Some Life Lessons from VAX/VMS (2013)

Summary

HP announced back in June that end-of-support for OpenVMS will be 2020. I've been compiling this blog post since then. I have very fond memories of VAX/VMS... I used one to store my pillow for two years. Funny story. I learned a lot of life lessons from VMS. Originally this was one big 'ol blog post but I decided to break it up so the post wasn't so long. These posts are just a collection of funny VAX/VMS stories from my youth. I really believe that I learned the most in my career from my few years working on VMS. Life Lesson Number 1: you need to have a sense of humor to work in this industryMany people have speculated that HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey was really supposed to be a play-on-words. HAL comes one letter before IBM. I guess that makes it "one better." Mathematically, the equation is...IBM (IBM rot-1) = HAL. The guy who wrote VMS was vehemently anti-IBM and when he ported VMS to WNT, which was the acronym for Windows NT before it was known as Windows NT, it is believed that WNT was "the next evolution" of VMS. Mathematically...VMS(rot 1) = WNT. That is a great sense of humor. Life Lesson Number 2: Hard Work Pays Off When I was in college I had a work/study job as a computer lab technician. Basically a lab tech is supposed to sit at the front of the "lab" and help people print documents, log in to e-mail, etc. This was a few years before computers were ubiquitous in every dorm room. I was the only lab tech that actually walked around and helped kids and didn't just sit there playing games. I'm serious... It was so bad that I was promoted to head lab technician by Thanksgiving of my freshman year. I was promoted because I showed initiative and because I came up with snappy little "tricks" to make computers easier for the less savvy. An example...our campus email was housed on a big VAX/VMS system. We had to either login from a VT100 terminal or use a program called Kermit to access our email on old DOS 286's. Kermit was actually a very popular communication...