I read with interest your article about the history of the 3000. Of particular interest was the part that said "The Alpha was announced as the HP 3000 with a fancy cabinet of pizza-oven doors, available in four colors.".
I once saw a HP 3000 which was multiple cabinets, each of which had many wood-grain doors which were the 19" width of the rack by perhaps 10" high, each of which had an Ace lock (round key, like on vending machines). I be- lieve that at least some of the compartments behind these doors held wire- wrap boards, not etched PCBs. The "console" was a table with a pair of CRTs in the middle, and to the left and right of these CRTs were large panels full of LEDs, with stenciled-and-varnished designations for each LED. I was told that one CRT was reserved for maintenance functions, while the other was the OS operator's console.
Does this ring any bells? Was this a prototype? It doesn't sound anything like any other description of a 3000 that I've read.
This would have been in 1974 or 1975..."
Thanks, Terry Kennedy (www.tmk.com)
05/09/2018
Dave Wiseman has announced a meeting of SIGBAR in June in Silicon Valley, funnily enough I had just signed up for the Silicon Valley Gran Fondo which will be on the same weekend.
We had such good times together for 25 years - I bought an HP3000 Series II for Commercial Union Assurance in the 1970s and stayed within the community until the early 2000s with Proactive and Millware - and it would be great to meet all our old friends again.
We are planning a social meeting in June 22-23 in the Santa Clara/Cupertino area, exact venue to be decided when we know numbers. There may be a small charge for the venue hire and we have two optional excursions we can organise for a small charge. Please use the link below to express your interest and book your flights NOW.
1. The Computer History Museum is in the vicinity and is on our list of potential venues. There will be an entrance fee and we can organise a group visit, even if it is not our meeting venue,
2. Remember the company at 19220 Pruneridge in Cupertino? Well, we have organised a tour of the address, which is now the Apple HQ visitor centre and will even hire a bus to and from the venue if enough people are interested. The charge will be around $10-$15 for the transportation.
Wherever the event is held, we will organise food and drinks to be available for purchase. Lastly, if a few vendors who made there money from the community could help sponsor the event we may be able to pay for all of this.
PLEASE share this email with anyone you know from the HP3000 community
Any questions? Please feel free to contact me directly - my email/Skype are below
https://form.jotformeu.com/80934801853359 Dave Wiseman
davebwiseman@googlemail.com
+44 777 555 7017
Skype: davebwiseman
04/09/2018
The latest newsletter has been posted to the Newsletter page, but you can read directly from this link.
07/11/2018
The January 2018 Newsletter has been send out to all our customers. It has some excellent articles, of note is an article on AI from Gavin Scott.
02/02/2018
Suprtool 6.0 has been released as the production release. This version contains many new features and bug fixes:
01/29/2018