From: "Andy R" <quadreverb@yahoo.com>
> Enlighten me here, is this company going to be
> continuing development of the Alpha? Does it have a
> future here?

I don't think there's much hope for Alpha.  The chip and development team
were sold to Intel, which obviously has a lot to gain by killing it.  The
development team is supposedly working on the third-generation (after
McKinley) Itanium already.  Theoretically, if IA-64 crashes & burns, they
might ressurect the Alpha, but there's talk they've already got a 64-bit
version of x86 under development (a la AMD's Hammer), so that's more likely
to see the light of day than Alpha.

Another good place to shop for Alpha gear is Microway at www.microway.com.
They've been in business for several years (their first products were
FORTRAN compilers and systems based around the old Weitek chip, if you can
remember that far back) and seem to have a pretty good reputation.  My
wife's company had one of their boxes for awhile, and she said it was much
faster (on FEA models) than the dual-processor Xeon box that replaced it.

Cheers!
-- Tracy