> I think you're right overall that Itanium is used too often as the reason why all the RISC platforms died/were cancelled, as if they would have had healthy futures had Itanium simply not existed, but I do wonder about Alpha.

Alpha had no fundamental differences that would have enabled it to avoid the same problem as the others IMO.

> I wasn't around at the time, so I don't know what availability and pricing actually looked like, but unlike the other RISC platforms,

No that's not true, other RISCs had similar, even before Alpha was on the designboard. They all did RISC workstations, Sun, SGI, even HP and IBM. IBM most famously went into PowerPC with Apple and Motorola early on, and then also did CPUs for several games consoles.

IBM probably of all of them understood the commoditization fight and they tried to put up a fight, but even they couldn't keep ahead of it. Alpha couldn't have.

> Alpha was actually available on PC-like systems, with PCI and ISA busses, and x86 emulation at the firmware layer, allowing regular PC peripherals like VGA cards to work. Windows and, significantly, Linux, had pretty superb support for Alpha.

Just too expensive to produce for what it did. Why would you use it for a Windows or Linux machine if you could do the same with a Pentium or K6 that actually ran your games and word processors and other stuff.