# VAXen, My Children, Just Don't Belong In Some Places
The trouble started when the Chief User went to visit his computer and its VAXherd.
He came away visibly disturbed and immediately complained to the ELFI's Director of Data Processing that, "There are some _very strange_ people in there with the computers."
Now since this user person was the Comptroller of this Extremely Large Financial Institution, their VAX had been promptly hustled over to the IBM data center which the Comptroller said, "was a more suitable place." The people there wore shirts and ties and didn't wear head bands or cowboy hats.
Oh my. It's 2025 and I'm just reading this for the first time.
In 1998, we were getting some large consumer brands on the World Wide Web for the first time. One of our customers had a Director of Security who didn't trust us. When he came out to see our data center, our web services, he trusted us even less. The guys wore ties that day, but the long hair didn't help.
It was really too bad; the Security Director was not wrong about many aspects of the whole idea and he was able to get executives in our parent company to realize that security best practices would require some structural changes on our part; we couldn't just buy a net appliance to take care of it. Having that client on board with that Security Director's input could have been a productive experience. But he didn't like what he saw, and that particular project was canceled.
Given the rather percussive events in this tale of The Little VAX and the DataCenter, perhaps that was all for the best.
