I've been playing around with VAX/VMS systems as a hobbyist for more than 20 years (I have owned MicroVAX II, and 3800/3900, and others), but I am not very familiar with how they were originally deployed. Besides from being used as industrial control systems, I have heard them described as "departmental servers" which is pretty vague. But I am interested in what actual applications they ran, and how users interfaced to them. There must have been some VAX/VMS installations which were large, are there any examples? What industries used them and who were some of the large VMS customers?
When you read about history of business computing in the 80's it is almost exclusively about IBM PC and I never understood how VAX/VMS fit in and what exactly it was used for aside from a few niche applications, but all indications were that it was enormous money maker for DEC so there must have been a lot customers. I am well aware of Unix (Ultrix or BSD) VAX installations (especially in research, academia, engineering)--usage models which I am thoroughly familiar with), but it is the VMS side of things which I am much less familiar with how it was used commercially. But as far as I understand, VMS accounted for vast majority of VAX sales.
When you read about history of business computing in the 80's it is almost exclusively about IBM PC and I never understood how VAX/VMS fit in and what exactly it was used for aside from a few niche applications, but all indications were that it was enormous money maker for DEC so there must have been a lot customers. I am well aware of Unix (Ultrix or BSD) VAX installations (especially in research, academia, engineering)--usage models which I am thoroughly familiar with), but it is the VMS side of things which I am much less familiar with how it was used commercially. But as far as I understand, VMS accounted for vast majority of VAX sales.