[GeorgeTirebiter]

Well.... I really liked the pdp-11; for years I had a pdp-11/45 in my living room, but eventually sold it to downsize to a couple of H-11 LSI-11/2 machines with dual 8" floppies.

Why? Well, the pdp-11, besides being the unix protoplasm, is conceptually well-designed. In the same way we tend to write routines that 'fit on a screen', the pdp-11's small directly addressable space encourages not-very-big modules: it encourages modularity.

Is it inadequate for today? Sure. Especially painful for Big Data. But, conceptually -- there's a reason the pdp-11 was so successful, and continues to exist vestigially.