Two fun facts about DEC Alpha: 1. Windows NT, which is the ancestor of modern Windows, was originally released on multiple platforms including Alpha and, I bel

Two fun facts about DEC Alpha: 1. Windows NT, which is the ancestor of modern Windows, was originally released on multiple platforms including Alpha and, I believe, MIPS; and 2. DEC, for awhile at least, had one of the most popular Web search engines: AltaVista. It wasn’t a commercial enterprise. It was mostly a technology demonstration for Alpha. For the time it was pretty good. No one at this time (the 1990s) thought there was a future in search engines. Many (including Yahoo) seemed to think curated directories were the future. Search engines were viewed as a solved problem, except by Larry Page and Sergei Brin who founded Google. The highly underrated show “Halt and Catch Fire” covers this early era of computing really well and is worth watching.