I learned on a PDP-11, but we had 8’s available, too. They felt very similar. I think the 11 had maybe 15-ish instructions?
Edit: just checked, and the 11 has about 70 instructions. I think MACRO-11 might abstract over many of them, making it look like it has fewer instructions. The instructions group nicely into a few families, which makes things really easy.
Then we moved onto a bit of 680x0. Yeah, that was different.
A simulator for it was pretty easy to write, switches and all.