Where did you get the idea that the story had anything to do with Unix? Or that Unix relies on reboots for cleanups? Note that around the time of this story, o

Where did you get the idea that the story had anything to do with Unix? Or that Unix relies on reboots for cleanups? Note that around the time of this story, one of the most popular hardware platforms for running Unix (especially in academic environments) was ... the VAX (and its predecessor, the PDP-11). So in fact of the 2 "sides" in the story (IBM mainframes vs. VAXen running VMS), Unix would be on the scruffy VAX side (if anything, at that time Unix folks were scruffier than VMS folks).