[turk73]

The first one I used was a DEC UNIX based workstation. That thing was pretty cool at the time, circa 1993. I learned a ton about UNIX on it and was really my only access to that type of OS until Linux first came out a year or so later.

Later on, I worked at a healthcare company that used a cluster of Alphas running OpenVMS or whatever the hell that OS is called. This was circa 2011-2014. It was DEFINITELY NOT COOL ANYMORE. That hardware was really old and the software on it was subject to frequent restarts due to memory leaks. The company used it to try and operate order intake for a multi-site online pharmacy. The system was impossible to interact with, it had a bizarre TCP socket based API, one awful, buggy, SOAP service, and otherwise data could come out via reports generated in a binary file format. Not strictly DEC's fault as the Alpha hardware did last a long time, but it was generally an awful experience for me to have to deal with that particular system. The company tried and failed to replace it so they doubled down, bought the source code for a ridiculous sum in the millions of dollars, and proceeded to try and maintain it themselves by hiring crusty old timers whose people skills were either way out of date or never existed in the first place.

Oh, and the repairs to the hardware were through a local computer salvage firm that basically bought boards and other bits off of EBay. This is a major player in the online pharmacy space, mind you.