News reaches us from our US insider at Compaq that the company has opened a Win64 porting centre in Bellevue. It is asking people it likes to sign a non-disclosure agreement and join it in planning ahead. The plan will be formally unveiled in April but early adopters have already been formally courted by Compaq executives, our insider notes. Compaq has, of course, said that it will make the transparent connection between Win64 and D/UX, now Tru64 Unix. Scaling is still a problem for Compaq on the Intel platform and when it announces its eight way IA32 box in April, Windows NT may not work as well as Microsoft hopes. That leads Compaq engineers to suspect that they might be better off staying with the benighted little endian Alpha chip. ®