Don't leave it too late.....

Compaq is committed to selling and supporting new VAX through the year 2000 and to the ongoing support of VAX customers thereafter. BUT...

The last VAX microprocessor chips have been built and the fabrication of new microprocessors is not expected - a finite supply of VAX microprocessors exists. When processor modules with these chips run out, no new processor upgrades will be available.

For the full story on the Alpha, contact Compaq on http://www.digital.com

We have discovered a number of special problems:

COBOL - we have found differences between VAX COBOL and COBOL on the Alpha - this includes some differences in reserved words and problems caused by the different word length on the two machine architectures. We have VAXSCAN-written procedures to migrate from one to another.

TDMS - for which we have a TDMS to DECforms converter

MACRO - will go across, but for smaller amounts of MACRO, customers often take this opportunity to have the MACRO re-written in C or some other appropriate language.

Systems Building - this is really the Inventory problem. Most systems (in our experience) are not easily built from sources and usually it is necessary to ensure that the system is build-able on the VAX before migration to the Alpha. This is, all too often, a non-trivial task.

Finally there are also problems with some Application Packages and Third Party Packages about which version is available to run on which version of OpenVMS.