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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.
The latest newsletter has been posted to the Newsletter page, but you can read directly from this link.
07/11/2018
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 their 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 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
Added to the daily support issues page is a quick tip on using variables inside suprtool and another tip on how to get the hour from the date command.
See the Daily Support Issues HPUX Variables.
03/10/2017
We have released a new Suprtool Pre-Release in the last week or so. Suprtool has a few new text handling functions and some new features in the handling of leading zeroes. A final new feature is you can extract the input record number as a double integer and you can also test via the if command.
03/09/2017
We have started a new page which will outline Daily Support Issues that come up. Hopefully what helps one customer will help another.
01/05/2017
A new version of Qedit 6.2 and Suprtool 5.9 have been installed into production. Qedit has a very important security update in the Qedit for HP-UX server. Suprtool, has a new $month function, STExport has JSON support and other new features.
11/30/2016
The Qedit for Windows Server has some important security updates, which helps improve the login security and error handling of Qedit and Qedit for Windows access. See What's New In Qedit for details and to request a download
11/08/2016
Our robelle.com mail service is currently down, but it is being worked on currently. You can reach me at: neilpatrickarmstrong@gmail.com for any and all questions.
This issue has since been resolved.10/06/2016
I recently needed to remove a bunch of spaces and needed to compress some data down and found that tr -s was exactly what I needed.
more taxref
6212301245700000123456 00000588005617512580 JOHN SMITH 0042158657802577
6212301245700000123456 00000588005617512580 JOHN SMITH 0042198757802577
6212301245700000123456 00000600005617512580 SHARON JONES 0042198757802577
6212301245700000123456 00000588005617512580 JOHN SMITH 0042158657802577
6212301245700000123456 00000588005617512580 JOHN SMITH 0042198757802577
6212301245700000123456 00000600005617512580 SHARON JONES 0042198757802577
tr -s " " >newtax
more newtax
6212301245700000123456 00000588005617512580 JOHN SMITH 0042158657802577
6212301245700000123456 00000588005617512580 JOHN SMITH 0042198757802577
6212301245700000123456 00000600005617512580 SHARON JONES 0042198757802577
6212301245700000123456 00000588005617512580 JOHN SMITH 0042158657802577
6212301245700000123456 00000588005617512580 JOHN SMITH 0042198757802577
6212301245700000123456 00000600005617512580 SHARON JONES 0042198757802577
Although this may not be exactly what you need it certainly helped me compress down some data and get ride of a lot of extraneous spaces.
09/07/2016
There is a new feature in Suprtool 5.8.10 and higher which allows a user to add a number of months to a give date. Let's say you have to follow up with a customer in three months, a simple Suprtool task can do this:
base custdb,1,;
get customers
if custno="12345"
item follow-up-date,date,ccyymmdd
update
ext follow-up-date=$month(follow-up-date,+3)
xeq
This was done due to a direct request from one of our customers. One of the features of this is that if a month does not have the same number of days, Suprtool will find the closest date. For Example, if the +1 is invoked for a date that is say August 31st, the resulting date would be "September 31", which is of course incorrect. Suprtool will adjust the date to be a correct date of September 30th.
09/14/2016
Occasionally we get requests to summarize data or manipulate reports to be re-organized. One common manipulation is to stick the contents of one line onto the end of another based on the a value in the first line. The commands to do this are fairly simple :
Append "~" "Transaction"
Glue "~"
ch "~" " @
qux/lq all
Transaction Date: 20160908
Balance: 1245.85
Transaction Date: 20151213
Balance: 908.54
Transaction Date: 20121221
Balance 125.44
qux/append "~" "Transaction"
1 Transaction Date: 20160908~
3 Transaction Date: 20151213~
5 Transaction Date: 20121221~
3 lines appended to
qux/glue "~"
1 Transaction Date: 20160908~Balance: 1245.85
3 Transaction Date: 20151213~Balance: 908.54
5 Transaction Date: 20121221~Balance 125.44
3 lines Glue-updated
qux/ch "~" " @
1 Transaction Date: 20160908 Balance: 1245.85
3 Transaction Date: 20151213 Balance: 908.54
5 Transaction Date: 20121221 Balance 125.44
3 lines changed
The Append command sticks a Tilde on the end of the line, and the glue command, glues the line after the Transaction line onto the end. Tilde is used since it isn't often in normal files, you can look to insure that the tilde is not in the file with a simple: ch "~"~" @, to see if there are any occurences.
09/08/2016
Occasionally we get updates to customers e-mail addresses and often these e-mails have bad data in them. Over the past years I have tracked the bad data to be, Tab, Carriage Return or Line Feed. Luckily we have Suprtool to fix the data in very few commands:
base custdb,1,;
get d-custdata
clean "^9:^13"
if $findclean(e-mail-address)
update
ext e-mail-address=$clean(e-mail-address)
xeq
We specify Decimal Nine thru to Decimal 13, which is Tab thru to Line Feed, we use $findclean to find the entries and we update and run the extract of the e-mail address thru the $clean function and the data gets fixed and updated in one easy step.
09/07/2016
Have our website generate your Suprtool code for you. We three new forms to help generate code, Standard Suprlink Task, Select using a table, and Update using a Table. See our Code Generation Page.
09/06/2016
Suprtool 5.8.11 is now available as a pre-release. You can read a summary of What is New, in What's New.
08/25/2016
The Robelle Web Site has been updated using Bootstrap 4, to provide a more Mobile friendly look and feel. As always please send feedback to neil@robelle.com.
08/01/2016
The latest Robelle Newsletter is now available.
06/27/2016
We've been busy adding new features to the Suprtool Suite of products, namely with the JSON option in STExport and more recently we've added access to MYSQL databases in Suprtool/Open.
>OPEN MYSQL robelle_4 Jz2xrwX tream_robelle dbserver.robelle.com
>SELECT * FROM ALL_TYPES
>FORM
Column Len Offset Type
TINYINT 4 0 Tiny
SMALLINT 6 3 Short
MEDIUMINT 9 9 INT24
INT 11 18 Long
BIGINT 20 29 LONGLONG
FLOAT 6 49 FLOAT
DOUBLE 8 55 Double
DECIMAL 10 63 NEWDECIMAL
CHAR 20 73 String
DATE 10 93 Date
DATETIME 19 103 DateTime
TIMESTAMP 19 122 TimeStamp
TIME 10 141 Time
YEAR 4 151 Year
>LIST
>XEQ
>SQL (1) >OUT $NULL (0)
TINYINT = 1 SMALLINT = 2
MEDIUMINT = 3 INT = 4
BIGINT = 5
FLOAT = 6.01 DOUBLE = 7.02
DECIMAL = 8.03 CHAR = MYCHAR
DATE = 2016-02-26 DATETIME = 2016-02-29 02:15:22
TIMESTAMP = 2016-02-26 15:06:39
TIME = 15:06:39 YEAR = 2016
>SQL (2) >OUT $NULL (1)
TINYINT = 1 SMALLINT = 2
MEDIUMINT = 3 INT = 4
BIGINT = 5
FLOAT = 6.01 DOUBLE = 7.02
DECIMAL = 8.03 CHAR = MYCHAR
DATE = 2016-02-26 DATETIME = 2016-02-29 02:15:22
TIMESTAMP = 2016-02-26 15:06:50
TIME = 15:06:50 YEAR = 2016
IN=2, OUT=2. CPU-Sec=1. Wall-Sec=1.
If you're interested in trying this new feature out or have any questions, let me know by e-mailing Neil@robelle.com.
Keep in mind that this products is currently just in our little wind tunnel, but it does extract data, list to the terminal and output to link/SD files. We are interested in getting feedback to look at the direction of how to handle some data types.
05/02/2016
You may have read on HP3000-L about the Computer History Simulation Project and the Emulated HP3000 that you compile and build yourself.
Read the details at the top of the page about the SIMH Emulator.
04/05/2016
04/04/2016
02/02/2016
01/25/2016
01/19/2016
12/15/2015
11/24/2015
What do you do when you try downloading a file to your HP 3000 and you always get a single line file?
Read some suggested tips about One Line files.
9/17/2015
I'm looking for people to test the code generation for for input from Oracle Form Output. This form will take in the output from a form command after the Open / Select commands have an active Oracle table.
You can try this new form out at Oracle Form to Code. Any feedback can be addressed to neil at robelle.com.
7/17/2015
Recently I was asked how to find a line and add a line before the line and how to add a line after. This is always fairly easy using host based commands, but since this customer did not have the host-based version of Qedit, but rather the Server only version and Qedit for Windows. Therefore my other option was to Add Lines Before and After a Line using Qedit for Windows Scripting Language.
You can refer to the Qedit For Windows Scripting Language manual for details.
5/21/2015
A number of customers have been requesting where to download Suprtool from for Amisys 6.7. The summary of what changes have been made to Suprtool under What's New in Suprtool Section.
You can click on the link "Request a Download" at the end of the list of enhancements etc. You can also go directly to the form to Request a Download and please note that at the end of the form you need to scroll down and enter the captcha information in the box provided at the bottom of the page.
5/13/2015
A second form has been added to help generate Suprtool code. The purpose of this form is to generate code where it would take in a CSV file make it fixed length and split the various fields into their intended native type. A form of a dataset or SD file can be used to generate the code.
This is currently just an experiment but we plan on expanding and already have a few ideas for some other code generation. You can try it out by going to this form: Form To Code
You enter a start position and paste in the form of the dataset you want define and extract commands for and you are taken to a page with then generated code on it.
4/24/2015
A new form has been added to help generate Suprtool code. The purpose of this form was to help a customer with some code generation where files would have some fields at the beginning and then an entire dataset in the file. So the dataset would start at a position that was not the first position and was not in a self-describing file.
So the code generator form will take in a form from a dataset and a start position and generate all the coded defines and extracts.
This is currently just an experiment but we plan on expanding and already have a few ideas for some other code generation. You can try it out by going to this form: Form To Code
You enter a start position and paste in the form of the dataset you want define and extract commands for and you are taken to a page with then generated code on it.
More refinements will be done but at this time this is just a test project.
4/22/2015
Oracle 12 has some changes in it that doesn't allow for older versions of Suprtool to connect to databases using the Oracle 12 client. Suprtool 5.7 Build 6 and higher now properly connects to Oracle databases using the Oracle 12 client.
This impacts Itanium and Open versions of Suprtool.
1/27/2015
In 2014, Robelle support was asked for a method to Obfiscate or make unreadable some test data. We came up with a method and documented it in this HowDoI article.
Taking this article and the need for many of our customers needing to do this, we enhanced Suprtool to have a function that would translate characters in such a way as to make such fields as the Company Name, First/Last name of people etc to be unreadable in a quick and easy manner. This is intended for when you make copies of test data and want to make some of these fields unreadable.
So instead of using the Table and having define each field, you can now do the following:
run suprtool.pub.robelle BASE macord.macsdata.test,1,DOALL GET customers TRANSLATE TOUNREAD UPDATE EXTRACT name=$translate(name) EXIT
1/13//2015
Suprtool 5.7 is available as the production release, you can read about the various enhancements and bug fixes in the various change notices.
12/31//2014
