Re: I cut my teeth on a PDP-11
Same here - my first was a PDP 11/05, that had been upgraded from 4KB to 8KB of core RAM. It had a high speed paper tape reader and high speed punch, as well as two, count 'em two, ASR-33 Teletype terminals.
It lived in the undergraduate room at the University where I studied in the mid to late 70's. You'd start up toggling in the paper tape bootstrap (14 sets of instructions from memory) and then read in the a tape to get it up and running properly - perhaps with the BASIC interpreter (multi user basic, what a buzz!). Writing assembler in the basic stream text editor, loading the (two pass) assembler, then link editing, loading a fresh tape at each step, and voila!
Ah, the memories!