alphaman

December 1999. A desk in Altunizade, in a small office and a nice one. Compaq had bought Digital, and half the people around me were the people I had walked away from in 1994. The last of these transmissions ended at this desk. I was back at home, under a different name.

The name was Alphaman.

Nobody printed it on a badge. It did not need printing. Alpha was Digital's processor, the fastest chip of its day, and AlphaServers were the machines built around it, and in Turkey those machines were mine to champion. Telco, finance, the public sector, the big critical systems everywhere ran on Alpha. In America AlphaServers were part of the early success of the Human Genome Project. In Turkey we sold so many of the largest machines that I still remember the project name of the biggest series. Wildfire.

I was proud in those years. Proud of the company, proud of my role, proud of the presentations I gave at every event. Pride is a word I use carefully in these transmissions and I use it here on purpose. The Digital years had made me. The Compaq years paid it back.

The office was the other half of the happiness. Altunizade was small and warm and full of friends. Necip, Selcuk, Tunc, and our manager Hakan. Alper joined later, my old friend from Siemens who followed me to Compaq. Ugur as well joined Compaq later, remember my friend from Imbros. Okan sat in another team, but he was one of our closest personal friends and our King partner. We worked hard and we played King card games and went down to the Arnavutkoy kahve. I lived in Arnavutkoy myself in those days, in a yali apartment, a flat in an old waterside mansion on the Bosphorus, with the Adem Baba fish restaurant nearby. I enjoyed living there a lot.

Later the company moved us to Icerenkoy, a good office and a large one. It held more people and it held them less closely. It was never as cozy as Altunizade.

The travels began in those years, and the travels are how I remember the joy.

A large technical university wanted a supercomputer, and the project put me on a Delta plane and did not let me off it. Istanbul, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Houston, Dallas, Richardson, Atlanta, Istanbul, in four days, something like that. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the University of Houston, our own supercomputer center in Richardson, Texas. A week's itinerary folded into four days.

Las Vegas was the Compaq sales meeting. We flew through Chicago on that travel, and I still remember the cinnamon rolls at that airport, because memory keeps strange receipts. At the airport I bought a tin of caviar, and at night I ate it alone in my hotel room, no occasion, no company, no reason. A self celebration and a joy. Total freedom.

There were other team trips too, and the team trips mattered more. Paris and the Musee d'Orsay, Alper and Necip in front of the paintings. Berlin during a beer festival, in the month I was trying to be a vegetarian. My friends took me to the Hard Rock Cafe and I ordered the veggie burger, and it was terrible.

And that was the last day of my vegetarian career.

When we stepped outside we found a city a storm had just beaten, hail on the cars, trees pulled out of the earth, and we had heard nothing from inside.

And there was New York, later, in the HP days, one visit that held everything. The selected BCS team, Business Critical Servers, flew in first for a training. One of our friends arranged a limo to a very fancy night club and we enjoyed it a lot. Later in the week the rest of the HP team arrived, and the same club turned me away at the door, the outfit probably, or the beard and mustache. That week also began my friendship with Cenk, and to this date we are still friends. And with Ugur we went to Barnes and Noble and checked out armloads of books and music.

Then the same New York became a stage. The worldwide team meeting, and my name called into the speakers, one of the best AlphaServer overachievers in the world, together with my team from Turkey. The prize was a black hat with the Compaq logo on it. Gold Quest Winner: AlphaServer Sales Achievement. The other prize was a ticket to Australia, the first of my life. Istanbul, Germany, a refuel in Singapore, and then a hotel room in Sydney with a window that looked at the Opera House. It was beautiful.

Hold the hat and hold the window. Both come back at the end of this transmission.

June 2001. We were closing a very large government deal that week, with AlphaServers. We had worked big time on it, days and nights, and our solution was superior against the competition. The customer was choosing us as the winner.

The news came into the middle of it. Hakan told us, or a company memorandum told us, I honestly don't recall. Alpha would end. The company had chosen Itanium, the architecture HP and Intel were building, for its enterprise future, and x86 for the volume business. We knew about the partnership and we had heard the announcements. But Alpha had a committed roadmap, the EV7 was coming and even the EV8, and we were out selling that future in the same weeks the company cancelled it. Everybody was shocked.

And then we had to be honest. We delivered the news to the customer in full transparency. And we lost the deal. The customer handed it to the competition after our headquarters decided to end Alpha. The work was done, the nights were spent, the solution was superior. The corporate decision to end the roadmap of Alpha killed the project for us.

I felt sorry. Very sorry. HP's own PA-RISC was walking toward the same fate in those years, on HP's own road to Itanium, and I did not care much. Alpha was different. Alpha was in my name.

Here is what I did with the sorrow, and my sons will recognise it from every transmission before this one. Life goes on, I said. I adapt very quickly in these changes. The machine was entering the history of IT with its records intact, and the man was staying in the business. Alphaman was in the memoirs anyway.

And it was Ferhat again.

Business critical servers and solutions for enterprise customers, as always.

One more thing from those years, small then, decisive later. We worked very closely with Oracle. Oracle and Compaq had worked together on Real Application Clusters, on Tru64 UNIX and TruCluster. I knew that platform inside out. Keep it in mind. It comes back in April 2007.

I want to give the machine its own pages here, because my sons should know what the name Alpha carried.

When the Alpha chip was announced, it was the fastest CPU in the world, and it stayed the fastest for a very long time, perhaps till the end of its life. It ran DEC OSF/1, later called Tru64 UNIX, with TruCluster, one of the best operating systems in the world and for sure the best clustering technology to this date, still no match by any other operating system or clustering technology. It ran OpenVMS, superior against all the operating systems in the world, true POSIX standards added later, with the integrated database called DEC Rdb. And for a very long time Alpha was the best and the fastest machine running Windows NT. Nevertheless, even the best, it did not survive.

In this world of IT, being the best is not sufficient.

The most common is the important, and it matters more. Quantity matters more than quality in this consumer world, most of the time. People matter, but corporate decisions matter more. The top level managers in the corporate headquarters make a lot of mistakes, and those mistakes are paid by the employees.

Alpha was dying and I needed a new fight. Linux gave me one. I became the Linux Champion of HP Turkey, working with the Linux teams worldwide, with great results. And seeing the whole lifecycle of the technologies from the 90s to the 2020s, I am only sure about open source. Proprietary and closed systems will eventually die anyway.

Alpha died mainly because of the bad decisions of the corporate headquarters. Not because of the people who created it, sold it and supported it, and not because of the customers who purchased it. The EV7 and EV8 designs are superior even to this date.

In 2002 Compaq and HP merged, the biggest merger the industry had seen, fought loudly in the American headquarters while we went on closing deals in Istanbul. The announcement came early. The real merger came much later, the problems mostly on the HP side as I recall. Until then, business as usual. The orders kept arriving.

Then everything settled, and we all went somewhere together, the Compaq teams and the HP teams, and the two sides were introduced to each other. New friends, old friends, many of them, countless names. Before this day there were Compaq guys and DEC guys in the past. Now Compaq guys and HP guys. Later it was only HP guys. We united as if we were always the same team. Culture and seniority matters and it worked well.

For me the era is best told through two men. When Compaq acquired DEC, Mehmet Bey ran Compaq and Sahin Bey ran DEC, and the merged company went to Mehmet Bey. When HP and Compaq merged, Sahin Bey ran HP and Mehmet Bey ran Compaq, and this time the merged company went to Sahin Bey. Two mergers, and the same two men at the top of both. Their rivalry was an interesting one.

I knew HP already, because I had worked there in the 1990s, and I loved their culture, the HP Way, the garage story, a senior and enterprise company. That made the merger easier for me than for most. But a merger means duplicates, and duplicates mean cuts. Some people did not make it. Our Compaq team stayed intact, myself, Alper, Selcuk, Necip, Tunc, Merden, Aysu, Ebru, Serdar, and Hakan became the manager of the merged team. From the HP side came Bulent, their UNIX guy, and he joined us.

And there was the rumor. The rumor of that year said only one UNIX guy would survive. I was worried, and I had reason to be, because the surviving product line would be HP's Itanium machines and Bulent was the HP Itanium guy. Against that stood the Alpha installed base, huge, critical, everywhere. One day I could not carry the rumor anymore, and I walked into Hakan's office and said it out loud. I hear there will be one guy, and it will be HP-UX most probably. Hakan got angry, not at me, at the rumors. He made sure and comforted me that I was in the team.

The feared rival became one of my closest allies. Bulent and I divided the world between us, he took financial services and the public customers, I took telco, manufacturing and services, and we closed many great deals together, in telco especially, in billing solutions. As we used to say in those years, Better Together, and we were a good team in harmony. I respect Bulent to this day, a great friend, honest. He was a bit unlucky as a single ex-HP among a team of all ex-Compaq guys, but he was well integrated into the team. However, later he left our team for a more technical role, and I believe that was the right decision. The one I should have made myself too. Being a business development and product manager guy paid me for a long time, in HP and in Oracle after it. But I always liked technical hands on work.

Here is the strange thing about those three logos. I wore a DEC badge, then a Compaq badge, then an HP badge, and I was proud of every one of them.

For me these companies were the same company.

The same culture, the same friendships, the same ecosystem of customers and technology. I never had any trouble adapting from one to the next. DEC, Compaq and HP were one bloodline to me.

But the industry around the bloodline was changing. Later in those years IT became more ruthless, very tough on employees, many layoffs, quota increases, targets upon targets. A rat race, and inhuman. During the merger hassle in the headquarters the layoffs came in waves, and I lost many good loyal friends to them. And here the two cultures showed themselves one last time. HP cut deep once, early, and stopped. Compaq cut almost every Friday, trying to keep as many people as possible for as long as possible. Which one is better, I am not sure. I recall Fridays were bad.

April 2007. The final sales period for new AlphaServers was ending.

I was not thinking about that at the time. What I knew was that I was standing at one of our larger value added resellers when my phone rang.

It was Filiz, the technology consulting leader of Oracle Turkey. We had been close allies with Oracle through the Compaq years and the HP years. My group, Business Critical Servers, later renamed Enterprise Servers and Storage, had lived beside Oracle the whole time. I knew Filiz. I knew Oracle. I knew the joint projects. She kept it brief. There is an opportunity in Oracle. Are you interested?

Every departure in these transmissions begins with an incoming call. This one did too.

I said yes, and the yes had a ledger behind it. I will write the ledger honestly. Alpha was ending. The job was becoming boring, and the real salary increases had stopped. Hakan had previously moved to another department as a manager, and Levend led us now. He was a friendly manager, and honestly I never had an issue with Levend. Bulent was gone to another department for a technical role, and Serkan had replaced him. He was another great friend. And one wound was still fresh. I had applied for a regional role inside HP, and they gave it to another person without any real interview at all. I was angry and upset. I read it as disrespect.

Filiz said the hiring manager was French and he would call me for an interview. The name was Alain, one of the best managers I had in Oracle and in my life. The interview was brief and to the point. The questions well qualified, and for certain he had been briefed by Filiz. He was well informed for sure. I consider myself very lucky to have started in Oracle with the introduction of Filiz, always my mentor and yet another angel sister, and with Alain as my first manager there.

So I went to the Oracle office in Maslak and listened. A regional role. The Database Options, all the extras that live on top of the Oracle database, Partitioning, OLAP, Advanced Security, the management packs, and RAC, Real Application Clusters. The biggest of them I knew in my bones, from the TruCluster cooperation of the Compaq days. The sentence I asked you to keep in mind had come back.

The region was South East Europe. Turkey, Austria, Greece, the Adriatics, Romania and the Balkans. New countries, new challenges, and I knew many Oracle people already, because we had worked as allies in this industry for years. I loved the idea. I was going to travel. Great, I said.

Now the detail I want my sons to notice. The salary was less than my HP salary. I said yes anyway. Twelve years earlier I had taken half my Microsoft salary to get back to the enterprise. This time I took less than my HP salary to get the road.

Levend said he would do everything to keep me. I said I have made a decision, it was time to move on. The last days were emotional and I remember them to date, the farewell lunches my old friends arranged, the desks, the goodbyes. I felt excited and a bit worried, the way every new opening feels. It was great days, into the new adventures. And many sad leaves behind.

And one more thing began in those months. My first son was on his way, the first of the readers these transmissions are written for.

If the whole era were a single image, it is my desk in the office in Altunizade, back at my Compaq, where I started, with the team around me. The Alphaman at his home.

My memory keeps three more. A partners meetup in Abant in a very cold snowy winter, walking around the frozen lake at night, cold, snow, and a man feeling proud of himself, successful, liked, respected. The center stage in New York, my name in the air, my team from Turkey around me. And the hotel window in Sydney, looking at the Opera House. That window was my first look at Australia. You probably have read the second transmission, so you know what Australia later became in my life. In those days the window was only beautiful and I want to remember it that way.

The black hat from that New York stage, the Gold Quest hat, I don't have it anymore. I lost it during one of my home changes. In those same years I lived in Saskinbakkal, Arnavutkoy, Baglarbasi, Atasehir, Cekmekoy and then Atasehir again, the very same location, a different block of apartments. Six addresses in seven years. I could not settle in one place. This was a mistake, and the hat paid for it.

Weigh these seven years, and here is what I want you to keep.

Friendship, loyalty. Work and spend your time with the right people, in real friendship. To this date my teammates from Compaq and HP are still the best. Working and fighting for a joint single target makes the success. Better Together was the motto, and it matters. Salary, company, badge, products, customers, all of it changes. Friendship stays.

The last transmission ended with a sentence I could not answer then. Freedom does not like stability. The Alphaman years are my answer, or the closest I have come to one. Freedom and stability do not work well together, but sometimes they do, and Compaq and HP is one good example. One role, one team, seven years, and it showed me the proof of it.

And I owe you the honest edge of that claim, because anyone who knew me in those years would question the word stability, for sure. The stability was professional, only professional. You have read about the six addresses. Outside work I was not settled at all, and those stories are not for these pages. But at the desk, for seven years, freedom and stability sat together.

And I can name the stable thing now. It was not the badge and it was not the processor. The badge changed three times and the processor died. The people stayed. That was the stability, and it is the only kind I have ever trusted.

On one of my last days at HP, one of my best friends gave me a music CD with a handwritten note on it. The hat I lost. The note I kept.

Gittigin yerler, geldigin yerlerden daha guzel olsun.

May the places you go be more beautiful than the places you come from.

Ferhat Dilman spent four decades in enterprise technology at Digital, Compaq, HP, Microsoft and Oracle. He writes at dilman.tech. This is transmission #006 of the life thread, a memoir written for his sons.

These pages are built from his own words. Ferhat drafts first. Claude (Anthropic) interviews him one question at a time, assembles each page from his own sentences, checks what can be checked and cuts what runs long. The memories, the people and the judgments are his alone.

And these are recollections, not records. He writes them decades after the fact. Where memory fails he says so on the page instead of filling the gap. The rest stands as he remembers it.