# Happy Birthday VAX!

From Yahoo! news, the [VMS operating system just turned 30 years
old][1]. Amazing that there are so many VAXen still in use today:

> Gareth Williams, associate director of the Smithsonian
> Astrophysical Observatory Minor Planet Center since 1990, has been
> tracking the 400,000 orbits of known asteroids and comets in the
> solar system using a cluster of 12 VAXes, from offices on the
> Harvard University campus. The Deutsche Börse stock exchange in
> Frankfurt runs on VMS. The Australian Stock Exchange runs on
> it. The train system in Ireland, Irish Rail, runs on it, as does
> the Amsterdam police department. The U.S. Postal Service runs its
> mail sorters on OpenVMS, and Amazon.com uses it to ship 112,000
> packages a day. It has "a very loyal installed base of customers,"
> says Ann McQuaid, general manager of OpenVMS at HP, who shows no
> signs of wanting to give it up.

I haven't sat in front of a VAX terminal in years; the last time was
in the late eighties when I was a CS student. It was a [VAX
11-780][2], which I did C programming on. I still recall the VAX lab
being reserved for junior and senior-year students only, as it was
light-years ahead of the horrific [Cyber mainframe][3] freshman CS
and Engineering students were subjected to.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071107063822/http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/202801794
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vax11-780.jpg
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Cyber
.