There's certainly nostalgia this kind of thing evokes, but booting up SIMH and puttering around in RSTS/E or RT-11 is usually enough to put it to bed. No need t

There's certainly nostalgia this kind of thing evokes, but booting up SIMH and puttering around in RSTS/E or RT-11 is usually enough to put it to bed. No need to put hundreds of pounds of power hungry equipment in my garage. Our high school had a PDP 11/34 locked away in a server room, we were only ever allowed to use the VT52s, Tektronix 4014s and later the much coveted VT-100 out in the main room. I wouldn't classify it as ASMR, exactly, but the somehow warm and tinny beep of the VT-100 when it booted, its quacking when you typed, or even the relay buzz for each key press on the VT52 are very evocative and fondly remembered sounds. In another lab there was a PDP 11/05 which we could get our grubby hands on although it required some effort to get going - namely toggling in enough code to get the paper tape reader to read a boot tape that in turn read RT-11 from an RL02. I learned a lot in those computer classes, not really about programming which I'd already had nailed. But I learned the sysop was impatient and would type his password faster than the LP36's ability to overstrike it because system was so busy that the ^H* came much later. I learned with access to the right manuals we could rewrite the login program itself and guarantee access past the semester's end. And I learned maintaining operational security is paramount because it's easy to get busted in a heartbeat. Lessons that still apply 40+ years later in cybersecurity.