70's computers

There was a recent discussion about code density (I forget whether here, or on TUHS), and someone mentioned this paper: http://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/papers/iccd09/iccd09_density.pdf which shows that for a combo of benchmarks, the PDP-11 had the densest code out of all the ones they looked at. (They didn't look at the PDP-8, but I suspect that since it's a single-address design, it's almost ceertainly not as dense.) The PDP-11 dates back to the days of core (it went through several generations before DRAM arrived - e.g. the -11/70 originally shipped with core), and given core prices, minimizing code size was pretty important - hence the results above. So if you want to get the most bang out of 16K buck... Not the simplest machine to implement, mind - the -8 is a lot simpler. Which axis is the most important to you? Noel