2239 The Architect.

I would guess some yes, but most probably not. I have some relatives in the construction business. I don’t spend time around them anymore, but I remember around 30 years ago there were some major changes to the electrical code in their jurisdiction, at least to hear them talk of it, that would make “everything” they’d done in their professional lives violate code. I think there has probably been at least another of those since then, as the electrical code has needed to be updated – in some cases, kicking and screaming – because of our increased use of electronics.

That said, the “some yes” part is pretty simple. This work wasn’t inspected by an independent inspector, because it was secret. There were probably a few compromises made that violated code, because it was secret. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was unsafe for the given load. If the bunker was intended as a place to live while the world destroyed itself, one would assume that it would need to be designed with a great deal of electrical efficiency. Also, the EMF Reggie was tracing was “faint”, and the future owners of the place would have probably noticed a significant power drain and had it shut off.

Sure, the state of efficient electrics in 1980 wasn’t amazing. Except that there’s been the dirty push it harder for profits underbelly to the electrics market for more than a century. 1000 hour incandescent light bulbs are much more efficient and last much longer if you put less current through them. I don’t know the exact numbers, but there’s a lot of stuff that can be run on less juice than we do. IC stuff gets really flaky if you dip the voltage too low, and the maximum clock speed drops as the voltage is reduced towards that threshold, but the ticks per watt go up with some moderate “undervolting”. The special magic in a lot of low power chips is regulators that let them dynamically do this, so that they reduce their voltage when full CPU isn’t needed, but increase it back to “full” when it is. In the 1980s, we didn’t have as much of an understanding of exactly how we could get away with it and how dynamic we could be, but we did have the ability to just run things at lower voltages and figure out at what actual voltages they stopped working.

All of that said, I don’t have the best understanding of this stuff. If I remember my electrics correctly, lowering the current would save more electricity and raising the voltage could let one do that. However, I think it’s possible that would require more redesign of how the circuits work. It’s also probable that there’s something fundamental to making ICs ever smaller that requires using reduced voltages.