VAX/VMS was a big part of my life in the 1980's. From 2003 to the end of 2008 I had a VT125 terminal on my office desk, and it was connected to a VAX in our machine room, which had many machines, including at least one 8600 if not an 8800 as well. The room after 2006 was a showpiece, visible through glass windows, with large climate control machines also.
The earlier room was also visible, but before the 8600 the mere 11/780's tied to many VT125's were dog slow, taking up to an hour just to log on. And that's where I became familiar with one VMS misfeature. The fact that while processing was being done, characters typed at your terminal were gleefully ignored. Basically, you'd watch, and if you didn't see your characters appearing after awhile, you'd type your command again. I recall one co-programmer (who later became a divinity student) intoned:
The VAX, in it's infinite wisdom, sometimes chooses to ignore your command.
Sometimes, just to keep you on your toes, the ignored character was precisely the carriage return (and it was CR, IIRC, not NL as on Unix machines) which caused the command to be executed. So you couldn't tell if it was just sitting there, after you entered the command, and slowly grinding away, or whether it has summarily chosen to ignore your CR.
Having been thusly trained, when we moved on from 11/780's to 8600's the problem of having the terminal program swapped out while you were typing occurred less, but never totally went away. I recall forgetting about this feature, until a Unix programmer pointed it out to me again, and before long I was working on a Sun Unix system also and VAX/VMS and it's foibles were gradually forgotten.
DEC really earned their reputation on, at the time, leading machines, like the PDP-10 in 1966, the breakthrough timesharing machine, used by Compuserve, Stanford, MIT, and many others. This was not a perfect machine either, but in those days DEC was more honest, less driving by intense marketing. So their solution to imperfection was to provide the source code for the entire OS. This was a breakthrough for places like MIT, the PDP-10 became the delight of all "hackers" (as leading computer scientist students were often called then, before hacking became synonymous with cracking), since you could hack the very OS the great timesharing system was based on, and do virtually anything to it, though typical modifications were bypassing the serial input stuff, IIRC. Interesting. Meanwhile, for IBM machines, you slipped your PL/1 card deck through a slot and some time later it would come back with the first of many error reports. Big difference. Interactive multitasking was available early, but only to the college crowd, who later became the buyers of DEC machines like VAX, which simply had to be good, the best thing ever, etc. Except that it was way oversold, too slow for the timesharing it was sold for, and VMS was terrible.
I had a parallel experience during the PDP-11 "hacker" era. I was a enthusiastic PDP-10 user for all of my college years from 73 to 78. The PDP-10 user of the system for the Claremont Colleges, renowned as one of the last to keep going into the early 2000's. Though we only had a few dozen terminals on campus, it wasn't THAT hard to get on one, and it was just heaven, being able to solve difficult problems in Basic, or run cool things like Eliza. In the summer after my freshman year I did a programming job using APL through a Tektronics terminal (which did lots of funny characters) connected through the Dec 10, as we called it. The Dec 10 was so much more useful and fun than the IBM 360, we actually had in our math building at Pomona College. The Dec 10 was up campus in the Claremont University Center. Later I ran my psychology experiments through SPSS on the Dec 10.
But meanwhile, I had also come to know and love the PDP-11 I used for several years in the Psychology department. Starting in 1976, I programmed in Basic and Macro-11, thanks to a Macro-11 handbook we got. Using peeks and pokes, and finally Macro-11 programs, I controlled digital audio through a 10 bit multi channel audio interface, and graphical displays on a CRT.
RT-11 was wonderfully crisp, and the system was marvelously simple and open. For controlling laboratory equipment, nothing could be better.
I sadly missed out on the dawn of Unix, which also happened on PDP-11's, starting in 1970. Unix had originally been programmed on a PDP-7, something I've never seen, but the first C version was programmed on a PDP-11 in 1970, and PDP-11 became the standard through the key developments of Research System 6 and 7 and BSD. I only got to use Unix starting in 1989, after gratefully leaving behind VMS.
Last PDP-11 I programmed was an 11/60 running RSX-11m, which was not perfect but helpfully open and fixable.
VAX, sadly, was a step backwards from all these fine machines. Rather than a leader, it quickly became a laggard in speed. It was sold to do far more than it could. A single 11/780 might be a nice personal machine, or maybe two people. I don't believe DEC was as open with the OS as they previously had been, though the 780 was a departmental machine, maintained by specialists, who at least kept it working. Unix might have been available, but we were supporting our product under VMS, which was considered something like industry standard, if not high end (Silicon Graphics was the high end).
DEC believed so much in the VAX they cancelled their Jupiter project to create the next generation PDP-10. This made people using famous systems at Stanford very angry, and may have been the impetus to creating SUN (Stanford University Network) computers.
It was said that the successor to PDP-11/70 was killed because it was faster than the VAX. The same may have been true for the Jupiter. The VAX machines were slow and especially unresponsive especially with the 11/780 and 11/730. The improvement in the 11/785 was minimal. It took many years before the speed was substantially increased, when the 8600 came out. Meanwhile DEC had disc clustering, machine clustering (buy more slow machines!), but each machine could simply not work for many users running CAD programs.
I think VAX was a bad turn, not just for DEC. All systems have become either more closed or more complicated, to the point where systems like the wonderful PDP-11 don't make much sense anymore, but are very much missed.
One of the bigger parts of that mistake was VMS. DEC ultimately realized the error of their ways and made Ultrix their standard. As that was happening, I moved on to SUN computers, which had used BSD Unix from the beginning. Until the late 2000's, SUN occupied a position similar to that which DEC had had, in leading universities. With Oracle starting to actually charge for academic Solaris licenses, and the decline of the cost competitiveness of Sun desktop hardware, Gnu/Linux is gaining faster than ever to solidify it's position as the leading research OS. Mac OS X is unix based, and much unix code has made it into Microsoft Windows as well.
