VMS is wonderful.. honest..

I'm much younger than 40 odd and have used version 4 through to 7.3. From PDP11s the whole vax range and on up to the modern alpha es45 systems.

If you have worked on VMS then you can see a lot of it in the way NT works. (although i would still put my money on VMS).

about 3 years ago we tested 3 systems running an active database (1 unix, 1 VMS and 1 NT)
While they are running 1000+ transactions we pulled the power, waited 10 secs and powered up again.

VMs goes.. Ops, i lost power... Lets 'rebuild that drive' and off we go (boot time +1 min to return to service)

NT goes.. Crap... i lost power. lets run checkdisk and hope its all kewl (boot time +30 mins to return to service)

Our Unix.. forget it.... go get your backup tape (check drives, restore files from tape+ restart)

The point... for data integrity VMS is the strongest system i have every used.... and it should be being ported to the next gen intel 64bit processors