the Jupiter super-KL-10 project, which never got past the design notes and emulation stage. The scuttlebutt in the Boston area at the time was that DEC was fra

the Jupiter super-KL-10 project, which never got past the design notes and emulation stage. The scuttlebutt in the Boston area at the time was that DEC was frantically trying to debug one or more ECL prototypes, engineers working in 3 shifts, 24 hours a day. Further, that the head designer was poached from the IBM mainframe world, and did not understand what made a PDP-10 fast. In particular, unlike the KL-10 which had a 72 bit wide FPU, its was 36 bits wide, which after the lateness was the final straw for its viability in the marketplace. And people marveled that DEC was willing to throw away a $100 million a year business, $275 million today, supposedly a lot of dedicated PDP-10 and Decsystem-20 shops declined to move to the Vax, which they could predict would be a bad long term move. All this is at the Nth hand rumor level, but from some people who were very interested in the architecture's fate, some with purchasing influence if not capability. It sounds like you have some better sources. The Olsen never groked VLSI tidbit is fascinating, and I suppose credible.