Very nice these old machines are still getting some love. It's very unfortunate the later models don't have switches (or any sort of front panel) anymore. Toggling in a program from the switches is a feeling that you don't get from the octal keypad.

There's some cool videos bootstrapping a 8800 via switches and then paper tape over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk

Now you can load up Dave Mills' Fuzzball software and have one of the first IP routers.

They found a tape of "Digitized Monkey Brains." I wonder if this is from the project that led to "always mount a scratch monkey." http://edp.org/monkey.htm

Almost certainly not. That used a VAX 11/780 since the earlier combination of PDP-11/05 and PDP-11/44 wasn't fast enough for the monkey experiments.

This NYC Resistor recovery involves a PDP-11/34 from storage the Bronx, so it wasn't fast enough and is in the wrong place. Also, you'll note that the image on flikr references the same aphorism.

More generally, a lot of people have digitized monkey brains in one sort or other. For example, I know someone in the early 1990s who worked on digitized slices of rhesus monkey brains, in order to re-register them to assemble a 3D model.