Terry Shannon, who knows Compaq, and before it DEC, better than anyone on the planet, is filing daily reports on the conference at his Web site Shannon knows Compaq. Being a good friend of the The Register, however, he has kindly allowed us to nick some of his content for our readers. According to Shannon, Compaq CEO Michael Capellas opened the symposium dressed in conventional suit but wearing an Open VMS number plate round his neck. Why he should do such a thing is unclear, but perhaps is something to do with the fact that Tru64 Unix is going well. Capellas noted that his company's decision to withdraw support for Alpha NT had caused some problems for the two per cent of customers that were committed to it. The delayed Wildfire technology is being shown at DECUS, Shannon notes. He saw a 16-CPU machine with two hard partitions and another running dual instances of Open VMS Galaxy. The Big Q is also showing the Alpha Server DS20E a rack mounted box costing less than $13,000 when configured with the Linux OS. According to Shannon, there is now a total of over one million Alphas in the installed base. For more daily updates of DECUS, look at Terry Shannon's site. ®