PDP-8

The 12-bit PDP-8, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), is the first successful commercial minicomputer. DEC introduced it on March 22, 1965 for a price of US$18,500, and eventually sold more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to that time. It was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of computers (the PDP-5 was not originally intended to be a general-purpose computer). The chief engineer who designed the initial version of the PDP-8 was Edson de Castro, who later founded Data General.

The earliest PDP-8 model (informally known as a "Straight-8") used diode-transistor logic, packaged on flip chip cards, and was about the size of a small household refrigerator.

This was followed in 1966 by the PDP-8/S, available in desktop and rack-mount models. By using a one-bit serial arithmetic logic unit (ALU) implementation, the PDP-8/S was smaller, less expensive and slower than the original PDP-8. The PDP-8/S was about 20% of the cost and about 10% of the performance of the PDP-8. The only mass storage peripheral available for the PDP-8/S was the DF32 disk.