6 ms·

I'm so glad this was made and worked, does anyone else find themselves haunted by the dumb failed utopian projects of the past? That somehow stupid engineering

I'm so glad this was made and worked, does anyone else find themselves haunted by the dumb failed utopian projects of the past? That somehow stupid engineering of the past sits in your imagination beside the dumb software development in shitty languages of your personal history? - What's that employer? you want a contract management system entirely in microsoft word macros - and it has to produce a scrollable map of government infrastructure, and it's 1995, and this is all in word, is there a database?, no?, no database, all in the word template - sure why the hell not, I guess you're paying and no doubt I will experience immense person satisfaction wasting my youth in your strange beige office attempting and repeatedly failing to realise this hideous monstrosity and cherish the downward spiral of shame and self recrimination. excellent! Thank you snow train - finally I can relinquish the weird melancholy I've always got thinking about the Antarctic snow cruiser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser

voz_ 6y ago
I think it is incorrect to compare ambitious (crazy?) utopian projects of decades gone with the mundane bullshit contract style work you describe. If anything, there is more of these crazy projects to be found today. It just so happens we don't bother remembering the inane and mundane work, so all that we have of the past is large (fond) memories of projects like this one, or that awesome snow cruiser.
- bacon_waffle 6y ago
  Yes, there may be more of those crazy projects today, but a major difference is the way abstraction in software obscures the insanity of the bigger picture. The current South Pole Station was designed by an architectural company based in Hawaii; I'd imagine the architects felt like they were working on a really cool project. In the station they designed, the dorm rooms all have windows without blackout curtains, but the sun rises and sets once a year at South Pole and there's an awful lot of ice outside. It's very bright there in the summer, and the dorms are hardly used for anything other than sleeping. There is a large pile of decorated pieces of repurposed cardboard that polies fit in the windows - I can assure you that decorating those window covers feels a bit silly, even if it is novel to play cut-and-paste with the world spinning around you. Byrd's Snow Cruiser and the CMS made in word macros are more alike than different.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Halley VI is my favourite, it looks like something straight out of a Simon Stalenhag painting and yet is a practical design. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halley_Research_Station#/media/File%3ALow_sun_behind_Halley_VI_modules.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halley_Research_Station#/med...
- noir_lord 6y ago
  To an extent I’d agree. A good example is SpaceX we now live in a world where rockets can launch payloads in a commercially viable way and then fly back to their drone ships to land... and it has become routine. I remember watching the first successful landing in sheer and absolute awe, “we” as a species knew it was possible, the technology existed and some early starts had been made but it took one person and a boatload of cash to convert a folly into a mundane reality. For all the stupid things musk does, He will always have some of my respect for bringing back the feeling I used to have as a kid in the 80’s watching a shuttle go up. Had they not been able to make it work for whatever reason in the decades to follow it would have been regarded as one of those ambitious projects that never went anywhere.
- monkeycantype 6y ago
  Compare the Snow train to the mundane shit I did, no I wouldn't, I realise that my comment, which at the time i made it was not the root of a tree, appears that I am. It was the antarctic snow cruiser, an absurd half backed con job, that was never ever going to work i resonated with, no the snow train is the antithesis, competent bold well executed.
blueridge 6y ago
Speaking of Byrd and Snow Cruisers, may I recommend: Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Classic-Adventure-Richard-Byrd/dp/1559634634 https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Classic-Adventure-Richard-Byrd/...
Animats 6y ago
This was only a tiny part of US air defenses in the 1950s and 1960s. This was for building the Distant Early Warning line of radar stations, geodesic domes in arctic climate. They were built, they worked, and many, though abandoned, are still standing. And that was just the outer warning line. The Mid-Canada Line and the Pine Tree Line were further in. Texas Towers were built out in the ocean with even more radars. There were interceptor bases all over the US and Canada. Anti-aircraft missiles and guns were staffed 24/7. The SAGE computer systems and Missile Master were built to coordinate this. Cheyenne Mountain was built as headquarters.
- kev009 6y ago
  And nuclear hardened coaxial cables and the TD microwave system and communications satellites and fiber optic and... I feel like millennial and future generations need a compact guide to what the GI and Silent generations actually accomplished.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - posguy 6y ago
    Look at the state of our communications infrastructure today. These "modern" coax networks have no redundancy and so so reliability (eg: Comcast's Node+0 nodes occasionally have their IP stack fall over, requiring a reboot). The remaining baby bells are baby bankrupt after years of pillaging their territory to pay for acquisitions and investor dividends (see recent Frontier bankruptcy and fire sale of Pacific NW territory to Ziply Fiber) and the infrastructure they do have is almost entirely running atop legacy hardware designed in the 1980s.
    - jcrawfordor 6y ago
      The coax networks that GP refers to have nothing to do with cable television (except that television syndication links were carried over them). GP is referring to the AT&T L-series carriers which carried telephone calls (and later digital voice link equivalents) over multiple bundled coaxial pairs. The L-carrier infrastructure was built to remarkable standards of durability and reliability, in part because much of the system (particularly L-3I and L-4) were built as part of federal C3I contracts and were hardened against limited nuclear strikes, but also because of AT&T/WECo's general culture of obsession with reliability. Station equipment would be entirely duplicated for redundancy, nearly all equipment stations were manned to allow for quick repair (and 'maintenance patrols' inspected remote en-route repeaters as often as daily), and the system was designed for network-level redundancy through rerouting and the preparation of 'alternate control points' to allow continued operation even in the case of complete isolation of parts of the network. The L-carrier system fell out of use when it was replaced by fiber-optic technology (which AT&T initially referred to as "lightguide", perhaps due to it coming hot on the tails of their work on waveguide carriers such as WT4 which were essentially microwave radio through a metal duct). Of course, this raises the question of why this infrastructure is so much more reliable than cable television seems to be. I would suggest three explanations. First, AT&T, Bell Labs, WECo, and the rest of the Ma Bell crowd held reliability as an extremely high value, at both a cultural and requirements level. This is exemplified by now legendary Bell system feats such as moving exchange office buildings with operators still working inside (and dragging long tether cables) in order to avoid a service interruption. Second, AT&T long held major defense contracts with significant reliability requirements (against both natural conditions and enemy attack), and as a matter of cost savings these contracts were met using infrastructure shared with civilian services. In general, the non-Bell system modern internet carriers have not held this type of business on such a large scale, in part because they postdate the cold war and in part because AT&T, CenturyLink, and other Bell alums are more interested in federal contracts. Third, cable television has historically been both more competitive and less critical in popular opinion than telephone service, and so reliability has simply not been a high business priority for these operators. For the Bell system any service interruption could be a major scandal, and this is still to some extent true today of telephone service (see any 911 interruption incident). On the other hand the cable companies descended from offering a service which was viewed as a non-critical luxury. Consumer and regulator behavior seems to have just not caught up to the internet era in this regard. And yes, it is quite true that many of the Bell system alums are struggling today. On the other hand, CenturyLink is quite viable as a business and shows few signs of slowing. They are even arguably relatively innovation-forward as an ISP as evidenced by their having one of the larger gigabit GPON footprints in the US, as well as emphasizing no-contract "price for life" service in many markets where they compete with cable carriers. But yes, ultimately most of the Bell system has been dismantled in the interest of cost savings, and has been replaced by a sort of shambling wisp of its former self. Many feel that the writing was on the wall as soon as the breakup occurred, a move which was in good part aimed at reducing consumer prices, and did so, but partially at the cost of radically reduced investment in infrastructure. There is tradeoff between affordability and reliability, and the telecom industry seems to always cling to one of two extremes.
bacon_waffle 6y ago
Thanks so much for the excellent rant. As I clicked the link on the HN front page to read this, taking "a break" and feeling entirely burned out, the snow cruiser came to mind. There's a good editorial waiting to be written about Byrd as his generation's Jobs.
jbigelow76 6y ago
This whole story is pretty interesting and so far removed from almost every new thing we see today, but that 50's-ish TournaTrain promo reel with its outlaw country soundtrack, it's just... chef's kiss
fit2rule 6y ago
I too feel the melancholy with regards to massive engineering projects undertaken to provide one thing only: death at scale. Imagine if we'd used these things to bring hospital and water purification supplies to the world, instead of building gigantic inhumane "defences" to kill our enemies. Its a sad state of affairs when you realise all the cool shit is in the hands of a death cult. But, then again, there's crazy things like Virgin Orbit dropping rockets off a 747 in the news today, and that's not all that bad. Perhaps, once we get to Mars, we'll finally have a planet at total peace.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  > instead of building gigantic inhumane "defences" to kill our enemies. In all seriousness: A radar chain doesn't kill anyone. I also understand why people are against the military but we need to see the context of all this: 1. The world had just suffered another large war because a large number of countries hadn't been able to defend themselves: If Poland had been able to stop Hitler or if they'd been able to convince others to stop him the second world war hadn't started at that point. 2. After the second world war USSR quickly took over most of easter Europe. And unlike USA who hasn't always been to nice either the USSR didn't leave until early 90ies. Having a plausible defense is important when you stand against a Hitler or a Stalin.
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    Every single bomb dropped 'in defence' is a hospital or water treatment plant that wasn't built, in peace.
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      I am most thankful for all the bombs that were dropped on the territory of my country during the Nazi occupation, and I am thoroughly sad the USA didn't drop any during the Soviet occupation - the effects of that 40 years are prominent even today, maybe more so than in the 90's; the old communist elite had 30 years to rebuild their wealth and influence and they're trying very hard to get back in power, this time as "centrists".

voz_ 6y ago

I think it is incorrect to compare ambitious (crazy?) utopian projects of decades gone with the mundane bullshit contract style work you describe. If anything, there is more of these crazy projects to be found today. It just so happens we don't bother remembering the inane and mundane work, so all that we have of the past is large (fond) memories of projects like this one, or that awesome snow cruiser.

bacon_waffle 6y ago
Yes, there may be more of those crazy projects today, but a major difference is the way abstraction in software obscures the insanity of the bigger picture. The current South Pole Station was designed by an architectural company based in Hawaii; I'd imagine the architects felt like they were working on a really cool project. In the station they designed, the dorm rooms all have windows without blackout curtains, but the sun rises and sets once a year at South Pole and there's an awful lot of ice outside. It's very bright there in the summer, and the dorms are hardly used for anything other than sleeping. There is a large pile of decorated pieces of repurposed cardboard that polies fit in the windows - I can assure you that decorating those window covers feels a bit silly, even if it is novel to play cut-and-paste with the world spinning around you. Byrd's Snow Cruiser and the CMS made in word macros are more alike than different.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  Halley VI is my favourite, it looks like something straight out of a Simon Stalenhag painting and yet is a practical design. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halley_Research_Station#/media/File%3ALow_sun_behind_Halley_VI_modules.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halley_Research_Station#/med...
noir_lord 6y ago
To an extent I’d agree. A good example is SpaceX we now live in a world where rockets can launch payloads in a commercially viable way and then fly back to their drone ships to land... and it has become routine. I remember watching the first successful landing in sheer and absolute awe, “we” as a species knew it was possible, the technology existed and some early starts had been made but it took one person and a boatload of cash to convert a folly into a mundane reality. For all the stupid things musk does, He will always have some of my respect for bringing back the feeling I used to have as a kid in the 80’s watching a shuttle go up. Had they not been able to make it work for whatever reason in the decades to follow it would have been regarded as one of those ambitious projects that never went anywhere.
monkeycantype 6y ago
Compare the Snow train to the mundane shit I did, no I wouldn't, I realise that my comment, which at the time i made it was not the root of a tree, appears that I am. It was the antarctic snow cruiser, an absurd half backed con job, that was never ever going to work i resonated with, no the snow train is the antithesis, competent bold well executed.

blueridge 6y ago

Speaking of Byrd and Snow Cruisers, may I recommend: Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Classic-Adventure-Richard-Byrd/dp/1559634634 https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Classic-Adventure-Richard-Byrd/...

Animats 6y ago

This was only a tiny part of US air defenses in the 1950s and 1960s. This was for building the Distant Early Warning line of radar stations, geodesic domes in arctic climate. They were built, they worked, and many, though abandoned, are still standing. And that was just the outer warning line. The Mid-Canada Line and the Pine Tree Line were further in. Texas Towers were built out in the ocean with even more radars. There were interceptor bases all over the US and Canada. Anti-aircraft missiles and guns were staffed 24/7. The SAGE computer systems and Missile Master were built to coordinate this. Cheyenne Mountain was built as headquarters.

kev009 6y ago
And nuclear hardened coaxial cables and the TD microwave system and communications satellites and fiber optic and... I feel like millennial and future generations need a compact guide to what the GI and Silent generations actually accomplished.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- posguy 6y ago
  Look at the state of our communications infrastructure today. These "modern" coax networks have no redundancy and so so reliability (eg: Comcast's Node+0 nodes occasionally have their IP stack fall over, requiring a reboot). The remaining baby bells are baby bankrupt after years of pillaging their territory to pay for acquisitions and investor dividends (see recent Frontier bankruptcy and fire sale of Pacific NW territory to Ziply Fiber) and the infrastructure they do have is almost entirely running atop legacy hardware designed in the 1980s.
  - jcrawfordor 6y ago
    The coax networks that GP refers to have nothing to do with cable television (except that television syndication links were carried over them). GP is referring to the AT&T L-series carriers which carried telephone calls (and later digital voice link equivalents) over multiple bundled coaxial pairs. The L-carrier infrastructure was built to remarkable standards of durability and reliability, in part because much of the system (particularly L-3I and L-4) were built as part of federal C3I contracts and were hardened against limited nuclear strikes, but also because of AT&T/WECo's general culture of obsession with reliability. Station equipment would be entirely duplicated for redundancy, nearly all equipment stations were manned to allow for quick repair (and 'maintenance patrols' inspected remote en-route repeaters as often as daily), and the system was designed for network-level redundancy through rerouting and the preparation of 'alternate control points' to allow continued operation even in the case of complete isolation of parts of the network. The L-carrier system fell out of use when it was replaced by fiber-optic technology (which AT&T initially referred to as "lightguide", perhaps due to it coming hot on the tails of their work on waveguide carriers such as WT4 which were essentially microwave radio through a metal duct). Of course, this raises the question of why this infrastructure is so much more reliable than cable television seems to be. I would suggest three explanations. First, AT&T, Bell Labs, WECo, and the rest of the Ma Bell crowd held reliability as an extremely high value, at both a cultural and requirements level. This is exemplified by now legendary Bell system feats such as moving exchange office buildings with operators still working inside (and dragging long tether cables) in order to avoid a service interruption. Second, AT&T long held major defense contracts with significant reliability requirements (against both natural conditions and enemy attack), and as a matter of cost savings these contracts were met using infrastructure shared with civilian services. In general, the non-Bell system modern internet carriers have not held this type of business on such a large scale, in part because they postdate the cold war and in part because AT&T, CenturyLink, and other Bell alums are more interested in federal contracts. Third, cable television has historically been both more competitive and less critical in popular opinion than telephone service, and so reliability has simply not been a high business priority for these operators. For the Bell system any service interruption could be a major scandal, and this is still to some extent true today of telephone service (see any 911 interruption incident). On the other hand the cable companies descended from offering a service which was viewed as a non-critical luxury. Consumer and regulator behavior seems to have just not caught up to the internet era in this regard. And yes, it is quite true that many of the Bell system alums are struggling today. On the other hand, CenturyLink is quite viable as a business and shows few signs of slowing. They are even arguably relatively innovation-forward as an ISP as evidenced by their having one of the larger gigabit GPON footprints in the US, as well as emphasizing no-contract "price for life" service in many markets where they compete with cable carriers. But yes, ultimately most of the Bell system has been dismantled in the interest of cost savings, and has been replaced by a sort of shambling wisp of its former self. Many feel that the writing was on the wall as soon as the breakup occurred, a move which was in good part aimed at reducing consumer prices, and did so, but partially at the cost of radically reduced investment in infrastructure. There is tradeoff between affordability and reliability, and the telecom industry seems to always cling to one of two extremes.

bacon_waffle 6y ago

Thanks so much for the excellent rant. As I clicked the link on the HN front page to read this, taking "a break" and feeling entirely burned out, the snow cruiser came to mind. There's a good editorial waiting to be written about Byrd as his generation's Jobs.

jbigelow76 6y ago

This whole story is pretty interesting and so far removed from almost every new thing we see today, but that 50's-ish TournaTrain promo reel with its outlaw country soundtrack, it's just... chef's kiss

fit2rule 6y ago

I too feel the melancholy with regards to massive engineering projects undertaken to provide one thing only: death at scale. Imagine if we'd used these things to bring hospital and water purification supplies to the world, instead of building gigantic inhumane "defences" to kill our enemies. Its a sad state of affairs when you realise all the cool shit is in the hands of a death cult. But, then again, there's crazy things like Virgin Orbit dropping rockets off a 747 in the news today, and that's not all that bad. Perhaps, once we get to Mars, we'll finally have a planet at total peace.

skinkestek 6y ago
> instead of building gigantic inhumane "defences" to kill our enemies. In all seriousness: A radar chain doesn't kill anyone. I also understand why people are against the military but we need to see the context of all this: 1. The world had just suffered another large war because a large number of countries hadn't been able to defend themselves: If Poland had been able to stop Hitler or if they'd been able to convince others to stop him the second world war hadn't started at that point. 2. After the second world war USSR quickly took over most of easter Europe. And unlike USA who hasn't always been to nice either the USSR didn't leave until early 90ies. Having a plausible defense is important when you stand against a Hitler or a Stalin.
- fit2rule 6y ago
  Every single bomb dropped 'in defence' is a hospital or water treatment plant that wasn't built, in peace.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    I am most thankful for all the bombs that were dropped on the territory of my country during the Nazi occupation, and I am thoroughly sad the USA didn't drop any during the Soviet occupation - the effects of that 40 years are prominent even today, maybe more so than in the 90's; the old communist elite had 30 years to rebuild their wealth and influence and they're trying very hard to get back in power, this time as "centrists".