[ Thanks to E5Rebel
for this link. ]
“Curiosity aside, the DEC Alpha chip has a special place in the
history of Linux, because it was thanks to the loan of a DEC PC
system based on it that Linus not only made the first official port
of Linux, but was also able to write up the project as his master’s
thesis at Helsinki University.“In fact, this was by no means the first port of Linux to other
architectures: almost as soon as it was usable hackers had got the
code running on other hardware that eventually came to include the
Apple Macintosh, the popular Amiga and Atari micros, the PowerPC
platform, and workstations based on the MIPS R4000 and Sun’s SPARC
processor. But Linus’ work on porting to the DEC Alpha chip was the
most significant because it entailed a radical re-write of the
kernel.”