This may be a fun anecdote or a cool story bro but I attended the 1982 National Computer Conference (aka NCC) in Houston, TX. At the time I was attending a hig

This may be a fun anecdote or a cool story bro but I attended the 1982 National Computer Conference (aka NCC) in Houston, TX. At the time I was attending a high school with a PDP-11/05 and a PDP-11/34A which along with a PLATO terminal which were the center of any student's life interested in computers. Needless to say I was beyond excited to see Digital's booth with actual Vaxen. They were mystical, super powerful systems we could only dream of one day touching at college. One of the floor walkers was demonstrating VMS and let me login and play around. At school we had learned all sorts of commands by a mix of monkey command line silliness (we discovered SUBMIT when someone literally typed SUBMIT TO MY WILL at the prompt) and reading the hallowed documentation which were normally locked away in the IT director's office. You had to be especially good (straight A student) or a toady to get access to the docs. Anyway we learned RSTS/E would let you claim resources with the allocate command. You could ALLOC a printer or disk but at NCC Digital had networked their systems to demonstrate global VAX clusters and VMS supported the same command across the network! You could ALLOC HOST::DEVICE and it would work. Out of curiosity I ALLOC'd an entire VMS node (ALLOC RED::). It crashed. Unable to believe it when they got the server up I tried it again and it crashed again. I slunk away nervously sweating the rest of the day, convinced somehow that the Digital police were going to descend on me and kick me out of the conference. I went back the next day and confessed and told them what I had done to crash the VAX, figuring they would no longer be angry and that they should know what happened. Unrelated to crashing the VAX I ended up getting a job offer from a Digital client to write Pascal code for MRI machines connected to VAXen strictly from one of those right place right time conversations. Those were the days. (Sadly as a 10th grader with no car I had to turn down the job.)