I never used an Alpha, but somehow I fostered such an inflated impression of their performance that if someone told me today that their new i9 wunderbeast was almost as fast it would take a little while before I didn’t believe them.

Well a lot of the Alpha engineers ended up working on and helped design AMD's AMD64 extensions and hypertransport bus, after AMD adopted the Alpha's EV6 bus for the Athlon you could say Alpha technology and engineers had a huge effect on why AMD bested Intel for quite awhile back in the day.

If it wasn't for the Digital and AMD engineers we'd all be suffering with IA-64 etc... I think it's more likely PPC would have remained a force to be reckoned with in the Desktop space.

Hey that’s some cool background info, thank you!!

The Alpha memory model has always scared the bejesus out of me. I bet it makes things fast though.

fast and stable. Before I left that company, one box had an uptime of over 14 months.