Looking to get into a Mini Computer, PDP or something Like that

I'm goign to get flamed for saying this, but it basically ocmes down to DEC or somebody else :-) The advantage of DEC is that they are well-known, there are lot of manuals, etc. So you will not have problems finding inforamtion on them The advantage of soemthing else is that they are less well known, so you will ahve to work thigns out for yourslef in a lot of cases. Which is how you learn a lot. Personally I'd avoid IBM. They used a lot of custom ICs, no schematic sare avialable for many of the minis. Whch would put me (as a hardware hacker) off them. But, IMHO, you should grab any machine you can find. My first mini was a Philips P850 (don't pretend you've heard of it), afiarly rare 16 bit machine. I had the schematics for the processor and the user manual and not a lot more This was my first entry into machines built from simple TTL logic chips, and I learnt a lot . My second machine as DEC. But perhaps not the best DEC to start with. A PDP11/45 with MMU and floating point. I did, again, have the schematics for soem fo it, but I had to modify one of the expansion backplanes to take th eRAM board it had come with, I also didn't know the instruction set. Yes, again, I got it workign and learnt a lot. This was before the web, of course, s o Icouldn't jsut look on bitsavers. I was figuring out what I could from whatever books/manuals I could find. You want to think why you want a mini. Do you want a lights-n-switches panel? Dp you want a procesor built from TTL (or discrete transistors), or would one using a single-chip processor be OK. What do you intend doign with it? -tony