Long story about a Motorola found on an abandoned farm

[dr.ido]

I've also got a thing for old and abandoned buildings, although I haven't been in any interesting buildings lately. I've seen some interesting things, but unfortunately I don't have pictures of most of them. It's a subject that I can ramble on about a bit, so if this gets too long and too far off topic let me know and I'll edit it down.

I spent a lot of time in the old Nubrik brickworks/quarry. I found the site sometime around 1995. At that time the production had stopped long ago and most of the production equipment had been or was in the process of being removed, but the company was still using one of the office buildings on site so vandals hadn't gotten to it yet. Wandering around the site I was amazed by the scale of some the machinery. Also the contrast between the newer (80s) machines controlled by PLCs and the much older stuff with control cabinets stuffed with masses of relays, uniselectors and even tubes.

As far as TVs the whole site was littered with many late 70s 12" B&W portables. They had been modified with video inputs, but the modification was switchable so the tuner could still be used. They had been removed from a massive "mission control" console that was in pieces in the middle of one of the buildings. I guess the employees dismantling the machinery were watching them. By the time I returned to the site later with a camera the vandals had gotten to the place and this was the condition of what remained. They had also destroyed some rare and unusual computer equipment including an original HP-150 touchscreen. The site remained abandoned until 2003 or so as the masses of asbestos and contamination on the site had scared the developers away. Eventually the housing boom pushed prices high enough that a developer took a chance, but that failed when the houses they built started sinking into the big hole that was there.



I also spent some time in the old Waverly Park stadium that is now a housing development. Being the only person in a place that once held tens of thousands of people is a strange feeling. The only intact TV I found on site was a 14" Rank Arena portable that had been modified with a video input and an NTSC decoder in one of the commentary boxes. In hindsight I should have grabbed that set. Waverly park had a Stewart Warner video scoreboard that was installed in 1979. It could display a quarter of a video frame in 16 grey (well yellow/brown) levels on a screen made from 150W incandescent light bulbs. This was controlled by a dual redundant PDP-11/04 computers with a mass of custom electronics. The video gear had been removed from the control room when it was sold at auction, but the buyer left the PDP-11. Vandals had smashed the terminals and put a couple of dents in the cabinet, but those machines were built tough. After seeing other interesting machines meet an untimely end I decided to save this one. Getting it down from the 5th floor in pieces was hard work. It's in the hands of another collector now as it was too big for me to keep.



One day while wandering around the city I found someone had left the back door of the old Melbourne power station open. I couldn't find a way into the main generator room which was probably a good this as there was supposedly pretty extensive contamination in there, but I did check out the other building that housed the offices, a medical center, class rooms, a pool hall, and an auditorium among other things. Over the years it seems that building was used by many people for purposes unknown. Candles on the stairs, paper arrows on the walls to lead the way, messages written in the dust. There were several tube PA amplifiers there, but I had no way to remove them at the time and wasn't able to get back in later. This was shortly before the redevelopment started so security was much tighter the next time I was there. I hope someone managed to save them. I made it to the roof and this ancient elevator appeared to be still alive, but there was no way I was going to try it out.