Question mark over Alpha's long-term future after Windows debacle

Compaq's recent decision to abandon the Windows NT operating system on its Alpha-based servers and workstations may not have affected a large number of enterprise customers worldwide but the resulting fiasco is worrying for Hong Kong's large corporate customers.

These corporations base their million-dollar purchasing decisions on vendors announcing long-term product road maps - and sticking by them.

Compaq's seeming indecisiveness also signals that the world's third-largest computer-maker is still struggling with a sweeping internal reorganisation which is hurting both customers and resellers.

When Compaq bought Digital Equipment Corp early last year in its bid to become an enterprise giant along the lines of IBM and Hewlett-Packard it acquired what was then one of the fastest processors in the world, the Alpha.

Digital based all its high-end lines of servers and workstations on the Alpha chip. It was so protective of the Alpha, one of the first Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) chips to come in a faster 64-bit version, that it even sued rival Intel Corp for stealing key designs for use in its own Pentium processor.

The Alpha-based machines ran a variety of operating systems. Some were created by Digital, such as the old and trusty OpenVMS (first used in minicomputers from Digital's heyday in the early 1980s), to the company's own flavour of Unix called Digital Unix (since renamed Tru64 Unix).