Ahoy, DECmate II the little PDP-8 that could

In the flickers:

→ [https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=144]

Does anyone know what that characteristic smell is DEC equipment has? It's different from the characteristic smell of (for example) Sun equipment. Rainbow's smell like VAXen.

Interesting fact about the PDP-8/S, which was the horrendously slow serial version.

It was supposedly the first computer sold to a private individual instead of business or academia. The purchaser was composer Peter Zinovieff, who used it in the electronic music studio he was building in his home. He paid for it by pawning his (aristocratic) wife's tiara. (They later divorced.)

Here it is in the racks at the back, next to a PDP-8/I which he bought later, and some of the synths and other products the company he created started selling soon after.

https://historyofinformation.com/images/Screen_Shot_2020-09-...

This was 1971. Computer control of analog synths, sampling, and video-to-sound with real time FFTs (from additional hardware) were years ahead of what Rest of World was doing then.

> It started at $27,000 [in 2026 dollars about $282,000], a surprisingly low cost for the era, and about a thousand were sold.

To give you a sense of scale, in 1963 when the first PDP8 was launched at $27k, here in the UK the very first JCB 3C backhoe loader was launched at around £2500 - roughly a quarter of the price of a PDP8 in real terms, or about three year's salary for its driver.

So think in terms of how much "You know what? It'd save us so much time and money to just buy ourselves one of *these* things" you could buy yourself with the money :-)