I miss DEC Alpha so much. I started out as a sysadmin for an stats department in 1993 that made heavy use of DEC Alphas running DEC OSF/1 due to their floating

I miss DEC Alpha so much. I started out as a sysadmin for an stats department in 1993 that made heavy use of DEC Alphas running DEC OSF/1 due to their floating point performance. DEC had one of the first 64 bit CPUs on the market, and I spent a lot of my time fixing 64 bit issues in open source software (mostly assumptions that sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *)). A few years later, I worked as a systems programmer for a department doing research using DEC Alphas, and wrote device drivers for OSF/1 (aka DEC UNIX) for Myrinet. I was lucky enough to get them to pay me to help Doug Rabson port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha as part of my job. We ran FreeBSD/alpha on our research machines until I left. I remember getting an API UP1000 direct from them so we could have FreeBSD board support for the irongate chipset from day one. I had that machine (running FreeBSD/alpha) as a personal desktop for several years. (this was before things like ACPI were a thing outside of x86, and each motherboard needed custom support) I really, really miss SRM firmware. It was so much simpler than UEFI and openfirmware. I wish Intel had chosen it, rather than UEFI, to replace BIOS on x86. EDIT: The 164LX is one of the few smaller PCI based Alphas that I never encountered in person. I think that was because DEC's discount structure made their workstations more affordable than the 164LX. Especially since we were running FreeBSD, and didn't need to pay for DEC UNIX.