few thousand bucks worth of gold in the boards.
DEC computer way before the Alpha chip... If I remember correctly, it was a discrete component machine with a bunch of cards (with a lot of gold on the contact pads and socket pins..) long before Intel made a 4004 and things started getting smaller. Now then, since you mentioned this relic, does this mean you are, shall we say, mature, or just a couple of youngsters who pulled a name out of a hat ;-)
After all, if you really had access to a PDP-8 when it was in production you are close to 'fossil' age like me. Just sayin ;-)
Well I guess I’m no spring chicken. While in college back in the late 80s, early 90s... I played on a couple of VAX’s. pdp-11 before we got the alpha. Not pretending I was a VMS guru even back then, let alone many years removed from it. It’s amazing how far we’ve come since those days.
The university where I went in the mid 70s had a gaggle of Model 33 Teletypes in the engineering lounge (built like tanks, and sounding like them too) wired into a PDP-8 which ran a version of BASIC. You didn’t even have to authenticate, you just walked up and began a session. You had to type your whole program in and then run it as you sat, no storage, no media readers. Eventually they took the Model 33s away when someone spilled coffee into one of them.