Ok my story. I touched real a VAX/VMS system exactly once. Was working as a sysad at an aerospace concern in the mid 90s. There was an old curmudgeon scienti

Ok my story. I touched real a VAX/VMS system exactly once. Was working as a sysad at an aerospace concern in the mid 90s. There was an old curmudgeon scientist named Norm with a comb-over who so-far refused give up his VAX—much to the chagrin of the IT dept. :-D He finally did, but not yet on this day. I came in to his office one summer, probably to help with a Mac or PC, and was intrigued by the unique machine. He let me poke at it and look around. Not sure what I expected... some kind of mainframe kind of thing? To my surprise was a graphics terminal with the X Window system running along with the CDE desktop. Believe the main box was in a lab somewhere else. Kinda blew my mind because I had recently tried CDE out on a cheap Lintel PC I had in my office. Slackware? Maybe had seen it on a Sun as well. (Was a great place to work and learn, the "UN of computers" I called it.) So it was familiar in that sense. Started up a character terminal and poked around. Had the crazy prompt [SYS$FOO...Bar] or something and verbose uppercase commands. Had versions numbers in the filenames after semi-colons. I think there was very good help system as well. In total, a fascinating combination of archaic sophistication. Unfortunately, a lot of great ideas from the old days were lost in the drive to standardization. I think I preferred VMS' named volume approach also taken on Amiga, Netware, and limited in DOS/NT. (Been on Unixen for decades now, so don't hate the single root, but find it less obvious where I am.) On the other hand, later I read ESR's take of VMS and it wasn't all that positive: https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#vms https://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#vm...