>>>And too bad the DEC Alpha wasn't popular enough. I saw it run some version of NT in 1995, and it was way ahead of what x86 could offer at the time. Too bad it didn't survive.
>>
>>Never had my fingers on those - multitasking I can imagine being more sophisticated than 386 single core. Which areas impressed you?
>
>The screen :). I said I only saw it. The girls at the show were doing their regular stuff - editing documents, inserting graphics etc, and that was waaaay faster and smoother than we saw on the Pentium boxes that year - and it was running the same Windows NT.

For a while I ran NT Server 3.51 as my main dev box. It was a P133 with 32MB RAM. For NT having enough (i.e. lots) of RAM was key. I think the required minimum was 8MB but 32MB was a realistic minimum, otherwise the system spent all day paging to disk. Trouble was in those days RAM wholesale was $50/MB so just the RAM for my system was $1600. A lot of people weren't willing to spend the extra money for the extra RAM so NT ran slowly for them.

In 1995 NT4 hadn't been released yet, I imagine what you saw was NT 3.51 with the Windows 3.x GUI. NT4 had the Windows 95 GUI.

The DEC workstation you saw probably had tons of RAM and fast SCSI hard drive(s). IIRC DEC priced them from a mainframe/mini POV rather than a microcomputer POV, which explains why they weren't "popular enough". ;-/