DEC was a big part of my life in the 90s. My first internship was working on a SCADA system on Vaxstations running VMS. My mom had to help me learn FORTRAN fo

DEC was a big part of my life in the 90s. My first internship was working on a SCADA system on Vaxstations running VMS. My mom had to help me learn FORTRAN for this. (we were all unix/c at school). My first job was as a sysadmin starting in 93 for an academic stats dept that used DECstations and were getting their first DEC alphas running OSF/1. A lot of my job at first consisted of getting the open source applications they needed running in 64 bit mode (you would not believe how many int/pointer conversions I had to fix). I remember adding a memory kit to a 3000/500 in the first month of working there. That memory kit had a retail value higher than my annual salary at the time & it was terrifying. My next job was as research staff at at a comp sci dept doing OS research. I wrote drivers for Myricom NICs for DEC OSF/1. (and had the funniest bug.. we had to use GCC to compile the drivers, and I missed the no-fp-reg directive, so every time the driver was active, it was using floating point registers as general registers and corrupting users fp state.. You'd see applications crashing left and right with FP exceptions). A few years later, the same dept paid me full time to help port FreeBSD to the DEC alpha, and I maintained FreeBSD/alpha until alpha was walking dead, and we killed the FreeBSD/alpha port. I got one of the first API UP1000s (one of the 3rd party alphas that used the irongate chipset from AMD), and it was my workstation running FreeBSD/alpha for years.