I guess the 8/e is the quintessential minicomputer... if you're not familiar with them already, you're probably on the wrong website! :-)
An 8/e was the first real computer other than a Mac, and early PCs, that I owned:
A scene from the very early days of the Corestore, circa 1992... my first 8/e in a rack, along with 11/05, RL & RX drives, and a PC04.
Since then I've accumulated several more, including three from British Aerospace, together with rare DF32 & DS32 fixed-head disks:
Two were part of an enormous rig, there were about ten other racks filled with non-DEC hardware!
Another was part of a 'junk' set of racks, together with an 8/a, and various peripherals.
Here's an 8/e which I brought over to New York and recently restored:
Yep it works... currently running FOCAL in 4k :-)
Cover removed, the most basic 8/e - 20-slot Omnibus backplane, and a basic boardset.
From the rear, the space for the second backplane is obvious.
Closeup of the boards: CPU (M8300, M8310, M8330), serial port (M8655), RF shield (M849), 4K core stack, bus terminator (M8320).
'Build Sheet' still stuck to the rear of the cover.
pdp-8/e machines are so common that it's pointless to try to list them... but the FAQ, as always, makes interesting reading:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8-models/section-8.html