May 30, 2026
Floppy drama and vintage funk
Ahoy, DECmate II the little PDP-8 that could
The tiny office dinosaur that’s got retro fans arguing about price tags, smells, and movie cameos
TLDR: The DECmate II was a 1982 office-friendly spin on a much older computer line, and today it’s being revived by hobbyists. But commenters stole the show by arguing over whether these machines were ever truly “cheap,” joking about their oddly recognizable smell, and treating retro hardware like pop-culture celebrities.
The DECmate II is basically a 1982 attempt to turn an old-school room-sized computer family into a cute little office workhorse: add a screen, keyboard, printer, and floppy disks, and you had a ready-made word processor for businesses just dipping a toe into computing. The article treats it like a lovable underdog — a shrunken descendant of Digital Equipment Corporation’s famous PDP line — and modern tinkerers are now giving it fresh life with solid-state storage and video mods. Very wholesome. Very nerdy. But the comments? Absolute gold.
Instead of fighting over specs, the crowd immediately veered into the truly important question: what does old DEC gear smell like? One commenter asked why DEC machines have a signature scent different from Sun computers, while another piled on with the wonderfully specific claim that a Rainbow “smell[s] like VAXen.” Yes, the hottest take here may be that vintage computers have brand-specific aromas, and honestly the room seems ready to debate it like wine tasting.
Then came the price-tag shock. One reader jumped on the article’s note that an early PDP machine cost $27,000 in the 1960s — “cheap” for the time — and fired back with a reality check: in the UK, that was roughly four times the price of a backhoe loader and about three years’ salary for the person driving it. That turned the whole “affordable mini-computer” story into a classic retro-tech argument: cheap for whom, exactly? Meanwhile, another commenter dropped a movie-and-TV spotting link, because of course every beloved old machine eventually becomes a background celebrity.
Key Points
- •The article focuses on the 1982 DECmate II, a desktop word-processing system derived from DEC's PDP-8 lineage.
- •DEC marketed the DECmate II as a basic office computer with two built-in floppy drives and optional expansions including Z80 or 8086 processor cards, extra floppy drives, hard disk, and graphics.
- •The DECmate line descended from the 1977 DECstation VT78 and launched in the same year as the first DEC Professional models and the DEC Rainbow.
- •The PDP-8 originated from the 12-bit 1961 LINC and was preceded by the 1963 PDP-5, designed with contributions from Gordon Bell, Alan Kotok, and Edson de Castro.
- •DEC introduced the PDP-8 in March 1965 at $18,500 with 4096 words of magnetic core memory and a 1.5 microsecond cycle time; it became the best-selling computer model of its time with nearly 1,500 units sold.