You sound a lot like some of the people I worked with, hey Tim :). 1. The codebase that I was working on was not awesome, it was a mix of Fortran (while i am a

You sound a lot like some of the people I worked with, hey Tim :). 1. The codebase that I was working on was not awesome, it was a mix of Fortran (while i am a fan of and would much rather use that than C for scientific code) and DCL. Lots of stuff that was clearly a design afterthought, but with decades of momentum and an attitude of "just keep it working" 2. There's a lot of history in VMS, but unfortunately it's primarily used to support legacy projects, and with intel not making anymore itanium doesn't seem like there is a future. I couldn't even get a working version of the netbeans plugin to work with it. Basically I got the plugin with no support, despite having a service contract, because there was no engineering supporting fixes. 3. Could have been that the way we wrote out networking was a mess, but I do believe that TCP/IP was an add-on feature that was not part of the kernel. 4. That statement was exclusive to the people i worked with. They were not CS guys, they were support people that had enough experience with the system to get a spot in engineering. They knew how "that" system worked, but not how to solve problems without relying on legacy code that was based on obsolete ideas. I shit you not there were delays in the code because the network was "too fast" and the process couldn't handle it. 5. Solaris is the bomb too. Take a chill pill, boo