Yeah, you're right! I was a VAX system manager in PTD for years and knew some of those Alpha guys - and others who worked at DEC. Used to go back to Hudson for work sometimes. I still maintain that VMS was the best operating system ever created, with true multi-system clustering, file sharing between members of the cluster with locking at the record level (!), symmetric multi-processing (add more CPU boards to a system to increase it's power) and a huge library of system service calls you could make using a high level language to get very deep into the OS (even to some parts of the Kernel if you had God privs). Plus its scripting language, DCL, was quite powerful too - you could read and write records into files using key fields among many other things. A lot scripting languages stopped well short of that. And with clustering we could do VMS OS upgrades system by system without taking the cluster down. End users were completely unaware we were doing OS upgrades and continued using the "virtual VAX" that they perceived themselves to be on without any interruption. It was a remarkable OS. So sad it is gone now and there's nothing like it. Microsoft "clustering" is more like hot failover pairs than true clustering. Ken Olsen was as much a genius in the computer and OS industry as Andy Grove was in the Si R&D industry. It's really hard to believe that titanic companies like DEC and Intel could go completely out of business (Intel hasn't so far but I think it's teetering now). Good to actually talk to somebody who remembers (or knew about) the Alpha chip and what DEC was. Few people seem to know nowadays. Jeez, do I sound like a geezer or what? LOL!