I started my history with computers on the PDP 11/40 at my Dad's university.
Years later when my company was writing Unix software and we were porting to all the major vendors, DEC loaned us an Alpha workstation so we could port to OSF/1. That machine was blindingly fast, way way better than any of the Sun, HP, IBM, etc. hardware we had in the office. It quickly became my desktop because it came with a gorgeous monitor. I strung out the loan as long as I could and was sad when it had to leave.
James Gosling spoke at our developer conference around that time, and talked about the Alpha design team (who got to create this fast RISC processor without worrying about the "embarrassingly large" backward compatibility footprint the modern x86 chips were saddled with), and how great the Alpha was as a platform for Java. DEC and Sun were my two favorite tech companies; I'm glad I got to use their products when they were at their height.
I got early access and wired it into our software, which essentially processed streams of various events. And you could get a sense for when the pace picked up, or something unusual was happening more often than normal. Sadly the project was shut down at some point.
Here in Minneapolis (one of the first two cities that got it), there are 6 (count them, 6) locations downtown near the Vikings stadium, and that's it. Yeah, I won't be ponying up for that any time soon.
Years later when my company was writing Unix software and we were porting to all the major vendors, DEC loaned us an Alpha workstation so we could port to OSF/1. That machine was blindingly fast, way way better than any of the Sun, HP, IBM, etc. hardware we had in the office. It quickly became my desktop because it came with a gorgeous monitor. I strung out the loan as long as I could and was sad when it had to leave.
James Gosling spoke at our developer conference around that time, and talked about the Alpha design team (who got to create this fast RISC processor without worrying about the "embarrassingly large" backward compatibility footprint the modern x86 chips were saddled with), and how great the Alpha was as a platform for Java. DEC and Sun were my two favorite tech companies; I'm glad I got to use their products when they were at their height.