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.
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.
