QueryCalc Y2K Compliance Certificate|
The future of report writing on the HP3000 is QueryCalc  Susan Putnam Cardinal Aluminum Louisville, KY long-time user & staunch advocate of QueryCalc |
An Introduction to QueryCalc
Imagine what you could do if you could extract information from your HP3000 in any manner that you wished. Imagine how profitable and productive you and your organization could become. Creating and executing reports is the singularly most important thing that you do on your HP3000. This is the point where all of your prior investment begins to pay for itself. And no other report writing structure on the HP3000 has proven itself to be as powerful, as efficient, as easy to learn, or as flexible as QueryCalc. Designed specifically for the IMAGE database, QueryCalc is more than a report writer. It is an elegant query language that is significantly more powerful than SQL, yet far simpler to learn and use, and greatly more efficient. But more importantly yet, at its core, QueryCalc is surprisingly simple. QueryCalc is a combination of the two most common ideas in any office: paper spreadsheets and steel filing cabinets. Only now, the spreadsheets are there on your screen and the steel filing cabinets are your IMAGE, KSAM and flat file databases. QueryCalc is wholly resident on the HP3000. No downloads to PCs are required – or even desired. By keeping the spreadsheet and its query language on the HP3000, the process of creating and executing reports is made far more simple, reliable, and efficient than it could ever be if such information must be repetitively downloaded into a PC. Moreover, QueryCalc is fully automatable. The importance of this simple attribute cannot be overstated. Fundamental business reports are the governors by which an organization is run and managed, and the easy creation and automation of these analyses are the keys to increasing your organization's productivity and profitability. Once a QueryCalc report has been created, it may be run in batch, month after month, with no further human intervention. Or the report may be launched by any allowed user at any time through the use of QueryCalc's very simple prompting screens. But for all of QueryCalc's technical qualities, ultimately the only measure of a product's success lies in the satisfaction and the proven productivity of its users, thus please pay special attention to the user comments in the material to follow. These are the comments of ordinary people who, like you, critically depend on their HP3000 for their organization's livelihood and profitability. Thirty percent of QueryCalc's "power users" had never seen the HP3000 nor its IMAGE databases before they began using QueryCalc, but are now producing reports within hours that would previously have required technical data processing staffs days or weeks to produce using more traditional techniques. |
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Why the HP3000?  True genius lies in the details |
The qualities of simplicity, reliability & efficiency cannot be overvalued We're often asked why, given the power and potential of QueryCalc, we continue to support only one platform, the HP3000? The simplest answer is that QueryCalc depends heavily on the HP3000, but not in the way that you might initially imagine. QueryCalc is software that offers you the capacity to transform the way that you conduct your business. But to do that, we must be able to get past all of the technical jargon and concentrate on the data held in your databases. To be truly productive, the platform on which the databases are held must become essentially invisible. Ease of use, reliability, and simplicity of operation are all part of that invisibility. For these very important reasons, the HP3000 has consistently proven itself to be among the most highly regarded, general purpose commercial database engines in the history of computing. That high level of respect has been earned over a period of twenty years. More organizations use the HP3000 today, with a greater assurance of system availablity, and lessened staffing requirements, and greater levels of obvious success, than any other mid-range platform on Earth. The HP3000's reliability and ease-of-use are only two of the attributes of the HP3000 that have generated an almost zealous loyalty among its business users. If business productivity is measured by the number of fundamental business results obtained per hour, divided by the number of machine manipulations that must be done to service the machine during that same hour, then there is no other mid-range/mainframe database engine manufactured that comes close to the HP3000's levels of productivity and profitability. The machines essentially run themselves. Ultimately, all technologies eventually become simple and reliable. It happened with color television sets. It happened with xerox machines. And it will happen with commercial computing platforms, too. In that regard, the HP3000 is today more like what all computers must become in the future than any other competing platform currently manufactured. The HP3000's inherent simplicity and reliability are of fundamental importance for two reasons: (i) these attributes dramatically increase your productivity and your information flow, and (ii) they greatly decrease your costs of operation. The stories presented here are an amalgam of candid testimonials of HP3000 users, taken from a variety of sources. All of the stories are documented and reprinted with the permissions of the original authors. Each story speaks to a different facet of the HP3000 experience, but all describe the profound financial and corporate advantages of operating a very well-designed, stable operating system in your business. |
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World's Largest Poster Project 
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MPE Users Kick Butt
The HP3000's inherent reliability and simplicity of operation has deeply impressed a generation of commercial computer users. Unfortunately, given the unsettled nature of today's marketplace, where hyperbole outruns functional usability by a hundredfold, the very qualities of the HP3000 (stability, simplicity, and reliability) that make the machine and its database an extremely prudent and profitable choice for the safe operation of a business have also caused it to receive little notice in the trade press. In an effort to help rectify that general lack of exposure in the press -- if only in a small way -- several hundred HP3000 users got together on the internet during the summer of 1996 and decided, on their own, to put together the World's Largest Poster, while delicately expressing their feelings about their HP3000s in the poster's slogan: "MPE Users Kick Butt" (in terms of profitability and productivity). The creation of the poster was inspired by an internet posting that repeated a news announcement that HP and the Disney company had recently created the World's Largest Poster, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, in order to announce a new inkjet printer. Within hours, this group of "well-connected" HP3000 users decided to better the HP/Disney record of 27,000 square feet by building their own poster. The completed 37,000 square foot poster, which almost completely covered a standard American football field, was created and printed wholly on a small HP3000 over a period of six weeks. The story of the poster's successful assembly presented here was written by Ron Seybold of the 3000 News/Wire, and is reprinted with permission. The cost of the poster was subsidized by two long-time advocates of the HP3000: Adager and AICS Research. |
