+1 to that. I feel his pain, having been there myself.

Back when DEC Alpha CPUs were still a going concern, I was one of the maintainers of the FreeBSD/alpha port. While DEC shipped their workstations, they were beyond the reach of OSS developers. The first "normal" Alpha board was the API UP1000. It was basically an Alpha 21264 on an AMD motherboard & it was totally awesome. API shipped me one before they were generally available so I could get FreeBSD working on it. I used it as my desktop (running FreeBSD/alpha) for years. Sadly all things Alpha were killed off in favor of Itanium.

Here is the best description I can find of it in ~30 seconds of googling: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/API+Announces+Program+to+Encou...