Starlink was one of two somewhat similar subject-specific networks set up in a period of enlightenment by the UK Science Research Council (as I think it was then) operating in the 1980s, particularly for largely interactive analysis. The other was an un-named and ill-publicized one for nuclear structure as opposed to astronomy. I don't know about Starlink, not being an astronomer, but I guess it was also rather ahead of its time, like the nuclear structure one.
Obviously it had changed in astronomy by then, but I didn't see the attitude that physicists (and later, structural biologists) shouldn't write software or build the necessary hardware before or around that time. We had people and job titles like "physicist-programmer", and did what was necessary, and we did fit the facilities to the problem (when not working at foreign labs). The software systems were designed to be user-extensible anyhow, in our case.
Personally I was glad to have the lightning-fast interactive graphics system on the nuclear structure GEC systems, and not the stodgy performance -- even when they weren't running something like Macsyma -- of all the VAXen I used. VMS was somewhat inscrutable to a physics hacker anyhow, so I don't understand why Unix made it more difficult, though I hold no particular affection for Unix.
Starlink was one of two somewhat similar subject-specific networks set up in a period of enlightenment by the UK Science Research Council (as I think it was then) operating in the 1980s, particularly for largely interactive analysis. The other was an un-named and ill-publicized one for nuclear structure as opposed to astronomy. I don't know about Starlink, not being an astronomer, but I guess it was also rather ahead of its time, like the nuclear structure one.
Obviously it had changed in astronomy by then, but I didn't see the attitude that physicists (and later, structural biologists) shouldn't write software or build the necessary hardware before or around that time. We had people and job titles like "physicist-programmer", and did what was necessary, and we did fit the facilities to the problem (when not working at foreign labs). The software systems were designed to be user-extensible anyhow, in our case.
Personally I was glad to have the lightning-fast interactive graphics system on the nuclear structure GEC systems, and not the stodgy performance -- even when they weren't running something like Macsyma -- of all the VAXen I used. VMS was somewhat inscrutable to a physics hacker anyhow, so I don't understand why Unix made it more difficult, though I hold no particular affection for Unix.