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So I have to ask, were you swept up in the Compaq merger? No doubt NT on alpha wasn't a big seller, the fact the 64bit compiler was hiding in plain sight pretyt much sums that up. But it had to be a simple sales # thing when they killed NT on Alpha?

It all just seems such bad timing, especially the way Itanium flopped, But I don't think Compaq could compete with AMD and the hammer.

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Compaq announced complete switchover to Itanium and killing off Alpha without any warning (No Itanium chips were available then, iirc), which is how there are Windows 2000 RCs for Alpha - up until the announcement the development was progressing with assumption that Alpha would be launch platform for 2000 just like it was for NT4.

Also, a lot of AMD64 tech is Alpha derived, despite Intel buying a lot of it from Compaq. I once heard a rumour that early K8 design changelog supposedly had a line about "dropping VAX floating point support from the FPU". Which would be less believable if Hammer didn't resemble EV7 with DDR2 in place of Rambus and no ethernet-based management bus.

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