Actually fun reminiscing a little. Have not thought about this stuff in decades. One thing I always though was kind of fun. When I started collage terminals were just coming in for students and there was not enough of them. Huge lines. Me I would go over to the row of empty card punches and punch up a deck for my assignment, walk over the the window and give it to the operator and have it read. Then I would get in line for a terminal which by then was often shorter, login, do any editing and debugging, and run and print my assignment in like 30 minutes. Not sure why others did not do this. Just seemed like the way to go.

Not really sure what it was. Maybe a small vector machine, or maybe a small cluster of them. I frankly do not remember much about it. Kind of forgotten about VMS until you reminded me. It was a time of much change in the 80s. I started on an IBM 370, then a departmental VAX, a Xerox Star System (a Word Processor on which the Mac was based), then we moved to Macs and Workstations. I had a Micro VAX I used, and Macs. All very expensive stuff. Personally I had a video terminal at at home at the start of the 80's, then a Commodore 64, then late 80's I bought a Mac at a huge price which I used until about 1997. There were some other systems kicking around during that time too that are hard to remember. One was something from Honeywell at a company I worked for during summers.