My first corporate job in computing, in 1994, was at TeleCheck. They used an all VMS environment, though by then the machines themselves were about 30% Alphas a

My first corporate job in computing, in 1994, was at TeleCheck. They used an all VMS environment, though by then the machines themselves were about 30% Alphas and not actual Vaxes. The denial about the platform's future was SUPER strong. TeleCheck IT and software development, at least in those days, was staffed by people who would either move on quickly or stay forever. They mostly hired right out of college, too, so the lifers were people who had never worked anywhere else. (This kind of employment monoculture is pretty destructive, IMO -- get some new ideas in there!) This created a super weird environment. Everywhere else I worked back in those days was rife with industry publications, curiosity about how other systems worked, excitement about developments in software or networking even if they were on stacks or platforms other than whatever the site used, etc. Not so there. I think this may have been mostly because to read, say, InfoWorld in 1994 would have made it much harder to avoid how narrow a niche they were occupying. The nature of the systems and software there meant people who stayed were gaining skills not useful anywhere else; pretty much everything (even the database system) was built in-house. People were out the door constantly, going to other big tech employers in the area to either (a) pick up more marketable skills or (b) pick up a huge bump in pay. That's what I did after 2 years. (Turnover in the dev group was something like 35% a year, which is HELL on institutional knowledge.) All that said, you could see SOME of the appeal of staying on VMS from their POV. Clustering was a big deal, because downtime cost dollars. File versioning in the OS -- which I still haven't seen implemented the same way anywhere else -- was fucking genius and made rolling back a bad release almost trivial. But when you decide to ignore where the market is going, and stay on a doomed platform, there are real costs to pay.