PDP-8/L

The PDP-8 computers were the most widely spread minicomputers of the world. In 1978, DEC was advertising them by having sold 50.000 units worldwide. The first version, the primary PDP8 was still assembled with discrete transistors and had the same instruction set like the very older PDP5. Both have 12Bit words. This comes from the original main application of the PDP5 as a small process computer, which should process the data from an analog/digital converter, that was integrated in the accumulator. All PDP8 commands consist of only one word. The minimal word length is 12 Bits, which still allows an usable machine instruction set.