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

[Paul Hardy]

Mac Decman <dearman.mark at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Anyway, I thought it would be fun, ... to ask, what brought you to VMS?
The first DEC computer I used in 1973 was the PDP7 at the computer lab in
Cambridge (UK) where I then did Part II Computer Science to follow Part I
Natural Science. I was lectured by Maurice Wilkes who built EDSAC (one of
the claimants for first general purpose stored program computing service)
and David Wheeler who invented the subroutine!

Starting work, my first tasks were programming in Fortran and BCPL on a
PDP15 - no disk drives, but four DECtape drives (pre-addressed, wide mag
tape). That was supplemented/replaced by a PDP11/45 with a couple of 5MB
disk drives - programming high end graphics and digital cartography systems
mainly in Fortran and macro assembler.

In 1979 the company bought what I think was the first non-military VAX in
Britain (000047), and I became its system manager, initially trained on VMS
0.6, then setting up VMS 1.0 through to 5.5-2 and beyond. I continued using
VMS on VAXen, MicroVAX, VAXstations. We ported the software suite to Alpha
(VEST/DECmigrate was a marvellous tool), but then moved to PC rather than
Itanium. The company went bust, and I moved away from VMS for a decade.

More recently, I've been running VMS as a Hobbyist on my home laptop using
SIMH - another very impressive piece of software. Latest venture was VMS on
a Raspberry Pi, again using SIMH. Amazing to get better performance for
identical software on a credit card size computer for GBP 25 rather than a
roomful of cabinets for many thousand!

Regards


-- 
Paul at the paulhardy.net domain