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 card, you could turn it into an overgrown CP/M machine or a rather limited MS-DOS one. You could stick two more floppy drives in it. You could even add a hard disk or a graphics card, as long as you didn't consider what more powerful system you could have gotten instead for that money.
Now, that's a lot of word processing. But under the hood it's still at least PDP-8 adjacent, even considering its oddities and incompatibilities, and you can make it do many of the things a full-size Eight can. We'll take this basic unit, convert the floppy drives to solid state, tap the video output, and put it through its paces. After all, if we have a PDP-11 on our desk, we should really have a PDP-8 too.
