Your story reminds me very much of a coworker of mine. He mentioned how they'd start an analysis job on it and get a printout of the results delivered to their desk later in the day by a messenger. What a difference.
The nice thing about the 11 was it was an interactive system with a terminal, not one where you submitted jobs on a card deck. The "computer room" was air conditioned with a false floor under which ran cables and the cooling system. There was a line printer to get the results instantly. There was a coded lock on the door, which is why I needed the sysop to give me access.
I later bought a Heathkit H-11 so I could have my very own PDP-11. You can see it on my twitter picture https://twitter.com/WalterBright
