Christian I've to correct you..
HP always was more interesting, they made the best build an engineered
machines.
Ooh... That's going to start a Holy War :-)
HP stuff (real, HP stuff, before the PC era) was beautifully built. It
was also well-designend and often very clever (I've said that I consider
the HP9100 to be the nost elegant piece of electronics I've ever had the
pleasure of working on).
On the other hand, PDP8s and PDP11s are well made, well engineered, and
interesting. It's impoissible to red the PDP11/45 CPU and floating point
microcode and not admire it.
And for anotehr manufacturer, the PERQ CPU is an interesting design too.
Can we agree to get on, and preserve _all_ these fine machines and their
software, please...
-tony