The end of an era

I read a couple of weeks ago that HP is closing ZKO (Spitbrook Road, Nashua).  I have a lot of fond memories of working in VMS development in ZKO1/1 (and later ZKO3/4) in the 80's and early 90's.  It's sad to see that it is going.

Of course I miss the people -- too many to try to count.  It was a great place to work, and I'm proud of the work that we did back then.  VMS was an excellent product for its time, and portions of it compare favorably to anything being done today.

I miss the DEC traditions around April 1st, especially those that Andy had invested in.  In ZKO, the decision to name conference rooms after people I'd heard of, and the quotes they picked -- some of which I use to this day (e.g. "anything not worth doing is not worth doing well").

I also wonder what will happen to the nonpaged pool behind the cafeteria, or the 7-bit ASCII colored bars at the main entrance (that used to say "DigitalSoftwa Reengineering" due to an unfortunate line break).

And, yes, I enjoyed DEC, but despaired of Digital.

Finally, one small personal tidbit: I remember giving a lecture on 'what is this 2PC thing anyway' to some VMS devs around 1990.  The thing that makes it memorable was that it was in the [Nancy] Lynch conference room.  The quotes on the walls were at least as good as anything in my slides :).