The Compaq Epoch

In fact, Compaq purchased the remains of DEC because of significant assembling facilities, its wide distributional network (in 98 countries), and that cross-licensing agreement with Intel (for example, allowing to manufacture 8-processor Profusion servers). Later on it turned out that the division developing Alpha architecture wasn't welcome really: Compaq produced workstations and servers based on Intel processors for a very long time, and also paid special attention to AMD products. So, Compaq established an alliance with Samsung in June 1998, to develop Alpha architecture (by the way, DEC and Samsung signed an agreement in February 1998, according to which Samsung received full access to all Alpha-related patents, and could manufacture already developed Alpha processors as well as design new ones on their own). They established a new joint venture aka API (Alpha Processor Inc.), to promote the architecture (someone must have made right conclusions from DEC's previous experience). In the summer of 1998, EV6-based systems entered mass production stage, featuring the best price-to-performance ratios compared to other competing products available on the market. Serious problems with the upcoming Intel Itanium gave every reason to assume that the situation would remain like that in the near future. Besides Samsung, EV6 processors were also manufactured by Intel in their Hudson Fab-6, according to the final agreement with the former DEC...

In 1999 Compaq suffered some significant sales drops in the personal computer market. The most frequently named reason was an underestimation of possibilities given by the Internet to promote and sell PCs. Dell, in fact, adapted its business model accordingly and offered computer equipment priced most attractively among all top brands. Compaq's CEO, Eckhard Pfeiffer, resigned after a financial disaster in Q1 1999. Trying to reduce losses, Compaq started to minimize its presence in certain areas, and that affected Alpha systems: in May 1999, the AlphaServers assembly line in Salem (New Hampshire) was officially shut down.

On August 23, 1999, a notorious event took place: Compaq stopped their participation in the development of Windows NT, stopped supplying this OS with Alpha systems of its own, and, in fact, laid off a team of about 120 programmers from former Western Research Laboratory of DEC (DECwest) working on this project. According to Compaq's statistics on the OS’s preinstalled on Alpha systems, Tru64 was used in 65% of the systems, OpenVMS - in 35%, and Windows NT in just about 5%, so there was no reason to keep flogging a dead horse. A week after, Microsoft announced that there would be no Windows 2000 for Alpha released. Considering the fact that Microsoft gave up the support of PowerPC and MIPS architectures in 1997, the future of a "universal OS" was tied to a single architecture, besides IA-64...