The DEC Alpha was a powerful microprocessor architecture that was popular in the 1990s, but it has since been discontinued.
It had a unique boot procedure that involved a ROM chip that configured the processor’s address space with a 1-bit serial stream of code.
This code could be selected with jumpers on the ROM chip, which allowed for a variety of diagnostics at the lowest level.
The DEC Alpha was 64-bit and had retargetable microcode, making it significantly faster than its competitors at the time.
It could run several operating systems, including DEC Tru64 UNIX, Microsoft Windows NT, and VMS, the last of which was the upgrade path for VAX minicomputers.
The DEC Alpha’s uniqueness and powerful performance made it a sought-after processor in the 90s, but it eventually fell out of favour with the takeover of Compaq and HP.
