First 286 I used had a monochrome Hercules card (or maybe the monitor was monochrome, either way could do EGA or better resolution, but monochrome), but I'd long been using the BBC B microcomputer (which, incidentally, is the first place I used DOS... not ADFS, but actual DOS) which had all the colours you might want (anything from 2 to 8![1]). Which was luxury after the bi-coloured ZX81.
But of course Slink's (department's?) machine was a minicomputer, anything up to a decade before that. Meaning that it was a few years before even the kit-type one (model not remembered) that was my first experience of a computer. But it may have certainly shared the similarities of having to (at least before adding a dedicated memory bridge to tape storage) actually 'bootstrap' the unit by entering at least the first few instructions in via dip-switches. Which means that the process of rebooting the machine won't have been as simple as pressing a 'reset' button and waiting a few seconds for today's variety of POST to happen. 
The Hercules monchrome graphics card was a very good card in its day. The problem that it had for games was that it was monochrome. The first PC that we had with a math co-processer also had a Hercules monochrome card. We (my husband and I) used it for scientific graphs.
The PDP-11 did have to be toggled into awakeness. The game program had its own toggles, and the bootstrap for the proper working program had another set. It ran an instrument that we used, and I am embarassed to say that I can no longer remember which instrument that was. I was only there for one year, as a post-doc. I think that whatever instrument the PDP-11 ran was normally used by one of the technicians. I used an ESR spectrometer and sometimes the polarimeter. The ESR belonged to another group, and the polarimeter had no computer, so alas I had no game of my own to play before work started.
Later on I went to work for an oil company. I briefly got to play with an Apple 2E that one of the Senior Scientists had bought for an engineeer who worked for him. She had given me permission to play during lunchtime, but he got angry when he found out, so I had to stop. That was when I built my Heathkit Z-80 at home. I bought Fortran for it, and ran CP/M. Eventually I got a spectrometer in my lab with Perkin-Elmer BASIC, which crossed over to my home PC so I could type in games from Byte and other magazines. By the time I moved to another city with the man I eventually married, I was ready for BASIC in color on Atari-800s, Commondore 64s, and the IBM PCs. Hurrah!
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