My first computer
PDP-8 front panel
No, I didn’t own a DEC PDP-8, but when I studied Engineering at university, this was the first computer I ever wrote a program for. The PDP-8 was one of the first mini-computers produced (from 1965 onwards); it had 4096 12-bit words of main memory. And with a list price of $18000 in the basic configuraton it was affordable enough that the university felt happy to allow students hands-on experience. The picture shows part of the front panel with the toggle switches used to program the computer – or if you had a high speed paper tape reader or a teletype console (which also had a paper tape reader), they were used to boot the machine from the tape reader. You can see a short video of a small program to increment a counter in memory being run by toggling the front panel keys here.
I was reminded about the PDP-8 when I found this photo series of vintage computer hardware on Time’s website – there are some fascinating pictures to browse through.