The P50 Underground Bunker

At its peak, there were twenty-five telephone lines running down our driveway handling thousands of transactions a week into our computers. P50 is half-underground and was full of servers and communications gear. My six-year old son Ben’s teacher asked her primary school class one day “how many computers do you have in your home?” Most students said one but Ben though it was eighteen. I am not sure she believed him <laugh>.

There are many more stories, achievements and statistics from that time but there is one that means the most to me. We once had a consecutive run of 465 days with zero-downtime. The streak was broken by a brief telecoms outage that was not our fault that really annoyed us…

Today, P50 is empty and freshly repainted. EDIS moved out into much bigger premises years ago and now outsources its own servers in much larger network centers. But, it all started down here…and one division of New Zealand’s largest construction company  trusted us to build an e-commerce network center for them, hidden away in the suburbs where no one would ever find it. That probably would not happen in today’s business environment but who knows? New Zealand is still a very creative place.

This building has now been sold and it is time for us to finally move out so I am spending one last time down here alone. With the door closed, it is still cold and deliciously silent. I remember the day in mid-1999, when the builders had finished and the first coat of paint was dry. I sat here in the same position by myself, absolutely joyful, thankful for our new toy and thinking “I love this stuff…”

I really hope the new owners build a massive model railway layout down here <laugh>…