Via OSNews, run into a three-part article on setting up a VAX at home.

Probably VMS was the second to last serious OS (the last is Plan 9). By serious I mean it was complete and useful. VMS and Plan 9 both shipped complete documentation both online and printed versions. (In case of P9, its minimalism keeps the user manual to one volume.) When was the last time Unix vendors did that?

VMS was also the last OS that had decent multi language support: Fortran, C, Pascal, and lots more worked seemlessly together and could be driven from DCL shell language that doubled as extension language. Unix never had it and it's very unlikely it ever will. We will see how .Net/CLR fairs.

Why is it that we still don't have versioned filesystem like VMS? Having to use filesystem is itself an insult but can't we have at least half-way decent one? Connecting libraries or components is still very hard for programmers and there aren't that many useful built-in libraries that come with OS these days either. And let's not mention security as it gets too depressing.

Alas, using VMS for daily task these days would be like driving a refurbished 1950s Cadillac - it may work most of the times but maintenance cost would be prohibitive...