Never came across a PDP8 in the sleepy little town of Whangarei, New Zealand.
In 1977, 2nd year of high school, once a friend got a driving license we sometimes went in free periods to another nearby school where there was an HP-97 calculator with built in printer and mag card reader.
By 1979 I had a TI-57 (8 memories and 50 program steps) and a richer friend had a TI-58C which had the huge advantage of not losing memory contents when you turned it off.
In the last year of high school, 1980, we did some FORTRAN programming in class, using punched cards with every 2nd column pre-scored so you could punch them by hand using a paper clip. In the evenings the teacher would take our card decks to a local bureau to run them. From time to time those interested could accompany. There was a Burroughs B1700 with 48k words of memory, a teletype console, a (chain) line printer, a card reader, and two 5 MB removable disk pack drives. We had our own disk pack with OS and compiler. We'd load our disk pack, put a boot cassette into the console, put a boot card deck into the card reader, rewind it, and load a short 1st stage bootstrap program into memory®isters using front panel switches.
The 1st stage bootstrap (only half a dozen instructions I think) could read the card reader. The code from the card deck could read the casette. The code from the cassette could read the disk. Whoa.
At the end of 1980, during exam time, the school got their first Apple ][. I was allowed to take it home for a few weeks during the holidays to learn about it and then brief the math teacher.
In 1981 I went to university, where the 1st year computer science students had the run of a PDP11/34 with 256 KB RAM with 22 VT100 terminals, two LA120 printers and, again, two 5 MB disk drives. We wrote programs in Pascal. As I recall we had something like 50 KB of permanent disk quota each, though we could use more temporarily while logged in.
In 1982 as 2nd year students we had access to the main PDP11/70 with several megabytes of core memory, and soon after to a shiny new VAX11/780 (which wasn't actually any faster, but could run bigger programs).
Everything I learned on as a student was slower than an Arduino Uno, though with more RAM.
Everything I used professionally in the first 15 years of my career after university, whether desktop, laptop, or mainframe/server, was slower than and had less memory than a Raspberry Pi 2/3.
Plus, we had unimaginably worse access to industry news (moths late, in magazines), research, new software...