A lot of mistakes in this article, although it's well-intentioned.
There is a direct lineage from the PDP-1 to the PDP-4, and the 18-bit lineage ends with the PDP-15 (missing).
The dual-mode PDP-12 (PDP-8 + LINC) is missing from the 12-bit lineage.
The VAX (VAX-11 initially) was an offspring of the PDP-11 and the VAX-11 could natively run PDP-11 user-mode code. DEC then tried to use the VAX to unify both the 10 and 11 markets.
The PDP-11 and VAX software heritage lives on mostly in C and UNIX (NetBSD being the closest relative), and in VMS / NT. The PDP-10 heritage lives on mostly in Emacs.
"However, even its most powerful configuration wasn’t powerful enough to attract many pdp-10 users."
They didn’t serve the same markets.
The PDP-10 was a time-sharing system that shone more for LISP than FORTRAN. For heavy number crunching and matmuls (the FORTRAN playground), 16-bit PDP-11s were usually used, with an auxiliary array processor such as the AP-120B or the CSPI MiniMAP. Those array processors could deliver more than 10 MFLOPS back then, when a minicomputer with a 50-100 KFLOPS FPU was already considered fast (FPUs were an expensive option back then).
There is a direct lineage from the PDP-1 to the PDP-4, and the 18-bit lineage ends with the PDP-15 (missing).
The dual-mode PDP-12 (PDP-8 + LINC) is missing from the 12-bit lineage.
The VAX (VAX-11 initially) was an offspring of the PDP-11 and the VAX-11 could natively run PDP-11 user-mode code. DEC then tried to use the VAX to unify both the 10 and 11 markets.
The PDP-11 and VAX software heritage lives on mostly in C and UNIX (NetBSD being the closest relative), and in VMS / NT. The PDP-10 heritage lives on mostly in Emacs.
"However, even its most powerful configuration wasn’t powerful enough to attract many pdp-10 users." They didn’t serve the same markets.
The PDP-10 was a time-sharing system that shone more for LISP than FORTRAN. For heavy number crunching and matmuls (the FORTRAN playground), 16-bit PDP-11s were usually used, with an auxiliary array processor such as the AP-120B or the CSPI MiniMAP. Those array processors could deliver more than 10 MFLOPS back then, when a minicomputer with a 50-100 KFLOPS FPU was already considered fast (FPUs were an expensive option back then).