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Rescuing two PDP-11s from a former British Telecom underground shelter (2023)
- zkmon 1y agoWorked at a research institute which had a monitoring system for seismic activity that used PDP-11. Hardly ever knew how it worked, but the whole thing looked damn cool with circular tape drives and LEDs all over. Very unlike the bland rack servers of today (no circular stuff).
- vgb2k18 1y ago> I'd point out of course that it appears that those folks are trespassing on private property - possibly in an environment that is quite unsafe. I hope nobody on here is daft enough to follow their lead. Said the guy who proceeded to follow their lead. I get it he was a BT employee so may have not been trespassing, but he appeared to have a change of mind about the possibly quite unsafe environment.
- bjord 1y agoit's clear in the thread that he got permission to do so it's also reasonable to assume he had more information about the state of the location given his access as an employee, particularly given that it was a full two months before he actually retrieved them
- vgb2k18 1y agoIt's clear in the thread that a forum user worked for BT. What was unclear was whether the site still belonged to BT and whether the employee was given official or any clearance to retrieve the parts. There was no 'we' language, all 'I', which is unusual at best. For a company of BT's scale one would expect a small team for such a recovery. I'm curious, where is it clear in the thread that he got permission?
- dkdbejwi383 1y agoThese tunnels are in the process of being turned into a spy-themed tourist attraction. I assume anything else of interest has been stripped out and scrapped by now. https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/wilkinsoneyres-220m-plan-to-restore-secret-wartime-tunnels-wins-approval https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/wilkinsoneyres-220m...
- coldfireza 1y agono updates in awhile sadly
- roygbiv2 1y agoYeah I wonder where they are now.
- cjs_ac 1y agoIn Kelvedon Hatch in Essex is the Secret Nuclear Bunker[0], which was first used as a RAF command post in the Second World War, but ended up as a Regional Government HQ for use in the event of a nuclear war. The room which was intended to be used for communication with surviving civil servants is filled with '80s microcomputers, and there's a manually operated telephone exchange (the automatic one having been removed when the bunker was decommissioned). The scariest part is probably the manikin of Margaret Thatcher in what would have been her private quarters. [0] https://secretnuclearbunker.com/ https://secretnuclearbunker.com/
- mnw21cam 1y agoThe road sign pointing to the Secret Nuclear Bunker is perhaps one of the more surreal road signs you'll see.
- citizenfishy 1y agoWorking in Post Office Research in the 1990's I watched a couple of PDP-11's being hoicked into a skip near our labs. Sadly I lived in a shared house with no room for them....
- thomasjb 1y agoThis reminds me of a pet idea of mine, to write an interactive fiction / text-based dungeon crawler based around trying to navigate underground tunnels and interacting with various weird computers throughout them to progress (take the TTY from the seismometer and use it to access the ventilation control computer, find the datatape of the plans for level IX to then find the hydraulic controls for the main blast door ect.)
- schlauerfox 1y agoDon't let dreams be dreams. Try a little work on it over time.
- timonoko 1y agoI saw PDP-8 and two ASR-33 on a garbage pile in around 1980. I knew that if I take them, it will destroy my life, I would do nothing else than tinker those for the rest of the millennium.
- SoftTalker 1y agoWorking on a teletype at 110 baud gets old really fast.
- WalterBright 1y agoI couldn't stand those ASR-33's. I'd wait until a Decwriter was available (300 baud).
- glimshe 1y agoWhen I started doing BBSs, I used 300 baud at times. Unbearable. "Nobody ought to need more than 2400 baud" is what I felt with the upgrade! Until 14400 came along, of course...
- jandrese 1y agoIt got really bad when the BBS got all fancy and colorful with the ANSI graphics. Every character displayed might require 6 or 7 bytes down the wire to change the foreground and background color so your 2400 baud modem acted like a 300 baud modem or worse.
- dhosek 1y agoThat’s why, when the local college was decommissioning their IBM minicomputer, I opted not to buy it (it would have been under a thousand bucks, as I recall, although I probably would have spent that much a month on air conditioning if I set it up in my apartment, not to mention the overall impracticality of it.
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- WalterBright 1y agoI gave away my Heathkit H11 (it's a PDP-11). Always regretted that move. The person I gave it to threw it away. There's a picture of it on my twitter profile.
- DerekL 1y agoI saw two working PDP-11s this past weekend. They were Super Sprint arcade games, which use the microprocessor implementation of that instruction set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_System#Atari_System_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_System#Atari_System_2
- djmips 1y agoWow that's amazing to find out. I knew Atari used a lot of 6502 in their early arcade games but I never knew they used the DEC T-11! I'll look at Super Sprint, 720, Paperboy and the others in a whole new light!