When I worked at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, UK in the mid 1980s DEC actually gifted us with three of these things (we were a big DEC customer - Dec10 and several VAXen). We really had no idea what to do with them as they came with no useful software - as I remember only the OS (RTX of some sort, I think) and a rather good Lunar Lander game. They were also terribly unreliable - the internal bus was very flaky. We accidentally fixed this by carrying them in the back of a van between Poly sites - the vibration re-seated things, and later worked out that lifting them a few inches and then dropping them did the same.

I also had a DEC Rainbow, which made a very nice VT200 terminal, but was otherwise nearly as useless. I did actually write some software for it to support the Polys student application clearing service, which made use of an 8mb hard drive that came packed in a crate about as large as a dishwasher.

I was so happy when the first IBM XT arrived.

PS Good article!