How much better was DEC Alpha than contemporaneous x86? (2020)
When I was hired into AOL as the Sr. Internet Mail Adminstrator in 1995, much of their hardware was still on the Stratus mainframes.  That was some seriously powerful hardware with an equally powerful but arcane mainframe OS, but it was limited to just 32 nodes -- and even getting to that took some real magic.  So, everything was slowly moving off Stratus, and primarily to HP-UX systems. It was a long, slow death.<p>Then the web team brought in DEC Alpha 4100 hardware, and that stuff just absolutely screamed. They were getting performance that many in the company simply couldn&#x27;t believe.  I ended up taking four 4100s, each with four DEC Alpha processors, and ran a copy of BIND-9 on each processor.  I suddenly had the biggest and fastest nameserver cluster in the world.  I did the benchmarks at the time to prove it.  We never did give back that rack of DEC Alphas to the web farm guys.<p>That was around the time that certain leaders in AOL realized that the Internet Operations group under George Boyce was effectively taking over the entire company, and so of course that had to be stopped. George was given a title without portfolio, and all his people were scattered to the four winds of the company.<p>That&#x27;s also around the time I started seeing the brick walls going up between the operations side of the house and the developers.  Those would be the same walls made famous by some of the best known books on DevOps, including &quot;The Phoenix Project&quot; by Gene Kim.  Every time I&#x27;ve met Gene at a conference, he and I reminisce and continue our years long discussions over our different experiences at AOL and the different decades when we worked there, and how we bookended that process.<p>I really liked working for George.  It&#x27;s a real shame what they did to him.<p>But boy howdy, was that DEC Alpha hardware fast.