My First Computer...

I thought I would change the subject for a while and talk about my very first exposure to computers. I had graduated from Thurston Junior High School and my brother had just graduated Westwood Senior High School back in 1970. It was during that summer my brother told me about the computer they had at school. All my exposure to computers up to that point were spinning tape drives on various television programs and movies, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. My brother had given me a book to read about the computer at school. I remember the third day at school I decided to go to the computer room and see what this computer was all about. At that point, the computer bug bit me very hard, because normal kids leave school at 3:30pm back then, but I stayed until 5:00 pm at school fascinated by this machine that could print things after I typed in commands on a teletype writer console.
This is the first computer I used:

I don’t think it’s all that expensive for the hardware, of course, the plug was a special three phase plug and the software was the killer costing in the tens of thousands of dollars.
I will never forget the Digital Equipment Corporations PDP 8/E computer. It didn’t even use bytes, it had bits, but no bytes as I remember. It had like 12 bit words I think they called them. It was very distinct from anything IBM.