[Info-vax] OT: Computing Experience, What brought you to VMS?

[Ken Robinson]

I'm one of the "Old Timers" here. I got my start with VMS in 1980. The
company where I was working at the time was running on a PHP 11/70 using
11M+ (we started with IAS in 1977 -- I told some stories about that time at
some Magic sessions at DECUS). I was an application programmer who dabbled
in system management. During the summer of 1979 this company acquired a VAX
11/780 and it just sat in the computer room. I started reading the
documentation and was itching to try the new machine. I finally got my
chance when I was promoted to System Manager and sent to DEC school (2
weeks in LA). Once we got on the machine, everyone loved it -- moving up
from the PDP 11/70 with less than a meg of memory to the VAX with 1.5 Mb
memory and no more tkb overlays was great. This system was running VMS v2.0
and had 2 RP06 disk drives. We eventually got 2 RP07 drives on the system.
When I left that job in 1984, I went to Bellcore where I was introduced to
UNIX -- but I was there to be a lone VMS System Manager for a DEC trial of
All-in-One for 6 months, then I moved to another project that was going to
use clusters for a major project. I stayed with with VMS until 2007 when I
transitioned to being a Drupal Web Developer writing PHP backend code. I
still follow what's happening with VMS and I run the info-vax mailing list.
 It was a good run for over 25 years for me.


On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Andy Bustamante <acbustamante at pacbell.net>wrote:

> USC was a DEC school in when I was a student.  We got a VAX in the early
> 80's and started retiring our PDPs.  My first paying gig in the field was
> as an undergrad computer lab instructor tutoring Fortran.  After a half
> dozen years with the US Navy, I took a job supporting PDPs just in time to
> move customers to a VAX and then Alphaservers.  That was grand time, travel
> and providing solid solutions.
>
> I still have a VMS hat, but it's keeping archive systems running.  What
> keeps me busy now is Information Security and special projects.
>
> Andy
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