By 1965 IBM’s dominance of the computer industry was old news. The new news that year was the company’s delivery of the first of its System/360 computers, the fruit of a massive project to reinvent the mainframe computer and ensure IBM’s continued dominance in the marketplace.

With considerably less fanfare, another computer appeared in 1965 that would be of equal or greater importance to the history of computing: the PDP-8, from Digital Equipment Corporation. In almost every way it was the opposite of the grand System/360 computers. Where a System/360 computer might fill a room, the PDP-8 was small—about the size of a portable refrigerator. It was simple, modest in its ambitions, intended to satisfy the needs not of an entire company but of a single department or perhaps even a single individual.

The PDP-8 began at $18,000 for the basic system, the price of a new Mercedes. This was shockingly cheap for an actual working computer in 1965, and the PDP-8—and other “minicomputers” such as the Data General Nova—encouraged a new way of thinking about computers. No longer did you have to submit your punch cards and wait for the results. For the first time it was possible to sit down in front of your own computer and interactively develop programs.

Commonly, the PDP-8 was set up as the hub of a small timesharing network in a university department or small business. In this way it introduced thousands of young people to computing, helping create a computer hobbyist culture that, ten years later, would produce the first personal computers.