A nice  article from Jon Hall  is on top of the blog

http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/Paw-Prints-Writings-of-the-maddog/Rest-in-Peace-Kenneth-Harry-Olsen

along with many other replies about PDP-* systems, VMS, etc.

My first HIGHtech job (1985) was hanging tapes and keeping dumb terminals alive and connected to four
VAX 750/780's running (not VMS but) BSD4 unix (before NFS, before NIS)
for a robotics shop in Billerica called Automatix.            csh%  a.out
 hello, world !