[HN Gopher] Rescuing two PDP-11s from a former British Telecom u...
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Rescuing two PDP-11s from a former British Telecom underground
shelter (2023)
Author : mhh__
Score : 110 points
Date : 2025-07-23 06:02 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forum.vcfed.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (forum.vcfed.org)
| zkmon wrote:
| 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).
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| no updates in awhile sadly
| roygbiv2 wrote:
| Yeah I wonder where they are now.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The road sign pointing to the _Secret Nuclear Bunker_ is
| perhaps one of the more surreal road signs you 'll see.
| citizenfishy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Out of Adastral Park?
| thomasjb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Don't let dreams be dreams. Try a little work on it over time.
| timonoko wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Working on a teletype at 110 baud gets old _really_ fast.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I couldn't stand those ASR-33's. I'd wait until a Decwriter
| was available (300 baud).
| glimshe wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
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