I know it's a long shot, but it's always worth asking.

Would anyone here have an experience with a working DEC PDP-8 computer?

The reason I'm asking is that my Final Year Project for college is to design and build a functional replica front panel of a PDP-8, which will connect via an interface to an emulation running on a PC.

The interface is being designed by another Master's student elsewhere, I'm just building the main panel.

As it is though, if you have any experience actually operating one of these things, I'd certainly appreciate an information.

And yes, I am using Google, but there's only so far the big G will go.