<i>&gt; DEC engineering, especially in VLSI, was easily the best in the world. Alpha was a thing of beauty, and an affordable Alpha PC would have killed Intel, MS, and maybe even Apple, and advanced the PC market and perhaps the Internet by five to ten years, and created a completely different culture around commodity computing.</i><p>DEC&#x27;s Alpha PCs were actually quite reasonably priced, but all the software was written for x86. There was zero chance of Alpha killing Intel or Microsoft without broad software support, and even with it, there&#x27;s no guarantee it would have won.