Meeting the bigots

The day we came in Jeff (My Project leader) took us around have a look at the office and meet people out here. Boy !!! it was amazing to see their offices.
Can you imagine most of them have been working on the OS even before I was born...10 yrs..15 yrs...30 yrs !!! I thought that was really amazing. In India we have to think twice or sometimes 100 times before asking for a new desktop and they have VAXs and Alphas and Itaniums at their disposal just like that(These are the only platforms my OS runs on. And their price is range of million dollars for real...not a joke). Its like they have a mini lab in their office...Yess everyone has his/her own office with 10x8 ft dimension and walls high enough to separate yourself from rest of the world. And they have a whole world inside...Photos, logos, posters, stickers and what not. Each one is unique in its own way and its real treat to see.
(Though we met so many people that I forgot names of most of them :D)
These are the people who have actually developed significant parts of this historical OS and have been around since earlier versions of the OS if not exactly version 1. They are the "VMS bigots". You can see posters, magnets and other stuff put on display,dating back to the late 70s and early '80s. You feel like walking into the history. And its amazing to hear the stories from them.

We had team dinner yesterday evening... sort of knowing the team less formally. They were telling stories of their old "Digital" days. The days when the joined the company, it used to have its own planes... the "Digital planes" and that's not all. They had helicopters to ferry people from one office to another !!! That's very true... I have seen the helipad in this facility. As they tell us, digital had 20 odd offices in this eastern part of US what is called New England and people used ferry in helicopters for meetings and stuff. Most of the people at the table had flown more than once. By the way the company Digital I am talking here is the same company we know as DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) from our computer science books, one of the early software companies which has many break through engineering innovations to its credit. I was overwhelmed by their stories. You can see their eyes actually twinkling when they are describing you those glorious years.
Though, all this has a darker lining. The original company went down because they has poor marketing and over pricing of the products. Now my company wants to move all their jobs to India or other cheaper country so many of them are loosing their jobs. They are really apprehensive about having the "new engineers" in their team. I can understand their feelings. Its really hard to accept these facts.
I will always cherish these moments. And now I get to be small part of this history too.

Life is great !!!