9 ms·
Photos of Soviet control rooms
- SN76477 9y agoLooks like an analog future.
- nateguchi 9y agoDoes anyone know what the circular indicators in the middle of some of these control rooms are for? Right in the centre of the indicator wall here: (http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/5309792-425120.jpg http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09...)
- ggm 9y agoRods in the reactor. These are basically all reactor control rooms.
- zootboy 9y agoYep. See: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bbcworldservice/5411039578 https://www.flickr.com/photos/bbcworldservice/5411039578
- 21 9y agoCloseups: https://carlwillis.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/dscf0806_v1.jpg https://carlwillis.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/dscf0806_v1.j... (zoom in) http://www.m1key.me/photography/chernobyl_questions_answers_2/chernobyl_questions_answers_2_25.jpg http://www.m1key.me/photography/chernobyl_questions_answers_... https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/45/129495116_40011d1db7_b.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/45/129495116_40011d1db7_b.jpg
- lobster_johnson 9y agoThe first image is from a blog with lots of information and high-resolution photos of old reactors, including Chernobyl: https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/ https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/
- mannykannot 9y agoThese are pizza oven control rooms - see the last-but-one, in particular.
- fitzroy 9y agoThese are beautiful — especially the Metsamor nuclear power plant (white table tops, with wood trim). Not strictly related, but the Death Star control panel in the original Star Wars was actually a modified Grass Valley television switcher. http://www.partsofsw.com/dscntrl.htm http://www.partsofsw.com/dscntrl.htm
- apostleofhustle 9y agowhere are the synths
- herdrick 9y agoCool pics are what killed the intellectual quality of Reddit. Let's not upvote this.
- dmix 9y agoModding content to this degree is one thing I don't like about (modern) reddit. When the majority of posts start taking a low-information high-emotion form then I'll start worrying. But one off events don't necessarily lead to trends. Flagging and voting has been very sufficient here.
- newman8r 9y agoI think in this case the images can start some interesting conversations about UX/ human interface devices/ industrial design. Posting memes would be a different story though - I'd probably bail at that point.
- monocasa 9y agoNothing can beat Project Cybersyn's control room, IMO. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File%3ACybersyn_control_room.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn#/media/File...
- digi_owl 9y agoToo bad they could not be allowed to succeed or fail on their own...
- philwelch 9y agoThere have been multiple attempts at planned economies throughout history. None of them were terribly successful, and it's not entirely clear why using spiffy early-70's style computers and knock-off Star Trek chairs would make that much of a difference. Although, it does look pretty cool.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoMost planned economies were founded before the availability of real-time, computer-driven decision support systems. Maybe it couldn't've worked, I dunno, but it was a bold experiment, and probably preferable to the brutal military junta that destroyed it.
- philwelch 9y agoThere’s already a real-time decision support system that also happens to be computer-driven these days. It’s called the market.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoYou seem to be ignoring people's actual posts to score points against straw Communists. Nobody's saying we should all switch to a planned economy.
- throw-away-8 9y agoSoviet mission control center: (1973+) http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/energia46-96/357-1.jpg http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/energia46-96/357-1.jpg (1980) http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/energia46-96/357-2.jpg http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/energia46-96/357-2.jpg
- pkaye 9y agoBack in the early 90s I got a chance to visit the BART train control center in the bay area. Surprisingly the controls were as old looking fixed displays as this stuff.
- KGIII 9y agoThese are the kinds of places where I'd be fired on the very first day, likely escorted away by security. I like to call it intellectual curiosity, but it's really poor impulse control. I'd push all those buttons. I couldn't help myself.
- oh_sigh 9y agoPresumably you would be trained on a simulator before being thrown into the room
- KGIII 9y agoYeah, I'd be weeded out in training. I don't even care if it's a bright red button with warning labels saying, "DO NOT PUSH!" I'm still going to push it. I might even push it first. It's a great way to learn software, but probably not so good in a nuclear reactor control room. Like you, I presume they have ways to weed people like me out. It's not that I'm evil, or anything. I'd just be like a five year old if I had access to that many buttons.
- whatshisface 9y agoThey could probably disable your exploration reflex by teaching you in advance how the plant worked and what buttons did. Which, I guess, is just normal training.
- KGIII 9y agoYeah, I suspect they train the fun right out of it.
- flycaliguy 9y agoyou should get into modular synths.
- KGIII 9y agoFunny you mention that... I have played at both hardware and software synths. I will never be productive, but I do have fun. A friend also has a recording studio. (I used to play guitar as a source of additional income, some studio and some performance work.) There are so many buttons, sliders, and knobs! I will go play with them. One of the reasons I enjoy my practice time (I still play but it's not for financial gain) is because it gives me time to play with the various settings. It's kind of how I learn things. This might seem off-topic, but I don't think it is. See, it's the love of poking buttons and moving sliders that has given me the 'hacking mentality.' It is the love of experimentation and willingness to press unknown buttons, metaphoric or real, that seems to be a trait of 'hackers.' We may not like to admit it, but I suspect a large number of HN viewers would not fare well if locked in a baren room, devoid of everything vut single red button that said, 'DO NOT PUSH.' I suspect that it is because of our willingness to poke these metaphoric buttons that we are driven to learn, create, and take risks. We gleefully push those buttons and learn more, create new processes, and discover. Polite society probably calls it intellectual curiosity. Really, many of us just like buttons, knobs, and sliders - be they metaphors or nuclear control reactors.
- m3kw9 9y agoWe are missing the one with Homer in it
- amasad 9y agoThis is beautiful! It's amusing to think that most of this can be replaced with a single iPad.
- barrkel 9y agoCan they? I don't think you'd get the same situational awareness that you can with e.g. blinking warning lights. And many of them have both measures and controls integrated into a schematic of the system, something that would be impractically small on an ipad.
- flatline 9y agoMy thought was exactly the opposite. Some of them have modern computers right in the control room and still have all this gadgetry. There's just no way to reproduce that level of visual information on a small screen. Even at work I sometimes struggle with dual 32" monitors, I just need more real estate and have to constantly switch between windows and desktops. And that's for fairly mundane development tasks.
- lucaspiller 9y agoMy impression was that the control console is probably coupled too tightly to the control system, that removing and replacing it with something modern wouldn’t be feasable or worth the effort. I find it unlikely that they need to see all those dials at once, but without a modal system to switch between data views they need to show every data point. On a modern system you could achieve the same by having views specific to each task, and an alerting system for when a data point for that task goes out of range. Here is an image from a modern Austrian steel factory run by 3 people - half of the screens on the top row are just showing CCTV images: http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/17/25/1498153350-699054458-1.jpg http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/17/25/1498153350-699054458-1.jpg
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- keithpeter 9y ago
- growlix 9y agoIt is amazing how many of these control rooms are just huge surfaces covered in dials and instruments that lack any representative structure of the system they are monitoring and controlling.
- barrkel 9y agoI counted 14 of 22 that integrated dials or instruments into a diagrammatic structure of the system; it could be more that I couldn't see from the zoom level. The degree to which instruments (and especially, status lights it looks like) were integrated into diagrams was the most interesting thing.
- hitekker 9y agoNice paper going into detail about the circumstances behind these rooms and the Soviet push for Cybernization: http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNy...
- pvg 9y agoThe pictured control rooms are mostly just control rooms of power plants, not levers for adjusting the Soviet economy. The paper is not really about these control rooms.
- dom0 9y agoMost power plants have control rooms that look pretty much like these; they fulfil the same function.
- pvg 9y agoYes the 'Soviet' bit just makes these pictures sound more exotic than they are (and it seems they originally had a couple of American ones in there by 'mistake') but the point is, none of this has anything to do with cybersyn-like networked command centers for the command economy. Which is what the linked paper is about.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoSomething I have always imagined doing was to build 'paneling' for lab that followed the theme of a control room like this. At Google we discussed making the inside of a conference room appear to be a shuttle in flight. (it was possible as it had no windows.) We figured we could build a slightly interior wall (maybe 3" thick) and rig up panels with various micro processors and left over displays from the Android project. It probably would have been a $20,000 conference room if we had done it. :-)
- bitwize 9y agoIn Google's ITA Software division there is a conference room made up to look like the inside of an airliner. Albeit it's far, far roomier than any actual airliner I've ever been on.
- droidist2 9y agoThis one looks intriguing, any more info on it? http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Tsentralnij-pult-upravleniya.jpg http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09...
- pvg 9y agoNASA recently published a picture of Annie Easley standing in front of something impressively retro-future-looking but didn't include an explanation of what it was: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/annie-easley-computer-scientist-and-mathematician https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/annie-easley-computer-sci...
- rzzzt 9y agoMy guess, after a quick google search: https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/facilities/erb/turbo/#small-engine-components-compressor-test-facility https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/facilities/erb/turbo/#small-engine... The signs on the top of each section says "air 40 psig" and "ref. air 10 psig", and this matches the capabilities described in the link: "The compressor can draw air from either an atmospheric intake, a 40-psig pressure source, or 10-psig refrigerated air system". The image also has GRC in its file name. (It might be a complete miss, though)
- jpatokal 9y agoSubmitter here. Not my blog post, but glad to see this got some traction! Random memory of a Soviet control room: in the late 1990s, the rave scene was booming in Estonia and I ended up wrangling an invite to a party called "Beast Feast" [1] arranged by fellow promoters VIBE. The venue was a giant old Soviet-era factory in the industrial zone of Liiva Keskus [2]. The factory floor, complete with random, rusty machines, was used for a "fashion show" featuring models wearing only animal skulls, horns, tails etc, plus stacks of speakers reaching to the ceiling and a thousand-plus ravers dancing. The control room -- which looked exactly like the ones in the pictures -- was carpeted with mattresses, decked out with disco lighting, and there was a DJ playing chill-out music. One of the most memorable parties I've been to! Unfortunately I can't find any pictures of it online... [1] http://www.moles.ee/99/May/26/5-3.html http://www.moles.ee/99/May/26/5-3.html [2] http://www.rrk.ee/?op=body&id=86 http://www.rrk.ee/?op=body&id=86
- Koshkin 9y agoReads like a scene from the Planet of the Apes...
- baybal2 9y agoThis how all big plants worked before Scadas came
- jaclaz 9y agoSide note, anyone remembers the Star-Trek inspired control room the NSA built? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexander-star-trek https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mi... The sliding doors with a "whoosh" sound are probably among the things every geek loves but is afraid to confess...
- officemonkey 9y agoHaving been in current U.S. nuclear power plant control rooms, they're not substantially different.
- westiseast 9y agoSame, went on a tour of a U.K. nuclear power plant and its all 1960s tech like this. I asked why and they said you can't afford the risk of bugs/problems for the efficiency gains you might achieve with new kit.
- officemonkey 9y agoI talked to the person who wrote a program that displayed reactor data on a computer screen. She wrote it in FORTRAN in the late 80s. They're still using it 30 years later. She confirmed that her programming passed Y2K with flying colors.
- ThinkingGuy 9y agoAll my life, I've had a strange fascination with this kind of thing: control rooms, cockpit instrument panels, or any sort of location with lots of of dials, buttons, gauges, switches, and indicators. Even Microsoft Windows "Control Panel" kind of excited me the first time I saw it. Now, seeing this posted here makes me wonder if maybe there are others out there who share this particular quirk of mine.
- owenversteeg 9y agoOh absolutely! I've had the same thing too for as long as I can remember. Aircraft cockpits especially interest me, and I can spend hours looking at physical switches. I created a subreddit, maybe there are more of us? /r/ControlPanels/
- zerr 9y agoHello, I'm .... It started for me when I first saw a calculator.
- closeparen 9y agoSame - it drove me to spend all the time I could behind sound & lighting consoles through high school and college. There’s something about live production operations that software engineering - even on the ops/oncall side - doesn’t come close to. I’d seriously consider taking a significant pay cut to sit at a console with a headset and run something in real time.
- masswerk 9y agoThe first photo is from the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered merchant ship, built in the US in the late 1950s as a demonstration project for the potential use of nuclear energy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
- baxtr 9y agoI really love those Soviet white hats. Does anybody know if they served any real purpose, or was that just soviet chic?