[bjnord]

I started my history with computers on the PDP 11/40 at my Dad's university.

Years later when my company was writing Unix software and we were porting to all the major vendors, DEC loaned us an Alpha workstation so we could port to OSF/1. That machine was blindingly fast, way way better than any of the Sun, HP, IBM, etc. hardware we had in the office. It quickly became my desktop because it came with a gorgeous monitor. I strung out the loan as long as I could and was sad when it had to leave.

James Gosling spoke at our developer conference around that time, and talked about the Alpha design team (who got to create this fast RISC processor without worrying about the "embarrassingly large" backward compatibility footprint the modern x86 chips were saddled with), and how great the Alpha was as a platform for Java. DEC and Sun were my two favorite tech companies; I'm glad I got to use their products when they were at their height.