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HOUSTON - Partnerships and industry standards are the new hallmarks of the design process for today's computer engineer, according to William Strecker, the former chief technical officer of Digital Equipment Corp. and new top technologist at Compaq Computer Corp.
The philosophy of alliances and openness will be tested as Strecker, interviewed less than a month after taking on the job as vice president of technology and corporate development for Compaq, prepares to push the Alpha microprocessor and Digital Unix technologies as the foundation for partnerships that will lead to their acceptance as a standard in 64-bit computing. Strecker, who played significant roles in the design of the Digital PDP-11/70 and VAX minicomputers of the '70s and '80s, sees Compaq at the forefront of a new dynamic shaping computer design today. "Vertically integrated companies like Digital did most of the work from silicon through software to support these machines," said Strecker. "Now computer companies recognize they are only going to engineer portions of these systems where they have real value to add, and depend on explicit and implicit relationships with other companies to do other parts of the system. "This has changed to some degree the way engineers look at the design problem," he added. "Clearly, a key function of almost any engineering group now is management of strategic alliances and partnerships. Engineers today are very often involved in business-level conversations around alliances and partnerships and legal issues in transferring intellectual property. These are the kinds of things thatweren't on the radar screens of engineers in the past." Just as in the days of the VAX, today's computer engineers still need to develop new technologies, Strecker said, but their companies don't need to keep a lock on those technologies. Instead, they just need to be the first to implement them. "That's a...