Alpha Processors… What happened?

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If you are an early adopter of computers when it first made it’s way to the markets, you maybe familiar with the brand name “digital” or “DEC” (Digital Equipment Corporation). This business was found by two computer professionals called Kenneth Olsen and Harlan Anderson. DEC was peak in its financial wealth during 1980s and then slowly lost the market for competitors.

DEC is the very first company, which commercially promoted Alpha architecture based computers. But with the x86 architecture, they had to struggle to be competitive in the market. However, DEC never under estimated the power of x86. Therefore DEC invested a lot in the upcoming technology just to be beaten by itself.

In the golden era of Alpha architecture, various vendors offered computers from PC to mainframes based on Alpha. Even at this very moment that I’m writing this article, Alpha based systems are being sold mostly by HP and Microway. Nowadays Alpha architecture is more popular among the Linux customers and I’m assuming that, it maybe so, due to Alpha’s old relation to UNIX systems.

According to available statistics from DEC and HP, about 800,000 Alpha based systems (workstations and servers) have been sold until 2001. For this no third party sales are included. The third party sales alone were estimated as 500,000. This shows Alpha’s important contribution to the evolution of IT industry.

Since most popular operating systems eventually targeted x86 architecture, more software were written and most of the business systems were developed to take the advantages of x86. These advantages include knowledge availability, availability of software and hardware and most of all; it was the trend at that time. This created a large vacuum between Alpha systems and regular PC users. Since then Alpha became more used for UNIX like systems. Many people say Alpha architecture had a natural death without much of a ceremony. But some argue that it was buried alive due to business politics. Whatever the case is, Alpha is no more with us. It should have been in the market to be competitive with other architectures and to offer an alternative since Alpha was a bundle of some interesting concepts.  

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