I don’t think DEC had much choice other than to kill the PDP-10 at that point. It was obvious that the non-legacy software world wasn’t a 36-bit one and never w

I don’t think DEC had much choice other than to kill the PDP-10 at that point. It was obvious that the non-legacy software world wasn’t a 36-bit one and never would be again. It was obvious it was taking increasingly incompatible hacks to extend the base 18-bit memory addressing (various combinations of magic segments). And while some may disagree, it wasn’t easy to make that architecture fast, hence the long standing performance plateau (the version codeveloped w VAX8600 never fully worked and XKL is only a proof of a faster system in much later technology but still much slower than other current CPUs). Nostalgia takes no prisoners.