I had about a year of deep VMS
I already had spent about 5 years in Unix and xenix and various derivatives at that point and I worked for a company that had a huge VMS investment. Probably the largest in North America.
So I had a project that required a database. SQL in some form, it could be Oracle it could be postgresql or whatever the commercial variant was at the time, it could be DB2. But I had to do a cost-benefit analysis and write the code to make it all work. It was about a six months of coding at that point. There was lots of c code that was the user interface that interacted with the SQL database on the back end. I initially coded it under MS-dos 3, with large memory extensions. I could do it on Unix or on VMS. I ported it to SCO Unix to prove it could run there. But I had free vax boxen available to me and the corporation really wanted me to use them. So I had to port everything I did to the corporate data center VMS to see if I can make it work.
Of course first I actually had to learn command line vax VMS. That was about two months of doing nothing but studying the books and playing. Then I had to learn Eve TPU. That is one evil editor. Then I was able to start moving my code to the system and compiling and seeing what failed in weird ways. That's when I learned I could see everyone's command line and their passwords when I looked at the process table under the VMS console. With random end user privileges.
I settled on Oracle. That meant that I could put it on the vax VMS system that the hardware was for free but I'd have to pay for support for the operating system and the cost of Oracle is about five times as much as the equivalent Unix platform. So I killed that idea and ended up on SCO Unix.
And thankfully never had to deal with the evils of vax VMS again.
So I had a project that required a database. SQL in some form, it could be Oracle it could be postgresql or whatever the commercial variant was at the time, it could be DB2. But I had to do a cost-benefit analysis and write the code to make it all work. It was about a six months of coding at that point. There was lots of c code that was the user interface that interacted with the SQL database on the back end. I initially coded it under MS-dos 3, with large memory extensions. I could do it on Unix or on VMS. I ported it to SCO Unix to prove it could run there. But I had free vax boxen available to me and the corporation really wanted me to use them. So I had to port everything I did to the corporate data center VMS to see if I can make it work.
Of course first I actually had to learn command line vax VMS. That was about two months of doing nothing but studying the books and playing. Then I had to learn Eve TPU. That is one evil editor. Then I was able to start moving my code to the system and compiling and seeing what failed in weird ways. That's when I learned I could see everyone's command line and their passwords when I looked at the process table under the VMS console. With random end user privileges.
I settled on Oracle. That meant that I could put it on the vax VMS system that the hardware was for free but I'd have to pay for support for the operating system and the cost of Oracle is about five times as much as the equivalent Unix platform. So I killed that idea and ended up on SCO Unix.
And thankfully never had to deal with the evils of vax VMS again.