Comment by TheOtherHobbes

A lot of people had a strong nostalgic attachment to DEC PDPs because they were their first experience of hands-on computing.

So SV always had a community of very wealthy nerds who could afford a used PDP-10 and its insane running and maintenance costs.

But... the community was always very small.

And today, the number of people with that kind of money and a similar nostalgic attachment to increasingly remote history is even smaller.