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Ah, the PDP-8. How lovely. I became completely enchanted with the PDP-11 when it came out. It had an octal face as well. I had to key in a boot loader to load a paper tape, which in turn booted the disk-based OS.

The Motorola 68000 family was very much like a PDP-11 with twice as many registers, and 32 bit ones at that.

I cut my teeth on an IBM 1130.

Those early years in addition to doing real work, I also played SPACWR -- actually StarTrek with short- and long-range sensor scans, photon torpedos, etc. with an ASR-33 for display, on a PDP-8L. And up at MIT where a buddy of mine was an undergrad there was a PDP-10 with real-time video display SpaceWar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar_%28video_game%29). That was mind-boggling.

The only PDP-11s I worked on directly were LSI-11/23 boxes -- one was in a Tektronix 8550 development system around 1982 and the other was the company main computer used for everything from secretarial memos to engineering software cross-compiles. I managed to snarf a copy of Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT) for the Tek box and after hours would reboot the box in RT-11 and run Adventure until the wee hours... ("You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building...")

I loved programming the 68000. What a lovely, symmetrical, easy to work with CPU. Got to write driver code for some handheld devices (based on a Dragonball CPU with a 68K core), only for half a year or so, but it was fun while it lasted.