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.
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.
cjs_ac · 4h 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.
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 · 3h 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 · 1h ago
Out of Adastral Park?
thomasjb · 2h 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.)
zkmon · 5h 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).
vgb2k18 · 5h 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 · 5h 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
https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/wilkinsoneyres-220m...
[0] https://secretnuclearbunker.com/
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.
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