At the time, the Alpha chip WAS the hotness. The first x64 chip was released in 1999 (by AMD, not Intel) and there was some reasonable expectation the Alpha wou

At the time, the Alpha chip WAS the hotness. The first x64 chip was released in 1999 (by AMD, not Intel) and there was some reasonable expectation the Alpha would be THE chip for high capacity computing and even personal computing. Also, many gov contracts at the time had stipulations that you had to be an 'open' computing platform, which included being able to run on multiple architectures.