Happy Birthday!

30 years.

30 years ago - give or take a few days - Digital Equipment Corporation introduced the VAX 11-780, running their brand new VMS operating system.

That's "VAX' as in "Virtual Address eXtension" and VMS as "Virtual Memory System".

"Virtual" as in "the system acts like it has more memory than it really has", something that we take for granted these days.

Though not the first system to use virtual memory, it was one of the first popular ones.

VMS was the system on which I first "cut my teeth" (so to speak) - I worked on it a couple of years in college, then professionally for a couple of years (and, arguably, I've been working on NT-class systems for quite a while).

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish VMS (now, "OpenVMS") a happy 30th birthday.