Happy to read VAX/VMS here :-) - my first project as a college fresher was migrating critical data from VAX/VMS ISAM files (written using Fortran code) to Digital Unix. The days when these two machine's did not talk to each other. Learnt dd, tape drive record limiter issues, all data was floating point so issues with binary compatibility etc.
One of the best accomplishments in my career.
Hi from another Sybase alumni, though I joined after the VAX era, on the PC side, when Microsoft stole the SQLServer source code.
Was the innermost loop doing the table join or the table scan?
I was able to remove one (1) machine language instruction from that innermost loop. I no longer recall if this resulted in a measurable difference but I've always been proud of this.