Dont forget the clustering/disaster recovery. VMS' clustering was incredible. The lesson I take from tech of this era is that good enough (and cheap) beats sup

Dont forget the clustering/disaster recovery. VMS' clustering was incredible. The lesson I take from tech of this era is that good enough (and cheap) beats superior over time. Unix over VMS, Ethernet over Token Ring, etc. I posit that Unix's simplicity of that era (you really could hold the entirety of the system in your head back then, and rereading the entire manual set every few months was something considered perfectly feasible and regularly recommended for power users) was the winning formula. It certainly helped that unix was all over academia. 20 years later, when Solaris was the incredibly powerful big dog and linux was the upstart, history repeated itself.