Comment by Zigurd

My first paying job as an undergrad was maintaining a remote job entry system running on a PDP-11. It was a revelation that the instruction set was simple, orthogonal, and made sense. Computers could be elegant! Later I had a full time job maintaining an driver written in C and 68k assembler and that PDP-11 experience was a big help. 32-bit x86 by comparison looked messy and weird, when I had to grok that for a gig ploughing through an impossibly large pile of Mitch Kapor's code at Lotus trying to track down and fix bugs.