The way it was done was so abrupt that Windows 2000 nearly released with Alpha version on standard CD (which would be AFAIK 64bit clean, unlike the older ones),

The way it was done was so abrupt that Windows 2000 nearly released with Alpha version on standard CD (which would be AFAIK 64bit clean, unlike the older ones), but essentially the whole NT/alpha team (which was part of Compaq) was told close to RTM release "sorry, your project was closed". Later, Compaq had to restart production, and HP even had to introduce updated chip, because some customers, especially VMS, didn't want to move to slower Itanium machines. I have even heard that part of Itanium's flop was how often older EV6 machines were running circles around new Itanium ones...