PDP-1

The restored DEC PDP-1 in the demo lab at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, with its typewriter console and the round display screen that made it famous. Introduced in 1960, a typical system cost about $120,000 and DEC sold more than 50. That screen is the point: hackers at MIT used it to write Spacewar!, one of the first computer video games. The PDP-1 showed that a computer could be something one person sat at and played with directly, rather than a batch machine you handed jobs to.