VAXen to play with? What type of hardware you running on? I vaguely remember VMS and DCL from the late 80's and early 90's, we had terminals everywhere on the floor and in the fab.
If you want to re-live VMS on your own x86 hardware, the simh emulator (free) includes VAX support. There are various other emulators available. http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/70
For OpenVMS, HP offers (free) OpenVMS hobbyist licenses and disk image downloads for all three OpenVMS architectures; for VAX, Alpha and Itanium. http://www.openvms.org/Hobbyist
Here's a setup of a (slightly older) version of simh on OS X: http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/922
As much as I love old gear, my interests are currently more modern. Still I'd like to put an OS on a smaller system, either ARM or MIPS. ST has a nice new Discovery kit that as a 2.4" QVGA TFT LCD and would serve has a radio controller prototype.