Ahh, VAXen. Fond memories.
I did most of my PhD on a VAX, and had essentially my own VAXstation 3000 in the computer room.
PhD was all done in TeX - but strangely enough laser printers in them there days cost $$$$$ and I had to print it off on the one laser printer the department had - in East Kilbride at the reactor centre (department was at Glasgow Uni)
The experiment I was a member of at CERN used VAX clusters for simulation and processing - VAXes were really easy to cluster. We had several clusters which reached the maximum limit of 128 - VAXstations rather than 19inch 'real' VAXen.
Lots of happy hours spent in experimental "barns" at the test beam though, using a real VAX to gather beamline test data from our calorimeter.
An experimental barn being a portakabin in a huge experimental hall, equipped with terminals and the essential coffee maker.
Oh, and I forgot my own lovely terminal (arrggg - I forget the brand).
It was the type that either emulated a VT220 or a Tektronix raster terminal.
That was in the days when Real Computing (TM) was done with green text on a serial terminal, and to get graphics you needed a separate graphics display.
My terminal neatly switched between them.
