Youngsters are notorious for thinking history began when they got involved. See also, sex, drugs, music, dance... Anyway I am sad to report that PDP8s and Dec

Youngsters are notorious for thinking history began when they got involved. See also, sex, drugs, music, dance... Anyway I am sad to report that PDP8s and Decmates were widely available (if you had friends in the right places, surplus, repaired scrap, etc) but DEC insanely wanted to charge $3000 or whatever for the OS8 license. I think even Fortran and basic were separately licensed and billed products. It was nuts. You could get an old -8 for free, more or less, (back then, now they sell for thousands on ebay) but legal software was insanely priced. Microsoft disrupted the market at a mere $300. That's what made them interesting right from the start, the dinosaurs of the industry didn't understand the imploding ratios of hardware cost to software cost. Sure the hardware is dropping in price so something that cost a corporate buyer $10K in '63 might only cost $1K in '73 but its not like software was getting even on dollar cheaper so if legacy corp buyers will pay $3K per seat for OS-8 I guess we'll keep right on charging $3K till they go away or we go away. Well guess how that turned out? The above is based on my Dad's experiences although I was a kid watching watching it all unfold at that time.