[allenrb]

I’m not quite old enough to have grown up with the PDP-11. They were gone from university (or at least the parts I had access to) by the time I arrived. But I did see exactly one in the wild.

In 1997-1998, I was working for a small company in Atlanta who did tape backup systems. At a client in maybe Knoxville (?), a hospital had a PDP-11/70 live in their machine room. Amusingly, right next to racks of then super-fancy Cisco gigabit fiber networking.

I was told that the PDP handled payroll. Guess that was important. Wonder how long it lasted there?

[hylaride]

PDP-11s and their VAX successors could often still be seen in hospitals as late as the mid 2000s as the back ends to all sorts of expensive equipment (MRIs, etc). At the time I was told that rewriting the medical code was one of those "not worth the risk" endeavours. By now they've probably been virtualized away, but those machines were damned reliable.

[hcfman]

Oh man. You are really missing out unless you started with valves and watched transistors come out as the cool kid on the block.

To see all that and still be programming now is one very lucky journey.