Someone gave me an NT4 CD when I was a kid and on the jewel case it said it supported x86, PPC, I think some other architectures too. I was disappointed I could never get our PowerMac to boot from it. :P
I had a job in 2006 where the sysadmin ran the entire shop on a single OpenVMS server with two 500Mhz Alpha CPUs. It was our file server, AD server (somehow), DB server, web server, everything.
I just looked it up and that CPU came out in 1996, at the same time Intel released their 200Mhz Pentium. Alpha was way ahead of their time.
Somewhere there is a blog about how that CPU had some hardware bug that prevented it from hitting 1ghz. if it didn't have that I'd be a 1ghz 64bit processor in a desktop early on. I really cannot find the blog. It was down a rabbit hole of how Intel AMD both picked some IBM mainframe to base their designs off but AMD went for an older quirky design but it allows a lot of advantages. Anyway, search engines are awful now.
I tried a few Kagi searches, but found Wikipedia claiming that at least one Alpha ran faster:
> The Alpha 21164 or EV5 became available in 1995 at processor frequencies of up to 333 MHz. In July 1996 the line was speed bumped to 500 MHz, in March 1998 to 666 MHz. Also in 1998 the Alpha 21264 (EV6) was released at 450 MHz, eventually reaching (in 2001 with the 21264C/EV68CB) 1.25 GHz.
Because desktop PowerPC was unpopular for anything other than Mac, and PPC NT wasn't designed for Open Firmware. Though you can blame Microsoft's monopoly tactics - in which loyalty to x86 was the prime directive, alternative OSes on PPC Macs were not a widely accepted idea either - people stuck around with classic Mac OS, in (ultimately) vain hopes that Copland/Taligent would deliver.
The PReP/CHRP was a venture by Apple, IBM, and Motorola (but primarily IBM) to allow companies to build OSes for a common platform. Apple didn't want to participate in the end. But like other ports of NT to MIPS and Alpha (Alpha enjoyed much more support until Compaq dropped support), the popularity was well beneath the dirt cheap in comparison x86 platform.
This had nothing to do with Microsoft's monopoly. And nothing to do with exclusively 'desktop' PPC -- remember, NT4 Server also had PPC support through SP2. IBM's intention was for servers, not desktops (though they did produce compatible laptops/desktops), to support operating systems such as AIX and S[l]o[w|l]aris
I wanted one on my desktop so bad. DOS/Win3.1 PCs were just so bad to me. Then I saw SunOS and really just wanted any Unix system on my desk. I bought a PC in 1994 just to install Linux.
> AIX was the first Unix I ever used in 1991 on an IBM RT with the ROMP CPU
Nice. Me too. But it was about 1989. The first machine I ever compiled a C program and it took me ages to find `a.out` and work out that that was my binary. I was more used to DOS compilers that turned $SOURCENAME.$ext into $sourcename.EXE.
Right; NT was and is likewise quite capable of being a desktop or server OS, the difference is that MS actually pushed that and NT 10.0 is still actively used in both contexts.
An interesting footnote is that installing the web browser package on AIX caused a telemetry dial-home to Big Blue. I found this because it was keeping our ISDN BRI leased line up constantly and costing us money. Blocking that address solved it.
NT4 was already compatible with PowerPC systems. The support ended with NT4 Service Pack 2; no further SPs had PPC support.