I wrote: Jay wrote: Never used E. The workspace on E was too small for many of my programs, and I depended on PRINT USING quite a lot. But I used C' for about two years, and it seemed extremely robust to me. The only problem we had was when the fixed-head disk eventually died, and even though the system was under an HP maintenance contract, they couldn't repair it. So they upgraded the C' to F, and gave us more moving-head disk drives. I used F for about a year, and it seemed really solid as well. Not surprising, since F is basically C' modified to use the HP-2100/21MX optional microcoded floating point instruction, and to not require fixed-head media. No, sleep/hib only works to tape. Same with selective dump/restore. You can copy files (including programs) disk-to-disk, but it's not very convenient, and it doesn't preserve the user ID table. If you take down the system, you can back up an entire disk onto another of the same geometry, but you can't do that during timesharing. I suppose, as long as your expectations are sufficiently low. Even most of the games wouldn't fit on E. That's why I've had very little interest in it, and mostly have wanted to run C', F, or Access. And it would be fun to set up Access for RJE to an IBM operating system running on Hercules. :-) Eric

Jim wrote... Nah, not at all :) Eric makes a good point, the smaller program workspace on E version, and "print using" not being present on E. I don't have his view only because of my experience. I happened to start out on an E series version of TSB. As a result, I was very used to defining COMmon variables and doing CHAINs. So when we upgraded to C, and later Access, all the programs I was used to using still worked fine. Of course, we could have gotten rid of the COMmon and CHAIN stuff and made several programs into one, but, why bother if it works as is. I never had the experience Eric did in getting used to the workspace on C, and then having to split the programs up when moving them to an E, so I can certainly understand his frustration with it. In addition, coming from E, I wasn't one to frequently try to use "PRINT USING", I found other ways to address it because it was the only way to do it on E. Of course, Eric got used to using PRINT USING on all his programs, so again, I can see his frustration in moving programs which made liberal use of that statement back to an E series. He's got perfectly valid points. There's no question that C, C', and F are superior to E. However, my argument was that E is perfectly usable unless you're doing business processing, running large apps, etc. More to the point, I was saying that if a hobbyist wants to get some form of TSB running, E is by FAR the easiest to attempt, because it uses much less hardware that is already somewhat difficult to find. Or to put it very succinctly - for E the requirements are one cpu, one disc drive, paper tape reader, and a 12920 mux set. For C, C', F you need an additional cpu with 32K, and 4 more I/O cards and the rather hard to find processor interconnect cables. I THINK 7970 tape MAY be required for C, C', F, but I am not sure about that, I know it's required for Access. I was just being realistic that... ok, if a hobbyist has trouble finding an HP TSB compatable cpu, they're going to be twice as pressed to find another cpu as well. So, to sum up, Eric is correct. Our only difference is that I consider E to be VERY usable, he doesn't agree because it lacks features that he finds important. I personally feel that if one looks at the specific differences between E and C, C', F, with regards to programming features available, not O/S or admin stuff, the differences aren't very big at all. And the hardware requirements are less. Given unlimited funds and/or easy access to more hardware, sure, go with C, C', F. Yup, I know load media is available around the listmembers for 2000E and 2000Access for sure, and I am guessing that Eric has load media for C, C', or F probably?