Rescuing two PDP-11s from a former British Telecom underground shelter (2023)

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/rescuing-two-pdp-11-systems-in-uk-from-a-former-big-british-telecom-underground-shelter-in-central-london.1244723/page-2

by mhh__ • 12 months ago

115 25 12 months ago

forum.vcfed.org

zkmon• 12 months ago

Worked 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).

vgb2k182• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

it'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

vgb2k182• 12 months ago

It'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• 12 months ago

These 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...

coldfireza• 12 months ago

no updates in awhile sadly

roygbiv2• 12 months ago

Yeah I wonder where they are now.

cjs_ac• 12 months ago

In 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/

mnw21cam• 12 months ago

The road sign pointing to the Secret Nuclear Bunker is perhaps one of the more surreal road signs you'll see.

citizenfishy• 12 months ago

Working 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....

arethuza• 12 months ago

At some point around '92 or '93 I was offered a Xerox lisp machine by the university I worked at - living in a small flat at the time I don't think I would have been popular if I had taken that home.

cjrp• 12 months ago

Out of Adastral Park?

thomasjb• 12 months ago

This 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• 12 months ago

Don't let dreams be dreams. Try a little work on it over time.

timonoko• 12 months ago

I 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• 12 months ago

Working on a teletype at 110 baud gets old really fast.

WalterBright2• 12 months ago

I couldn't stand those ASR-33's. I'd wait until a Decwriter was available (300 baud).

dhosek• 12 months ago

That’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.

PaulHoule• 12 months ago

If you think the 6502 doesn't have enough registers and addressing modes... Try the PDP-8.

The PDP-11 on the other hand has a lot of registers and addressing modes. A kid with a TRS-80 in 1980 might have thought the "16-bit" PDP-11 looked like the future although it really was the past, as it dated from 1970. The greatest weakness of it was that the user had a 16-bit address space so a PDP-11 running RSTS/E gave everybody a BASIC experience a little bit better than an Apple ][ or alternately the ability to run applications similar to CP/M. The machine as a whole had more than 64k of RAM but as a user you got 64k of code and 64k of data -- so it was a little bit better than the 8-bitters of 1980 but not as good as the IBM PC for having a bigger "problem space" to work on bigger problems.

My high school got a VAX to replace our PDP-8 and the computer club got it. We had two video terminals and a printing terminal, originally the printing terminal was the main terminal that was used when the machine was brought up in single-user mode. I swapped in one of the video terminals in this role, powered it up, and had the VDT catch on fire -- so we cleaned up the other terminal before bringing the machine up with that.

djmips2• 12 months ago

But it was the future if you got a Mac or Atari ST or Amiga!

WalterBright2• 12 months ago

I 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• 12 months ago

I 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

djmips2• 12 months ago

Wow 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!

Rescuing two PDP-11s from a former British Telecom underground shelter (2023)

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