The DEC stuff feels like a foreign country to me.
Most of the world is powered by Unix (and its clones/derivatives), at least in the infrastructure space, with a small percent still running Windows Server for some masochistic reason. Outside of playing with OpenVMS exactly one time with qemu (purely because I kind of liked their goofy shark logo [1]), I've never used anything from DEC, but throughout the 80s my understanding is that DEC was a force to be reckoned with. I think there was probably more diversity in operating systems back then.
The DEC stuff was huge for a period of time, and I feel like there's an alternate universe where VMS and VAX stayed the standard, and Unix is the footnote. I'm not sure that universe would be better, there's probably a reason that Unix won overall, but it's not like DEC and VAX were tiny things.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Dec-vms-...
Think of Windows NT as the spiritual successor of VMS and it never really went away.
Sort of like if Plan 9 had succeeded Unix.
Interesting, I hadn't thought of it that way; I didn't realize that NT shared ancestry with VMS.
Dave Cutler
Yeah, I looked it up after you mentioned it. Interesting stuff.
I hate Windows but that's not so much the kernel but much more due to my hatred of the interface and Windows Update, so I don't know if the alternate universe where DEC reigned supreme would be better or worse.
Only spiritual. The implementation is a disaster.
I had a bunch of DEC Alpha's 21164 back in the late 90's I absolutely loved those machines except from the ARC/SRM firmware which was pretty horrible. We also had a Sparc64 board/CPU from Sun Microelectronics which we put in our tower case, added SCSI, video cards etc and ran Solaris. I also worked for a 3rd-party Sun clone maker around that time, we had piles of Sparc/Sparc64 boards sitting round.
UNIX probably won out due to licensing and the fact that it was available on x86-64 so much earlier - mainly Linux and BSD I guess but Solaris was there as well, VMS didn't boot on x86-64 until 2019.
Everyone loved the Alpha machines when they came out as far as I remember. I also liked Digital Unix a lot more than Solaris or HP-UX though I don't remember any particular reason, probably completely irrational :)
> Most of the world is powered by Unix
Well, Unix came into being on a DEC PDP-11, and C is basically high-level PDP-11 assembly...
And MS-DOS was influenced by CP/M which was influenced by DEC operating systems (like OS/8 for the PDP-8).
If you wanted to run UNIX, a PDP-11 or VAX was a great choice too.
Outside of computing proper, DEC had a massive influence on networking too.
Flashback to DEC VT-100s in the CMU graduate student terminal room.
DEC/digital always made probably the most attractive computers beyond Apple (and I realize that both parts of that are subjective).
Their cases were far more white than beige, and generally fairly understated and subtle. (Although sometimes that backfired, because it was hard finding white peripherals - https://antnik.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/dec_... )
I owned the Digital Celebris in both a desktop and a mini tower configuration.
