Bill Karwin wrote:

> MPE/iX is a proprietary mainframe OS for HP3000 hardware.
>
> When I worked as a DBA at Hewlett Packard, my teammates all used MPE/iX,
> and I was "the UNIX guy". It's pretty simple really, but it has all its
> own quirky tools (like JCL, a batch scripting language) that are unlike
> things that UNIX folks are used to.
>

I know were going out on a limb here, but wasn't the MPE/IX the one that
shared
the common architecture underneed and you could run either or both HP-UX
and MPE
at the same time. I also remember vaguely that the numbers changed arround
that time
so it may have been the HP9000, but Im bad with these things. it had the
new RISC
architecture because it did both the Unix/MPE thing. Everyone droped the
MPE thing
as quick as they could.

The HP3000 its predecessor was a monster, it was a stack based machine much
like the calculators.
Even the machine language was reverse polish notation, like the
calculators. I remember
that even the heap space was implemented as a stack of some sort and
becuase of this the heap
space in C was restricted to 16k TOTAL.

Yes the tools were quirky, the editor was still a line editor at that time
(1988 or whenever).
AllBase was the trendy new unix HP database. The HP3000 however had another

Network model database, whose name I cannot recall. I still remember it
had a list of "large"
prime numbers in the back of the book for suggested values in creating your
hashed indexes.

Hmm so I suppose now Mike knows more than he really wanted to know about
MPE

Mark




that ALL the stack or heap space

>
> I was thankful that the only interaction I had with MPE/iX was FTP'ing
> files back and forth; for that purpose it might as well have been UNIX.
>
> Also, MPE/iX has its own HP-supplied SQL RDBMS product, Allbase. I used
> it on UNIX while I was there, but I didn't know database stuff well
> enough at the time to make a judgement about how good it is. The only
> thing I remember is that you had to pre-allocate large files for data
> and indexes.
>
> Read all about MPE/iX if you have nothing better to do with your time:
> http://www.docs.hp.com/mpeix/
>
> Regards,
> Bill Karwin
>
>
>
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