One of my first job out of school was as a sales support for the then bleeding edge NT 3.1 MIPS box for a company in Canada. Fond memories of loading stacks of 1.44 floppy disks for NT 3.1 and mangling ARC paths (Advanced RISC Computing, boot firmware). This was pre-internet and documentation was often hard to come by, incomplete etc.

I remember demoing the machines to astonished clients by running a stupid number of Clock apps on the desktop without a hitch.

Fun times.

My first real job out of school was supporting Windows NT on Dec Alpha for a company in Canada.

Things were so weird and wonderful back then. You could get GCC from Microsoft for Windows NT 3.1 for Alpha (crazy). And when Windows NT 4.0 came out there was the FX32 subsystem that ran X86 apps on Alpha (very similar to Apple Rosetta but much earlier).

I did not realize Canada was such a hotbed of Windows NT RISC.

Interesting historical note: the main reason PuTTy exists is because its author was given a Windows NT on alpha workstation and there was no native terminal emulator for it that he needed to connect to other equipment. IIRC, PuTTy still supported alpha into the 2000s until the build machine he had failed.