I remember working for a large financial company before the big crisis. Half the infrastructure was unix on x86 and the other half that made most of the money w

I remember working for a large financial company before the big crisis. Half the infrastructure was unix on x86 and the other half that made most of the money was on VMS running on Alpha. We eventually went to the itanic architecture and got maybe 30% more memory and everything else was harder. VMS on Alpha was freaking amazing. Toolchain sucked, compilers sucked, the developer interface was really rough. Think non ssh protocol to console with non vt220 compatible terminal, with custom non xwindows gui protocol to run emacs. No code works cause filenames look like e0:[funkychicken]\goats\maker.txt;2 The ;2 on the end is the version. It also had a distributed lock manager , a geo decentralized file system which the equivalent of distributed inotify integrated into the decentralized lock manager. 20x the horse power over our x86 nodes, and they supported cluster operations across all 50 of the alphas. We ended up replacing the batch processing with like 200 nodes of Hadoop and hbase. It was never as stable, scalable or fast as vms. It was 100x cheaper though :)