Value of a PDP/8?

[Scott Quinn]

Speaking as a youngster (I was in the sort-of midrange bracket, my 
elementary/middle school had a reasonably well equipped Apple IIc (& 
clone)/ IIgs lab that we actually learned programming on, then high 
school had 2 XT clones and 2 Mac Pluses for general use, and about 25 
386s kept under lock and key for learning typing, then when I got to 
college I missed the VAX years-we were on Suns) the DEC bit was due 
partially to reputation and, perhaps, partially due to advertising 
(after the children's programming on PBS they ran McNeil/Lehrer, and 
right at the start they did the "brought to you by Digital Equipment" 
with the Digital logo. Still remember that).

Anyway- I was old enough to remember the technical buzz about Alpha 
when it came out, and of course I later learned how 4BSD was written on 
and for VAXen. I don't have a huge DEC collection (VAX 4000/200, 
VAXstation 3100/76 (cobbled together, it seems to mostly work) DEC 
3000, AlphaServer 1000a, Multia (my first machine, I was getting 
desparate...)

Haven't found any PDPs in the area/within my price range, but based on 
my experience there are two manufacturers who do really nice console 
firmware, one of them is DEC (SRM/later VAX consoles), and the other is 
Sun. DEC marketing was terrible, though (arbitrary hardware limits, 
extreme proprietariness, random direction changing (sounds a bit like 
SGI...) It's a testament to DEC engineering, though, that HP hasn't 
been able to kill off the Alpha after several years of trying. It's 
back, at least for another month.

It will be interesting to see what today's children are interested in. 
AFAIK few school districts do programming now, and most are running 
PCs.