Wirt after Bruce:

>>  <http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/comdig/TWB19980612S0003>
>>
>> that quotes Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer, the company's strategy for
>> absorbing Digital Equipment Corporation is to kill the brand name and
>> move all VMS customers to NT.

> I didn't know this for sure, but all the signs pointed in this
> direction.  However, saying it out loud is probably the dumbest
> thing that anybody could say.

> Compaq may as well stop spending money on Digital
> advertisements today. ......

Yup....  admit I was surprised too;  that Compaq would make
that clear an admission in public.  Quoting a couple sentences
from the above techweb article:

"We haven't fully resolved the enterprise organization, but I'll
give you a flavor of a few things," said John Rose, senior vice
president and group general manager of Enterprise Computing.
.......
Rose said Compaq would build on Digital's and Tandem's legacy
systems installed base to build enterprise-class Windows NT
solutions. ...."

Nothing anywhere in the piece that even hinted about keeping
OpenVMS going;  even for awhile....  nada... zippo...  zero...

Another telling factoid that was on CNNfn end of last week:
Compaq had just announced job cuts as part of the "absorption"
of Digital.  The proportion was (surprise, surprise):

Job cuts at Compaq:           2,000
Job cuts at Maynard, MA:  15,000

CNNfn reported that 15,000 is 25 percent of the remaining
work force at ex-Digital...  Bet the proportion of people working
on OpenVMS that were cut was a lot higher than that....

CONCLUSION:  Don't look for a lot of OpenVMS updates
from here on out...

> However, on the bright side, it does make our decision not
> to support DEC emulation into QCTerm seem more reasonable. ....

Sometimes it doesn't matter if you're good or lucky or both,
in making a decision to go one way or the other on things like
this:  It only matters that you're right...      ;-)

Ken Sletten