&quot;Just to provide some more contrast... Just about every other system had to be rebooted daily or every few days.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s the biggest point I push on it: architecture and development processes that <i>worked</i> in terms of reliability. It didn&#x27;t emerge after billions of investment in whatever wasn&#x27;t working. Just teams working 9a-5p building stuff, testing it, reviewing it, polishing it. And it totally worked.<p>&quot;By the time the Alpha systems were ready, the Pentium (and soon Pentium Pro) was suprising every OS vendor.&quot;<p>People of the time period told me it was a combo of hardware and licensing cost. They said OpenVMS still cost a fortune while Windows and UNIX&#x27;s (esp BSD&#x27;s) were &quot;good enough.&quot; That is, DEC &amp; Compaq seemed to ignore the lessons of Worse is Better essay about the market power of an imperfect, mostly-working solution. They <i>might</i> have gotten further lowering their price alone. Maybe still have to target commodity hardware, though.