Menu:
Alpha was Digital's high-performance 64bit RISC CPU architecture for the 21st century. Launching in 1992 with the 150MHz DECchip 21064 "EV4", it replaced both their earlier 32-bit VAX platform and the DECstation line of 32-bit MIPS Unix workstations. Chips were initially manufactured by Digital Semiconductor in their own fabs at Hudson, Massachusetts and South Queensferry, Scotland. Later generations were also fabricated by Samsung, Mitsubishi, and IBM.
Alpha is one of my favourite platforms, so I've accumulated a few though unfortunately most are large servers rather than workstations:
Alpha systems ship with one or both of two kinds of Firmware: SRM and ARC (later renamed AlphaBIOS).
ARC/AlphaBIOS is primarily used to boot Windows but some Linux distributions also supported it. It uses a simple menu-oriented or, in AlphaBIOS, pseudo-graphical interface. Early machines that didn't support Windows (mostly those with weird expansion busses like TURBOchannel and XMI) don't have it, while others may not have it by default due to limited flash space (you have to flash either ARC or SRM firmware).
SRM is used to boot all other operating systems. It's user interface is a bourne-style shell with some built-in commands actually implemented as shell scripts (you can even cat them to see). It supports background tasks (multitasking), pipes, and I/O redirection. Its present on virtually all Alpha systems - only those sold for use only with Windows NT, or without enough flash space to store both SRM and ARC may be lacking it.