Ahoy, DECmate II! the little PDP-8 that could

In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer. But that wasn't the only PDP-series mini it happened to, and it wasn't even the first: the PDP-8 actually got the shrink-ray treatment several years before, and not content to merely make it into a smaller general purpose computer, DEC turned it into a word processor. Thus emerged the DECmates, descended from the 1977 DECstation VT78; arguably the zenith of the line was this one, the DECmate II, which rolled off the assembly line in 1982 simultaneously with the first DEC Professional models and the DEC Rainbow. Advertised aggressively to offices new to computers, take the two floppy disk drives built-in, add a printer, monitor and keyboard, and right away you had a simple office system for basic needs. With a Z80 or an 8086 processor…