Internally, NT first targeted Intel i860, not x86. This was a deliberate decision to break old assumptions. It was designed to be multiplatform from the beginning. The fact that it had an NT syscall layer but also a Win32 one, then formerly an OS/2 subsystem, also reflected this heritage of adaptability, multi-platform, portability etc.
Mostly because that format is not strictly speaking Windows-specific but comes from Unix System V release 4. Also various oddball embedded platforms use the full NT-style PE COFF as their native object/image format (but these usually either specify i386 as machine type or place some invalid value there).
500Mzh vs 233Mhz, if you could afford the cooling. Maybe exaggerating the gap, but I think it was pretty big which contributed to the enthusiasm for DEC alpha.
I remember a law firm I worked at buying an Alpha server running NT to host a SQL Server database system in the mid-90s. I was network admin, but we ran Netware at the time an I didn't touch that machine, we had an Alpha sysadmin/dba for it. I left a few months later to a firm that was already running NT on its servers; learning a new network OS in a stable environment was much preferable to converting from Netware to NT.
People forget the excitement around alpha from the mid 90s. It was the first Linux port to non-x86 for example. It was a little bit before the AMD vs Intel wars and race to 1ghz kicked off, so it represented a challenge to Intel's monopoly.
IIRC: There was a bonanza of DEC Multia Alpha's[1] that made it's way to some salvage seller in the late 90's for like $100-ish. The catch was they didn't include RAM and it had to be True Parity RAM which was fairly expensive.
I remember my first job in 2000, straight out of 1.5 years of college, getting to play directly with Digital UNIX and Alpha processors! The Alpha 21264 was a beast at the time.
