January 17, 2011

Volunteer server acts as time machine

1984Proceedings Volunteers in the 3000 community, some working with OpenMPE, have placed a chunk of its history online. Conference proceedings from the 1984 Interex meeting, the one where HP announced its project to create a modern, PA-RISC 3000, are on the Invent3K disaster recovery system. (1984 was a significant one for me and eventually the NewsWire; it was the first year I reported on HP 3000 activities, writing for The Chronicle, a trade publication focused on HP that I edited through the early 1990s.)

These scanned papers join technical submissions from 1996 through 2004, the final year that Interex hosted an HP user group conference. Tracy Johnson, who manages the Invent3K outpost and still acts as secretary for OpenMPE, reports, "Most of the bugs in the links for the earlier iteration of the Proceedings Libraries have been fixed. This inspired new input from Frank McConnell.  As such I have received more scans of the Proceedings from yesteryear."

The proceedings for 1984 are on the third button on the left, now included in the indexes of other years, Johnson said, adding that "More years will be offered in the future." He also commented on a stop-gap fix for the outage of openmpe.org, which has been mis-directed to the hp.com main web page since late December.

Johnson and the volunteers have moved the group's web pages to the new server, but they haven't yet applied for a domain name to replace openmpe.org.

Some of you have noticed the OpenMPE domain has been down since Christmas. While the domain is still broken, the internal files are back online, second button from the left. Again, Keven Miller volunteered the coding effort.