In hindsight,
could the DEC-20 or RISC version of it
had marketing and other bad luck changed ,and
today replaced the PC in many applications?
Six bit based architectures all died with the rise of the IBM S/360
family. DEC, CDC, Univac.
It also did not help that many of these old line mainframe
architectures were getting hard to extend. For the DEC 36 bitters -
what does one do after the 18 bit address pointer, with two neatly
stuffed into a 36 bit word? A kludge. What does one do after the 36
bit address pointer? A worse kludge.
I kind of suspected that was the case. Did anyone make a large 48 bit
machine?