Are there any former Bell Labs sysadmins on this list?  My father was the sysadmin for hoh* (Crawford Hill, mostly the radio astronomy folks) in the mid-late '80s and early '90s and I would be especially interested to hear from hou* (Holmdel, what a building!) folks but also ihn* (Indian Hill) and the like.  I'm very curious about what life was like on the ground, so to speak.

I'll start off with a quick anecdote.  When I started college I began working for the computing center doing menial jobs.  There was an older, ex-army guy leading the networking department who extolled the virtues of the VAX up and down; I think Oberlin would have kept the VAX 6620 running VMS 5.5 forever if he had his way.  Anyway, I mentioned his position to my father and he told me that the best thing he ever did was replace the VAX systems (and the endless mounting/remounting of RL02s for user data) with early generation Sun 4 systems.

-Henry