Digital Equipment Corp PDP-8

The PDP-8 was one of the most popular mini-computers from the mid 60's until the arrival of the first micro computers.  It was a single accumulator design and had from one to three banks of memory, each with 4K of 12-bit memory.

The memory was magnetic-core memory that didn't hold its content when switched off, and there was no ROM available at the time of the PDP-8I, so when you switched it on you had to load the bootstrap code into memory through the switches on the front panel.  This bootstrap read in a paper-tape containing a full paper-tape loader program, which could then be used to load in editors,etc.

The main storage device was a small random-access magnetic-tape unit.  This tape was block-addressable.  My first PDP-8I had the luxury of a 64k disk-drive as well.

I wrote a real-time operating system for the PDP-8i that included a 'database' -- a binary-chop system using the random-access ability of the DECTape.