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Alpha was so far ahead, compared to the other mid 90’s “workstation” vendors. I went to a university with tons of DEC hardware, then worked at a mostly DEC shop for a bit. It’s a shame DEC died.

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LeFantome 20 hours ago | parent [-]

I really loved the Alpha platform. It was not as fast as it felt like it should have been given the clock speed. It also seemed like a real memory pig compared to x86 at the time. That was probably just because it was 64 bit. Everything is a memory pig now I guess. :)

Alpha boxes were cool. High clock speeds, massive amounts of RAM does the time, and huge storage. When they were the only 64 bit systems, they were the only game in town for some workloads.

	▲	sillywalk 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> When they were the only 64 bit systems They were never the only 64 bit systems. MIPS introduced their 64 bit R4000 in 1991, a year before the Alpha came out. Sun released the 64 bit UltraSPARC in '95, along with IBM's 64bit PowerPC AS for their AS/400 systems. HP released the 64bit version of their PA-RISC in 1996.
	▲	icedchai 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		In the late 90's, another engineer came up to me and said they had an Alpha with a couple gigs of RAM. That was almost unheard of for the time! My x86 laptop then had 32 megs. It's funny looking back at that now... Everything is a memory pig.
	▲	brazzy 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> It also seemed like a real memory pig compared to x86 at the time. That was probably just because it was 64 bit. Everything is a memory pig now I guess. :) Wasn't Alpha also a fairly pure RISC architecture, with larger machine code being an inherent property of that?