The agronomy research company I worked for in college had a small IT department of three programmers/DBAs. They ran Oracle on a big Alpha with some older vaxen

The agronomy research company I worked for in college had a small IT department of three programmers/DBAs. They ran Oracle on a big Alpha with some older vaxen serving in auxiliary roles. They had bunches of programs written in VAXBASIC over a couple decades that ran the company, managing the hundreds of thousands of seed strains they were testing. I’m sure they’ve transitioned in the two decades since, but back then there wasn’t any off the shelf software for their purposes and it would have been an enormous time sink to port over all those old programs. DEC’s role in the tech industry was enormous and platform transitions can’t happen overnight. OpenVMS provided DEC customers with a lifeline. (Also, VMS != Unix) Today’s tax day in the US and my bet is that some 50 year old COBOL program running on an IBM zServer is computing over your data.