It's also a bit of a tragic story. The PDP-1 was designed by Ben Gurley, an engineer at DEC. He took just 3.5 months to build the machine. Tragically, Gurley was later murdered in 1963 while eating dinner with his family, when a co-worker fired a rifle through the window of his house. The co-worker was later admitted to a hospital of the criminally insane, where he died.