I don't think anything could have survived the rise of X86. Most x86 chips were 32 bit at the time and you need Alpha/Sparc/PA-Risc, or some fancy custom chips

I don't think anything could have survived the rise of X86. Most x86 chips were 32 bit at the time and you need Alpha/Sparc/PA-Risc, or some fancy custom chips to work in 64 bit. I wonder if the AMD/Intel competetion pushed x86 to get as fast as it got surpassing all those custom chips? HP was involved in Itanium and was discontinuing there own chip lines. We were talking about moving to it, for the "superdome" line of machines. I was working with PA-RISC at the time, and it seemed like this was the next chip. But it wasn't compatible with PA-RISC but had an x86 compatibility mode.. It was a weird chip, and required really good compilers. I thought it was long dead. It was interesting though.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518758