Odd coincidence, I was just thinking about the VAX when I went out for a cigar tonight. I remember being in a data centre sub basement (mostly EMC storage) where the halon went off. Turned the drop-in ceiling tiles into popcorn deep enough to come halfway to your knee.

VAX is one system that I've never worked on. They still had one running at Pitt in the late nineties when I was there but I never got a chance to log in to it.

Fond memories of the VAX, since that's what I had access to in college. They installed WordPerfect 4.2 my sophomore year, and we were in heaven.

Also - always mount a scratch monkey

I worked at a VAX-based computer center in the early nineties, supporting users and having some operator privileges (I could create and modify normal user accounts). Most of my knowledge of VMS is forgotten.

My earliest internetting was via the local university's VAX. Mostly usenet. I also learned to program ADA on it, of all things (a language I found surprisingly interesting, but have long since forgotten utterly).

Pretty funny tale, that link.

In particular, I forgot that it is not an acronym and should be written 'Ada'.

What implementation of Ada did you use? I just used the Vax to play Zork until they got one with Unix on it.

Ada 83 - before the introduction of OOP constructs.

Arse, I'm not calling BS or anything here - but I thought Halon worked by scavenging all the oxygen in the room in double-quick time.. and if it ever went off, we were told to run for the doors, so the firemen wouldn't have so far to drag our asphyxiated bodies... or at least that's what they told us.

MY data center sub-basement story is that one night I was working late in the sub-basement, and wanted to go up to the basement. So I shambled into the elevator, and spent a loooong befuddled moment looking for the button marked ".."

Anyway, I remember in the early 90's emailing my brother via UUCP address because the VAXen at his college required it... I felt so smug running pine from a SunOS box, or on really fancy days, when I'd scored time on one of the NeXTs. Good times.

We learned Ada at Pitt in the first computer languages class along with Smalltalk and Prolog. I'm pretty sure that Ada influenced Java quite a bit.

I read the first line of the linked article to my husband, who laughed and said - "isn't that from a hundred years ago?" He is enjoying me reading bits of comments aloud, as he is probably a similar kind of old-school geek as the rest of you, whereas I have no idea of what any of this means.

The outgoing senior class my freshman year of college were the last class that had VAX access at my school, and they let them keep it until they graduated, at which point they shut it all down. By that point, almost everyone had switched over to Webmail, but I sought out a few remaining VAXen, because them's my kind of people and that's my kind of system. I was pretty pissed to find I'd missed the boat by three years.