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To: arthur pritchard who wrote (140087)	8/20/1999 3:34:00 PM
From: TechMkt	Respond to of 176387

More confirmation about Compaq's abandonment of NT on Alpha. Fez _____________________________ August 20, 1999 12:00am Compaq to halt NT on Alpha development By Lisa DiCarlo, PC Week Online and Mary Jo Foley, Sm@rt Reseller PC Week Compaq Computer Corp. this week laid off roughly 100 engineers responsible for developing Windows NT on the Alpha platform, several informed sources said. In what may be a related move, Wes Melling, former vice president of OpenVMS and NT integration at Compaq, resigned this week, sources said. Many, if not all of the engineers are being let go from Compaq West, the former DECWest facility in Bellevue, Wash., which has worked hand-in-hand for several years with Microsoft Corp. on NT kernel, clustering and 64-bit support. Digital Equipment Corp. was one of the first, if not the first, major OEM to back Microsoft's NT operating system. And Microsoft's chief NT architect, David Cutler, is a former Digital employee, as are a number of people who have worked for Cutler at Microsoft. Compaq officials did not return a request for comment. But in recent weeks, Compaq has been playing up Linux, True64 Unix and OpenVMS as the preferred operating systems for Alpha. Microsoft officials in Redmond, Wash., also did respond to questions regarding whether or not Microsoft itself will continue to support NT/ Windows 2000 on Alpha. If it decides to discontinue NT on Alpha support, Microsoft's flagship server operating system will support only the Intel architecture. Over the past several years, Microsoft has whittled down NT's cross-platform support by killing support for MIPS and PowerPC. While the two main backers of NT and Alpha were unavailable, others with vested interest in the NT-on-Alpha platform were scrambling to respond to Compaq's moves late last week. A Web site called AlphaNT Source, which follows technical and marketing developments of the Alpha-on-NT platform, derided the decision. "By early September, the engineering staff at DECWest will, for the most part, be gone," the Web site states. "The only folks with work left right now are those people working to get Service Pack 6 [of Windows 2000] out the door. Over 100 souls and their families are having their lives torn asunder because they did a great job and made NT on Alpha the only alternative to Intel's monopoly." The AlphaNT Web master Aaron Sakovitch said that NT on Alpha has been a large financial drain on Digital and now Compaq. Discontinuing NT on Alpha support is "a pure business decision on Compaq's part," Sakovitch said.