Happy Birthday VAX 11/780

I think I'm right saying the Manchester 'Baby' had a 32 bit word in 1948, actually 32 of them on one Williams tube. However as it was a serial machine the data path to memory was actually one bit wide so it depends how you define bit size, but I was taught it was the largest addressable unit of memory and by that definition it had a 32 bit word. There was talk of the VAX design being the inspiration for the Motorola 68k. Isn't it more likely that the PDP11 influenced the design of both the VAX and the 68k? Actually as I worked for a defence contractor I knew about the 68k before I heard of the VAX. The engineers did not believe the Motorola design was practical and we worried about a large 64 pin chip in the environment of a military helicopter's avionics bay (G forces, vibration, expansion, cooling etc) and it was decided to go with the 48pin Zilog Z8001 instead. Possibly a big mistake but at the time sample Z8001s were available to us but MC68000s were still estimated to be at best months away. When I left the company a couple of years later we had just placed an order for a VAX 11/780 to augment our GEC 4080, GEC 4070 and a Prime.