Being a fan of the DEC PDP 11 series, I had a hoped…back in the day, since we ran two PDP 11/70s, that a DEC VAX would play some part in our companies future. But the head of the department, who came from a banking environment, unsurprisingly chose IBM. I’m sure it was the right choice.
In school the DECs were fun and the IBM mainframes were business like. It wasn’t a hard transition for me. Most of my schooling was on IBM mainframes. However in school the OS I learned was MVT the predecessor of MVS. And our small company chose DOS/VSE…a more cost effect solution for smaller businesses. The concepts were the same…a largely batch system. The languages I learned were the same…COBOL and Assembler. JCL, however was different!
Also TBH, we used our PDPs like a batch system. The girls in data entry would key in batches of customer data, that would be processed later. Wow those girls could keypunch fast! They could probably key in 10 customers before I could write one line of code. It’s been a while but I think they got bonuses for speed and accuracy. It probably made sense back then because the DEC databases were not very sophisticated.
That was a lot of reflection to make the point that today, thanks to emulation I can emulate a VAX running OpenVMS software. So it’s on the list!