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Comment by mhandley | Hacker News Reader

I was also in one of those basement labs in the Pearson building in 1988. Not exactly the nicest place to work, but some great equipment. I particularly remember that year coding a graphical application in NeWS (Sun's original network window system, long before it became X/NeWS) on a Sun Workstation there, which was an amazing piece of kit for its time. Also remember the DecStation 3100s we had down there that would periodically catch fire.

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Nice to meet you. Yeah the smell of overcooked circuits down there was something eh? I forget my room number now but there was something called the Pyramid next door that was mysterious and hush-hush. Phil Treleaven was my prof (saw him outside Waterstones last time I was around ULU so he must still be there).

Haha, yes, the Pyramid was alien technology, but the cover story was that it was a multiprocessor RISC minicomputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology When I arrived at UCL, there were three PDP 11/44s of which one (?) was shared by all the undergrads. The pyramid replaced those circa 1987 and was a huge improvement.

If I recall correctly, the main workstation lab was B10A, where I spent a lot of time. Then there was a narrow room, B09 I think, that had mission control on the right hand side with a machine room behind it, and a second machine room on the left side. Can't remember which machine room the Pyramid was in.

And yes, Phil is still around.

The POP11s were a rack of ribs when I saw them, so I figure you must be one of the older boys. Awesome. Totally pm me man. im at @cybershow.uk

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