Pat,
I still know a few people from the 36-bit world so I could put you in touch, but if you
really want people to understand primitives, you might want to start with a simpler model,
e.g., 16-bit minicomputers like the DEC PDP-11 (smaller models), the DG Nova, perhaps the
original mc68000 (no MMU or FPU on-chip in that).
Once you add MMUs to the picture, life gets a lot more complicated, and I'm pretty
sure the typical applications programmer doesn't really need to know that class of
details, but going for PDP-10 (more "mainframe-ish" system) is going to take
them there.
Erik