It stinks. Yup, the time has come to bid the dedicated, hard-working souls that filled the hallowed (or is that now hollowed?) halls of DEQwest adieu, goodbye, and good luck.
Over 100 dedicated and loyal technologists who have given years of their lives to putting the world's most popular operating system on the world's fastest and best processor technology have been told that they weren't good enough. In a move so twisted it will indeed make your head spin, Compaq is laying off the people who made Alpha NT as good as it could be, and not the marketing buffoons responsible for its demise, those who couldn't sell ice water in Houston.
The bean counters win.
By early September, the engineering staff at DEQwest will, for the most part, be gone. The only folks with work left right now are those people working to get Service Pack 6 out the door. Over 100 souls and their families are having their lives torn assunder because they did a great job and made NT on Alpha the only alternative to Inhel's monopoly. My heart goes out to you folks...
What about W2K/64? What will Microsoft do now that their only provider of a stable hardware platform is quitting? What will API do now that they've wasted so much time on Alpha NT and are now stuck with only one OS? What happens to Microsoft's promise for 64- and 128-way boxes? What happens to the nearly ripened fruit of all the man-centuries of effort building W2K on Alpha?
Linux. Tru64. OpenVMS. (Anyone care to make a PALcode update for a 164SX to run OpenVMS?)
Not much, as far as this is concerned. You can always let Compaq know that their decision to not market Alpha NT and then destroy the lives of the engineers who made it so good STINKS. (NB: Compaq's email naming convention is firstname.lastname@compaq.com; an example would be Michael.Capellas@compaq.com.)
Got an Alpha app, driver, tool, or other program lying around? Please put a copy in the Incoming directory of the file archive for posterity's sake. There will be lots of folks out there who may need that program in the future and may not be able to find it any other way.
Call or write your favorite Alpha engineer and let them know that all their time and energies were not in vain. There are too many success stories, too many millions of dollars and man-hours saved, too many visions seen (that would never be realized on lesser technologies) due to their efforts for them to ever think that they failed. Let them know that they were the successes, it was the marketeers and the bean-counters who failed.
Goodbye? I think not... I'll be around for a while.