How the PDP-10 and PDP-11 Split Hacker Culture in Two
Brief History of PDP Computers
A timeline of DEC's PDP line — from the experimental PDP-1 through the PDP-11 to the VAX — charting price (inflation-adjusted) against memory cycle time. The machines that ran Unix, C, vi, make, and Usenet were the small ones; Emacs, Scheme, TeX, and Zork came from the big PDP-10. Which side you landed on mostly came down to what your employer could afford.
What decided whether you became a small-computer hacker or large-computer hacker was what your employer could afford.