VMS had the "sound the fire alarm and leave the building" attitude towards exceptional events that Windows NT has. That's why you used to see the "Blue Screen of Death" on Windows all the time, but they changed it in the early days of Win 8, when they realized you were violating the human rights of tablet users, even laptop users, and suddenly changed it so the system would reboot, reopen your windows, and pretend it didn't happen.

The flip side is UNIX which tries to pretend things are OK even when they are strange. For instance, you might fill the disk with a log file, then 'rm' the log file and note that the disk is still full. The file is still taking up space on the disk, even though it is invisible. The space isn't released until that process closes the file or gets killed.

Contrast that to VMS which, given an impossible situation, will do nothing. (as in "not do anything") Recovering from a "full disk" on UNIX is usually routine, but on VMS you will probably be recovering from tape or calling the factory for support.

This guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Esq1l0Yoo

(the year after that album was released) got mad because a midwestern state university student had a "non-traditional"
student spamming hundreds of USENET newsgroups. The university couldn't throttle the spammer because he'd had already won a "free speech" lawsuit against the university newspaper.

The antagonist saw this as an existential threat to the net one Friday night and went Ender Wiggen on his ass.

He thought he'd fill the disk quota on the spammer's account on the VAX/VMS system so the spammer couldn't log in and delete his received email -- an excellent implementation of quotas meant you could usually get the victim running to 'mommy' (the sysadmin) for help.

The antagonist used ftp-to-email gateway servers to vastly amplify the attack and confuse people about the origin. At the last minute he found a way to get the ftp-to-email gateway servers to send email commands to each other in a cascading way.

The target campus went down in about 30 minutes, and, logged into the VT-100 terminal in his dorm room, the antagonist realized that he'd miscalculated and the attack was possibly 20,000 times larger than planned.

The target campus didn't come back until Tuesday evening, probably the disk was full for the whole VMS Cluster.

The spam stopped. They never proved anything, but a few days they shoved an empty SUNtape into the antagonist's hand that allegedly held the files from his account at his campus central computer center account -- just "being a jackass on social media" was a good enough reason.

About a decade after that incident, I had "the same thing" happen to an email server running Linux on this box

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube

during the 'Love Letter' virus crisis. I had email accounts getting millions of emails a day on that badly underpowered machine, a beta-test model with a 2% slow real-time clock.

In 15 minutes I had the email server shut down, the disk full condition cleared, logs working correctly again.

I brought up qmail and did not like what I saw in "top" so I shut it down. I wrote a uniq|bash|awk script that picked out virus-sending ip addresses from the logs and piped the bash script into bash to block them at the firewall.

I brought qmail up and it was good, good enough to go to bed. By the next morning the viral load was serious so I automated the firewall script, installed an anti-virus scanner, etc.

In wartime, VAX/VMS gives up the fight but UNIX soldiers on.