Doesn't sound like you ever really stuck around long enough to see how that worked in real life. Problem was, WANG and DEC never adapted to the PC age and insisted on trying to stay with minicomputers. The idea was to have ten or twenty people doing office automation type stuff on a mini. It was slow at best and, once a day or so, somebody would start doing something slower than usual on the mini, and then the whole thing ground to a halt. You had ten or twenty people sitting around on their thumbs when they could have been happily working on PCs and the whole collection of PCs needed would have been substantially less than the mini. Nobody really needed to be Albert Einstein to figure that one out.
Nope, we managed a VAX/Alpha network and it wasa never slow and never came to a halt, dude. Until we moved the dumb data entry users from the $400 VT300 terminals to $3,000 networked PCs running Pathworks and what not. Hadda hire new support staff, unending headeaches. Flash forward 12-15 years to day, engineers at my current company are being switched from Sparc workstations to something called SunFire or something (don't remember exactly) which is a mini server with dumb terminals, amd virtual sessions, as I understand it anyway, which are of course 15 years smarter than the VTs. Progress. That was predicted 15 years ago by a seasoned professional I was working with, now retired, and myself. It all goes round in circles...