In the mid-70's my dad built a Heathkit-branded DEC PDP-11, with a dumb terminal and a paper tape reader/punch for I/O. Later he got dual 8" floppy drive, and upgraded the memory from 16K to 28K (the maximum!). I learned to program BASIC and Pascal on that machine (with a few nods at Assembler and FORTRAN 4), and never looked back. Still programming today.