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◈ALB Atlas

DEC AlphaStation Dead

DEC AlphaStation
KindMachine
Introduced1992
Discontinued1999
StatusDead
ManufacturerDigital Equipment Corporation
ClassWorkstation
PlatformDEC Alpha 64-bit
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

The first mass-market 64-bit workstation — blazing Alpha silicon that humiliated every contemporary. NT, Tru64, and VMS all ran on it; the architecture died with DEC.

Created by Digital Equipment Corporation
Hosted Tru64 UNIX

DEC's Alpha (21064, then 21164, 21264) was the first 64-bit RISC to reach the workstation mass market — 150+ MHz when rivals ran 66, and by the mid-90s the fastest microprocessors on Earth.

AlphaStations ran Windows NT (through 4.0's RCs), Tru64 Unix, and VMS interchangeably. DEC's 1998 sale to Compaq killed the roadmap; Alpha was cancelled by 2001, its ideas absorbed into Intel's and AMD's designs.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStation