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Comment by rexarex | Hacker News Reader

At McMurdo Station, Antarctica the ~2000 line phone system still runs on a NEC PBX purchased second-hand in the 60s from a prison. A couple years ago a line card broke and so a staff member was sent on a mission to go to a junkyard in Nebraska and harvest all the spare parts they could out of an old one.

They’re finally moving over to VOIP, but there was something romantic about this giant refrigerator sized behemoth, ready to break down at a moments notice. The battery backup system for it was homemade, about 24 car batteries in another room on a shelf, daisy chained together behind an inverted. Soon, it’ll be replaced with two pizza box sized servers.

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I'm surprised you can find a mid century PBX in a junk yard, and that if you could the parts wouldn't be completely destroyed by the elements. Is there some kind of indoor tech junkyard somewhere?

RE-PC in Seattle is like an indoor tech junkyard.

dang it, was just up there for kubecon and would have loved to visit such a place :-(

3R is too on some levels.

Weird Stuff in the Bay Area used to be exactly this. Until it closed down earlier this year, sadly.

HSC is the equivalent for lower-level electronic parts. They’ll also be closing down in January.

What is HSC? I missed out on ever getting a chance to visit Weird Stuff in the Bay Area and if there's other cool shops in the area I'd like to check em out before they close down!

https://www.halted.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/technology/personaltech/0...

They've been around for a long time. Jobs and Woz apparently bought parts there for the original apple computers.

Well, the copious amounts of waste heat from the old PBX can be put to good use.

If its really from the 60's its likely electromechanical, and uses almost no power at idle - like less than 1a at 48v

So it's cooler, more reliable, AND bigger than modern computers? We need to go back.

Not really more reliable - they required regular servicing, Electromechanical phone switches did - contacts being cleaned, that sort of thing - Modern digital or IP stuff is largely turn it on and stuff it in a closet

Except for security updates, software bug fixes, etc.

Miniaturization and flexibility come at a cost. Today's iPhone is more powerful than the computers used for the Apollo mission.

A TI-89+ is more powerful than the computers used in the Apollo mission.

> Miniaturization and flexibility come at a cost.

Companies have little to no incentive to update software for older products unless there are lucrative support contracts. This has been the case for decades.

If the system was found to have a security flaw, that would be even harder to fix in vintage hardware.

Except that no sane person would hook this thing up directly to the internet anyway.

So it basically comes down to security flaws exposed to whatever interfaces it really is connected to.

I’m confused about the topic. How would one connect a 60s PBX to the internet? The suggestion was ‘we need to go back’ to this style of architecture, I think, not that we should use vintage 60s phone hardware.

It switches analog phone lines, so it could (and I'm sure did) act as a control plane for modem links. (Over which it was possible to send TCP/IP, etc.)

People actually do this with SIP gateways.

Can confirm, was quiet and sat in an open room with other workstations around with no extra fans, cooling, etc. But, it's administered with a CLI computer hooked up, so not sure it is truly 'electromechanical'.

That's from the 80s or 90s then

...Or a retrofit from that period?

No, you don't go from 60s era tech to 90s era in phones without s forklift. Moving from electromechanical to stores program control is a sea change.

It's like going from Hollerith card based tabulators to a System/360

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