That's outrageous...

1. RE: FORTRAN. VAX FORTRAN was the most awesome implementation of FORTRAN ever. FORTRAN because these systems didn't have much RAM and CPU power was limited. FORTRAN went into the background for a while when the C fad began in the early 1980s; however, academics cringed at C for reasons that the industry would eventually learn "the hard way" and FORTRAN came back along with a government knee-jerk reaction called Ada and a pile of 4GLs starting with DATATRIEVE --up until processors and RAM allowed for more productive use of more powerful "safe" language systems (Java, C#, Python, Swift).

2. RE: ITANIUM. DEC created VAX/VMS for the break-thru 32-bit VAX-11 architecture and then ported it to its break-thru 64-bit Alpha architecture and rebranded it as OpenVMS. The Alpha chip was really powerful, but it was produced only by DEC's Hudson chip plant (which also produced the StrongARM chip whose descendants are in all of the smartphones). To address the customer need for a second supplier for that chip, DEC began to shop around the Alpha architecture to other semiconductor manufacturers. One of those was Intel --which decided not to become a second source and a little while later, announced the Pentium series that revived its ALL BUT DEAD x86 architecture using patented concepts found only in DEC's Alpha chip. There was a lawsuit and the settlement was that Intel would buy the Alpha chip and Hudson plant. This resulted in the Itanium architecture, which the then owner of DEC (HP) decided to embrace for OpenVMS and its other HP operating systems. As the Pentium chip gained momentum, Intel realized it would be more profitable to use the tech to make X86_64 architecture. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which was all but ready to dump the ALL BUT DEAD x86 architecture (in favor of MIPS and PowerPC), pivoted with Windows NT and released full support for X86_64. Considering that Windows NT was developed by the original computer scientists behind VMS and considering the dominance of Windows on the desktop and the low cost of X86_64 hardware (due to economies of scale), it was no surprise that Itanium fell out of favor, and OpenVMS along with it (though there were many heroic efforts to "rescue" OpenVMS from that dead architecture, HP had no real interest --at least not in time).

3. RE: VMS TCP/IP. This cracked me up. I wrote one of the first TCP/IP stacks for VAX/VMS on a VAX-11/780 using InterLAN hardware. You are correct that VMS pre-dates TCP/IP --but dude it was only by like 1-2 years! VMS was uses with XNS/ITP (upon which TCP/IP was based). TCP/IP is le grand garbage --as the entire planet knows now and DEC had bet heavily on something called OSI to replace DECnet. But some f'n jack head named Vincent Cerf created an async implementation for TCP/IP that allowed the bazillion Windows PC to hop on the Internet (what could go wrong) and that quickly became Microsoft RAS which destroyed the universe quickly. All of the stable and secure networking systems died. Bill Gates was interviewed at one point and responded to a question about what the biggest unexpected development had been with a dumb look saying he had failed to predict the sudden end of distance-and-time based pricing for data communications. So now, dude in St. Petersburg can show off his genetic superiority by hacking the microcode in the Intel Ethernet controllers in your laptop from 8,000 miles away at virtually no cost. Enjoy!

4. VMS knowledge are hackers. This is among the most outrageous comment I've read on the Internet. VMS was all about structure and discipline. If you weren't a computer scientist (or college student) you weren't even getting a job working on one! What you probably observed had nothing to do with VMS but just maintaining legacy code in general.

5. RE: "interesting". VMS was the most powerful operating system ever created well into the modern era. You can imagine that the guys creating Windows NT at Microsoft (who previously developed VMS for DEC back East) were not being allowed to create the true successor to VMS --the idea was to get something working on small cheap PCs that would be sold to all of the small businesses, not on continuing to perfect the product of 30 years of engineering (as VMS descended from their prior RSX11 and RT11 operating systems) as they had been doing first to the 78032 "chip" and later to the Alpha processors. I think around 2015, Windows, Linux and MacOS finally began to pull away from where VMS was (back in 1990). One can only imagine how powerful VMS would have become when run on something like the MacPro 7,1 that Apple announced.

In conclusion, true industry leaders, many of whom did not support VMS back in the day (because they were forced to embrace crummy UNIX System 3, V and BSD "hacks" for lack of access to the incredible DEC engineering resources), will tell you that VMS (and TCP/IP) are stories of lost art that severely setback the pace of mankind's development. The reasons are many: Bill Gates' well known BS, Vincent Cerf's destructive efforts to advance PPP, alleged theft of intellectual property by Intel that set off the downward spiral of DEC, skyrocketing memory prices due to market manipulation and Carly "That Face" Fiorina.

Consider yoh-self schooled.