Ah, the good old days. My first job was being a gofer, printer monkey, tape-hanger, etc. at a local college’s computer center. They had a DECsystem 20. When I went away to college in 1984, our computer center was all VAX—at first an 11/785, 11/780, and 11/750, then they put in an 8650 and 8600 (I think) and ditched the 11/750. We had to do all our IBM work in batch, sent down a phone line to Virginia Tech and back again once an hour (as a student operator, I got to put the phone in the acoustic coupler and flip the switch!).
I always did think VMS was an excellent operating system from a user standpoint. I don’t know about the technical side of it, but I always liked using it.
}:-)4
RE: I always did think VMS was an excellent operating system from a user standpoint. I don’t know about the technical side of it, but I always liked using it.
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I developed on OpenVMS as recently as 2003-2008 ( before capitulating to evil Microsoft and becoming a .NET developer on Windows :)
It is one of the most robust, reliable, virtually unhackable operating systems I have had the pleasure to work with ( much better and easier to learn and use than UNIX too ).
Unfortunately, it has had its day ( and even I myself had to move out of it in order to put bread on the table ). There are still companies out there that use it for highly mission critical systems, but it is clearly a dying product.
During its heyday, it had the fastest microprocessor in town — the ALPHA Chips.
DEC sold itself to Compaq, which eventually was acquired by HP. LAst I heard, HP ported OpenVMS on INTEL microporcessors. I’ve never heard anything exciting about OpenVMS ever since.
I have to say thank you to Ken Olsen for providing me my bread and butter for years, right after I graduated from Engineering School. The VAX was one of the earliest computers I’ve used.
Just goes to show that the best engineered products do not necessarily become the most successful.