VANCOUVER, British Columbia – May 9, 2000 – ActiveState, a leading supplier of products and services supporting Open Source software, announced today the beta release of Python and Perl for the Intel Itanium processor.

The Intel Itanium processor's floating-point performance, 64-bit addressability, large cache memory, and high bandwidth bus are well suited for high performance workstations. The port will make available to these high-end servers and workstation users the power of Python and Perl, familiar and highly utilized tools.

"I am very excited about the potential of the Intel Itanium processor," commented Dick Hardt, ActiveState CEO. "ActiveState is committed to this new architecture and will be providing Itanium versions of our freely available ActivePerl and ActivePython distributions. The ports of these two popular scripting languages will ensure that those companies investing in Intel Itanium IA-64 processor-based computers will immediately have the power of Perl and Python available to them."

Under the agreement ActiveState is porting Python and Perl to IA-64. As part of its involvement in the beta, ActiveState is also supplying support to the Itanium early adopters. Upon release of the Itanium chip, ActiveState will provide complete Python and Perl binary packages available for free download from its website www.ActiveState.com.