In 1977, personal computers weren’t a thing yet. But I had Fred Stark. He was my high school teacher. Physics, electronics, and as it turned out, computers.

His classroom (room 262) had a closet. Inside were computers. Big deal at the time. Among them: an new IMSAI 8080 and a 1968 vintage DEC PDP-8. One day, Mr. Stark said I could take the PDP-8 home for the weekend.

Imagine that! A computer. Running at clock speed of 385 kHz. In my house!

No real plan. Just pure excitement. I was officially the first person on my block to have a computer in their home.

It wasn’t easy. The PDP-8 weighed 80 pounds. Just 4 kilobytes of magnetic core memory, but still a beast. I hauled it around on a Lucky’s shopping cart. Along with the ASR-33 teletype. That thing wasn’t light either, it also weighed 80 lbs. You had to have serious muscle to move these things.

Once home, the work began. First task: enter the bootloader for the paper tape reader. Page 202 in the PDP-8 manual. Twenty 12-bit instructions. Convert octal to binary. Flip the switches on the front panel. Took about 20 minutes.

After that? Paper tape. Loading at a blazing 10 bytes per second. The program? I really don’t remember. Maybe a stripped-down version of FORTRAN? By the time it worked, the weekend was over. I packed it all up and hauled it back to school.

But that wasn’t the point.

The point was this: I had a computer in my house. And no one else on my block could say that.