34 ms·

The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)

677 points by ricardomcgowan 6y ago

laretluval 6y ago
Not great, not terrible
duxup 6y ago
Very pretty, but not sure they were anything that 60s and 70s style were ... elsewhere in many cases. That's not a knock on them. Usability though I hear was pretty rough in some cases... but again for the same reasons UI can suck any other place too. Old soviet era posters looked great too, even if sort of static as you look at them over time and they don't evolve much.
_n_b_ 6y ago
The ones I can see that are clearly nuclear power plant control rooms really don't look all that different than the Western designs of the same era. They don't even look that different now in those plants, except for more computer screens (at the operator desks mostly, not necessarily many "on the boards") and digital strip chart recorders. The biggest difference I see is that the Soviet stuff clearly wasn't seismically qualified.
- mgibbs63 6y ago
  I agree - many older particle accelerators in the U.S. have/had control rooms that look very similar to these photos (go see the 88-inch cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab if you ever get a chance!). I think this is more 'vintage control system aesthetic' than a particularly soviet look.
  - vilhelm_s 6y ago
    In fact one of the photos in this collection is from the American ship NS Savannah (launched in 1959)... it's not easy to spot which one is the odd one out!
    - rootbear 6y ago
      I’ve toured the Savannah. It’s docked at Baltimore, MD, and they do tours one a year (but not this year). And yeah, the control rooms are very retro.
  - gfxgirl 6y ago
    This? https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/rawImage.jpg https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/rawImage.jpg
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    I used to work near there[1] (and take prom dates on the spook show at the then abandoned Bevatron[2]); the Soviet stuff does have a distinct look to it. The US racks were filled with this grey stuff, generally put together rather haphazardly by EM techs, where the soviet stuff is vastly more .... designed. At least in these photos. Possibly because the control systems were for larger, longer lived technology. Though the 88 has had a pretty good run. By contrast the ALS control room looks like a devops room; just a bunch of Sun workstations. Just for contrast; the Dubna cyclotron in Russia is pretty equivalent to something like the Bevatron or 88", and it has that swoopy designed look to its control room[3]. [1] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/640x0.jpg https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/640x0.jpg [2] https://nara.getarchive.net/media/bevatron-control-room-fred-lathrop-at-control-panel-photograph-taken-june-2-82ae09?zoom=true https://nara.getarchive.net/media/bevatron-control-room-fred... [3] https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-dubna-moscow-region-ussr-the-central-control-desk-of-the-synchrophasotron-80589121.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-dubna-moscow-region-ussr-t...
- trimbo 6y ago
  I just finished "Midnight in Chernobyl". One of the things mentioned in there was that the automation for their RBMK reactors was primitive compared to Western reactors. Even for normal operation, the operators had to be hands on continually to keep those beasts under control.
- hansthehorse 6y ago
  They are very similar to the nuclear control room I worked at except mine had orders of magnitude more annunciators and didn't have the schematics of systems on the board. I really can't imagine running a nuclear plant with so few alarms.
  - _n_b_ 6y ago
    I've been to plants with the P&ID schematics on some of the boards. I worked at a new build where we had to adjust some of them after design changes, which was done with racing stripes and squirrel hair paint brushes from Amazon.
- kevinskii 6y ago
  Interesting. How can you tell that they're not seismically qualified by looking at the exteriors of the instruments?
  - _n_b_ 6y ago
    Not necessarily the control boards, but look at the consoles and tables around--they don't look like they're ready to survive an earthquake.
    - rimliu 6y ago
      That part of the world is not exactly known for earthquakes.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  A lot of architecture and design around the world a better sense of aesthetics than most English-speaking countries, but this nuclear power plant control rooms are indeed quite plain.
- DrPhish 6y ago
  I also agree. I was IT lead for a Kraft paper plant in the recent past, and the control rooms were indistinguishable from these. The big difference, which you wouldn't realize from pictures, is that the guts of all the old relay-based control systems had been ripped out, and the entire place was being run on a few racks of Delta-V automation controllers. The also had an enormous data centre room in the admin building that had been knocked back to two sparsely populated racks from maybe 50 at its peak. So much crufty and interesting tech at that place...VAX, AS/400, Netware 4...and I could go on about the scale of the place (7 story tall boiler!)
obiefernandez 6y ago
These are great for my collection of realistic yet not-realistic Zoom meeting virtual background!
_jal 6y ago
A lot of them have an interesting visual grammar - some of them almost look like subway maps. For some reason I love trying to work out the communicative intent behind the design of some of these things when I don't know what the system actually does - there's clearly a lot of thought behind the presentation that turns it into an interesting puzzle. ...And then I compare some of that to modern industrial design. Everything must be a touch screen, who cares if the UI makes any sense or the operating context makes demanding both visual and manual attention distracting or dangerous?
- duxup 6y ago
  I've read that some of these systems were brutal to try to figure out. Not unlike today (or anywhere else) engineers were king and they often made the call on how things worked in ways that you might not do day to day. Walking across the room to compare two readings both on opposite sides of the room in a myriad of other similar controls and displays was not uncommon. Granted I would never do that ... /s
- dogma1138 6y ago
  The lines link components of the same system in their actual order for example: fuel pump - furnace - gas turbine - generator. When the space permits layout and iconography is also used to put the various components in more context next to each other often based on things like the layout of what ever they are used to control or monitor. For example if it’s a plant control components will be laid out based on the exact layout / blueprints of the plant if it’s a ship or a train if would be laid out by decks or cars. This helps people orient themselves and find the exact thing they need based on familiarity with what is being monitored rather than the control room itself. It not only helps with day to day operations since the the visual association is faster but also allows staff that isn’t familiar with the control room and specialists which may be called in to effectively operate within it. This isn’t unique to Soviet control rooms this is constantly used in monitoring all over the world across all fields even IT.
- vilhelm_s 6y ago
  Indeed, one of them is a subway control panel, and another one a railway panel. :) [See http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 for the links to original image sources.]
earthscienceman 6y ago
I recently had the luck of spending several weeks/months on a Russian icebreaker from the soviet era. It was incredible. The engine control room was a work of art. Room after room of thoughtfully constructed controls with a huge emphasis on design. The bridge was also stunning. As someone who grew up post-cold-war in the United States, it was really something to be immersed in the aesthetic and culture of Russia in that era. I'll dig up some photos and post them here in a bit maybe. EDIT: Alright, here they are. I'm currently working on building a static website for my photography/work... but it's not done. So I'm sharing a small selection quickly in the stupidest way possible (google photos). https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7 https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7
- nathan82 6y ago
  Please do, that sounds amazing.
- na85 6y ago
  Wow! Was it the Arktika-class?
- joshdance 6y ago
  yes please
- winrid 6y ago
  Please do!!
- semisober 6y ago
  I had the luck of visiting post-soviet countries in Eastern Europe, and I can say I was somewhat admired by the block buildings that they have. Rows and rows of massive constructions that look alike, we even visited some apartments, and they had the same room placement, some had really old chandeliers, which gave a strange sense of luxury in a room that's really plain and simple. I think we visited the district where Chernobyl was filmed, but right now I can't remember the exact country.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
detaro 6y ago
Seems taken from http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2, which did link to the sources for the images.
gamegoblin 6y ago
See also a dubiously useful but very aesthetic "control room for the economy" in early 70's Chile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > After the CIA-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed. I do wish we'd had a chance to see how well it worked.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - eigenvalue 6y ago
    You can see from this chart that the entire economic program of which Cybersyn was a part was more akin to sabotage than anything helpful: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Chile-the-real-wage-1967-1977_with_lines.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Chile-th...
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      Sabotage is probably the correct term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_Chile#Allende_presidency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...
    - p_l 6y ago
      It was used to successfully navigate strikes, and the general idea was more decentralized than typical system these days.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
      Nixon also asked the CIA to "make the economy scream". It's really unfortunate that most experiment in central planning were also complicated by the world's super power at the time trying to ensure that the experiment failed. Not to mention that their key export (copper) price crashed during those years. Not to say that there wouldn't have been bad economic outcomes here otherwise, but it's clear that they were going up against the CIA.
microcolonel 6y ago
I'm really not fond of much of this sort of design. So many objects from the 60s and 70s were too focused on looking “cool”. The furniture strikes me as impractical and inhumane, and most of it was poor quality; I've seen a lot of it thrown out, and it just gets ratty and the laminates peel off if the climate control wasn't just right in whatever building it was in. The organization of controls is alright, and the SCADA-style visual HMI definitely looks intriguing, but I wouldn't say it's “beautiful” in any way I would recognize; and it's not really any different from the design language of similar-period U.S. control rooms (see examples below). You'll even note in my third example one of the images in the article isn't even of a soviet control room but rather a U.S. nuclear ship control room. This error seems to stem from this article being from a family of slapdash articles based on a webpage with a collection of control room photos [0] claimed to be Soviet; though they they note several corrections, the U.S. ship control room is still there, right at the top, taunting you. https://www.atomicheritage.org/sites/default/files/Three%20Mile%20Island%20Control%20Room.jpg https://www.atomicheritage.org/sites/default/files/Three%20M... https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2133/gallery-1436388894-monticello-training-simulator.jpg https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2... https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2133/gallery-1436388667-ns-savannah-control-room-md1.jpg https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2... [0]: http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2
dpflan 6y ago
This reminds of content on the site OObject. It has lists of interesting images of real-world things like control rooms, neutrino detectors, etc: like these 12 space inflatables: http://www.oobject.com/category/12-space-inflatables/ http://www.oobject.com/category/12-space-inflatables/, or these 12 mobile bridges.
VBprogrammer 6y ago
This is a bit of a random question but if anyone will know this answer I'm sure it's the HN hive mind. I was looking for those handle shaped switches, the tall ones you can wrap your whole fist around and activate. I've no idea if they have a specific name but I've not been able to find them in industrial parts catalogues but they are common in power station control rooms world wide by the looks of things. The third photo down has a lot of examples. Anyone have any idea if there is a specific name for those which I'm missing?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- whatgoodisaroad 6y ago
  I'm not an expert, but I like the question a lot. My best guess from some scrolling through industrial parts ordering websites is that they're called "pistol grip levers". Here's a couple examples found using that as a query: https://images.app.goo.gl/NRHyawiKxrsvZUhu5 https://images.app.goo.gl/NRHyawiKxrsvZUhu5 https://images.app.goo.gl/9qyhBAdqBy9Tqxxh9 https://images.app.goo.gl/9qyhBAdqBy9Tqxxh9
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    That would never have occurred to me as the key word, thanks!
- intrepidhero 6y ago
  Examples https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switches-relays/manual-standard-instrument-and-control-switches/series-24 https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switche... https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switches-relays/manual-standard-instrument-and-control-switches/type-w https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switche...
  - watsocd 6y ago
    I think that was the GE model. Here is the Westinghouse version. https://nationalswitchgear.com/Products/WH-TYPE-W2-CIRCUIT-BREAKER-CONTROL-SWITCH-3-STAGE__013-385.aspx https://nationalswitchgear.com/Products/WH-TYPE-W2-CIRCUIT-B...
osamagirl69 6y ago
I always loved the look of older switchgear (as in power transmission, not network switches...). There are few examples given here, but some of the early gear genuinely wouldn't look out of place in a Frakenstein movie, like the original control room in at Battersea[1]. There is just something about a room covered in mechanical meters (not analog meters hooked up to a computer - literally mechanical computers hooked up with sense transformers to the high voltage lines) that read thousands of amps and 10s if not 100s of thousands of volts, often times with the megawatts of power traveling just on the other side of the panel! [1] http://benedante.blogspot.com/2015/05/battersea-power-station.html http://benedante.blogspot.com/2015/05/battersea-power-statio...
- asteli 6y ago
  Why no love for network switches? The old mechanical telephone exchange equipment is enormously satisfying to watch as well. https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs
  - PoachedSausage 6y ago
    You can see them in action at Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings[0] which includes a working telephone exchange. About a mile from there is Droitwich Transmitting Station, an ArtDeco era station, see page 13 of [1] for exposed knife switches with 400V. [0] https://avoncroft.org.uk/avoncrofts-work/special-collections/ https://avoncroft.org.uk/avoncrofts-work/special-collections... [1] http://www.bbceng.info/Operations/transmitter_ops/Reminiscences/Droitwich/droitwich_calling2.pdf http://www.bbceng.info/Operations/transmitter_ops/Reminiscen...
    - barrkel 6y ago
      There's a functional mechanical switching relay, the kind triggered off of the clicks of a rotary dialing wheel, attached to two phones at the communication museum in Frankfurt https://www.mfk-frankfurt.de/ https://www.mfk-frankfurt.de/ and you can dial one phone from the other, and see the relays move as you enter the numbers.
  - 6y ago
mikepurvis 6y ago
It's super cool to see the natural light (even skylights!) present in some of the rooms pictured. That would be unthinkable when glare from monitors is an issue, but makes total sense when everything is mechanical.
ur-whale 6y ago
From the good old days when complex systems were still mostly 'fits in head' and could be drawn on a wall ... beautiful.
yumraj 6y ago
What did the US control rooms from the same era look like? Any links to photos somewhere?
- watsocd 6y ago
  If you are talking pre-1970, they looked pretty much the same!
blattimwind 6y ago
These don't look much different from control rooms elsewhere from the same time? Heck, a lot of process control rooms still look a lot like this (and for good reason), just with a row or two of desks with screens in front and perhaps some screens sprinkled in here and there.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Hopefully, we won't start seeing these types of pictures with touchscreens in the consoles.
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    I've got some bad news for you: https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...
at_a_remove 6y ago
I feel a strange urge to rewatch Colossus: The Forbin Project.
- technothrasher 6y ago
  Have you read the books? They're even more of a hoot than the movie, which was actually a reasonably faithful retelling of the first book and enjoyable in its own right where it does diverge.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    Yeah, about fifteen years back. They were rather enjoyable. Frankly I am surprised the movie got made. It's a little on the cerebral side. There's something about the cold, tense abstraction of it that matched these huge banks of somewhat cryptic control panels.
dvirsky 6y ago
I've had this idea for a long time but haven't gotten to actually doing it, to create a physical dashboard for production services using that aesthetic. Controlled by some Raspberry Pi or something, exposing an API, so I can hook it to real dashboard data for my work. With the API you bridge it to something like Grafana etc, to make the gauges and lights go, and for bonus points have some buttons do things like silence alerts, a big red button to roll back a deployment, and a missile-launch like button with a key you need to turn to deploy to production. The closest thing I've found on eBay that could be used as a base and was somewhat similar in design, was the control panel of a Soviet tank. But I think it will just have to be made from scratch using bought gauges and buttons.
- jraines 6y ago
  seconded! For me, I'd add that I want high quality, almost superfluously "chunky" ones -- think heavy, metal knobs that would get a positive grunt from Knob Feel[1]; switches with a physical resistance and heft that would be apropos for arming the Death Star laser. Hyperbole, but . . . the point is since I'm a total noob regarding this stuff, I wouldn't know where to start and would be nervous about buying them sight unseen without a good rec from someone knowledgable. Anyone have recommendations for where/how to look for such things online or in person (Bay Area)? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csrxxcLhW2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csrxxcLhW2c
  - jaquers 6y ago
    Depends on how hard you wanna go. I dunno about any prebuilt console/control panels, but this guy built a whole A-10 cockpit by himself w/ RasbPI's ;) Pretty neat. I too want a control panel for my apps! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJq3cq9N6xYF0fAvTgpwoBg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJq3cq9N6xYF0fAvTgpwoBg/vid... Edit: here's the build breakdown video: https://youtu.be/gDy10Wy4vw4?t=57 https://youtu.be/gDy10Wy4vw4?t=57
- FiatLuxDave 6y ago
  a big red button Back in the day when we were building our fusion reactor at Fiat Lux, we saved some money by buying an old Varian ion implanter (for the HV power supplies). We scrapped whatever good parts we could find off it. One of the goodies we got out of that thing was an absolutely huge (~5 inch diameter) red button with the word STOP on it. I always wanted to find a good use for that button, because it was just so amazing! But the thing about a fusion reactor, is that turning it off is pretty easy. The only thing that it might have been useful for was as an emergency stop button for the high voltage power supplies. And the only time that would have been useful, we didn't think to hook up the button beforehand. I like your idea. The aesthetics of web-based design seem rather confined to the screen, and bringing that control of information out of the screen sounds like a cool idea.
markvdb 6y ago
Watch Solaris [0] by Andrei Tarkovsky! It's an amazing Soviet era sci-fi movie. While the controls in there are obviously fake, it's interesting to look at how the director and his team imagined a space station to look in 1972. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%281972_film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%281972_film%29
- pengaru 6y ago
  There's also significant Russian space ship interiors shown in the 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel; 2010: The Year We Make Contact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact
  - twoheadedboy 6y ago
    Also interesting to note that Tarkovsky hated 2001: A Space Odyssey.
ornornor 6y ago
Would love to find high resolution files for these, so they can be printed on a large format printer and hung to my wall. But the most I can find is 1000px Eire which is not enough to print larger than a postcard afaik
jdonaldson 6y ago
I see these rooms as part of the "aesthetics of control" that is common in a lot of communist and socialist cultures. The control and wall surfaces seem to almost celebrate the existence and relationship between component dials and indicators. Everything is highly centralized and intentional, and everything has a place and role. This notion of "everything has a place" is common in Soviet propaganda art as well. Some of these control surfaces are as much a communication medium as they are a functional one. In some cases I'm reminded of Egyptian hieroglyphics on walls. They are an act of communication as much as an act of engineering.
323454 6y ago
How did they test a control room like this, with so many inputs and outputs? It seems like there would be many opportunities to botch a contact or two.
vmh1928 6y ago
These look like pre-computer analog control rooms at large plants everywhere. There wasn't much automation then so the operators really had to know the process and how to manually start, stop and modify the behavior of whatever it was - chemicals, power, steel, etc..
Simulacra 6y ago
IIRC the photographed control rooms were often staged to look more high tech, and functional than they really were. Like new paint on a tank with no running engine.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
That is cool. Thanks for sharing it! I remember seeing this image in an older version of Don Norman's famous book The Design of Everyday Things:https://pictures.abebooks.com/JVALLES/3324134975.jpg https://pictures.abebooks.com/JVALLES/3324134975.jpg I think that was a US plant, but it was a cool idea.
supernova87a 6y ago
I think this is a world totally foreign to what HN's world is about, which is why it's so charming/aesthetically pleasing. (exaggerating a bit, but not that much) The reason that these switches and dials are ok to be hardcoded in metal and glass is that they (and the people) do the same thing, over and over, year after year, for decades at a time. Rinse and repeat. Versus the software world (or more accurately, the world of starting up new things and experiments within months) -- where you don't know what you're building yet, whether it will work, and if it will still exist next year.
- atemerev 6y ago
  There are many Russians on HN, myself included. So, not foreign to everyone. :)
  - jscheel 6y ago
    I believe they meant functionally foreign, not culturally foreign.
  - varjag 6y ago
    It's pretty foreign to Russians who grew up after Soviet collapse.
- eecc 6y ago
  I'm sure there's plenty of hardcoded panels that will be used to control the same process for decades also in the "western" world.
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    No idea if they're doing the same thing in the military, but the ongoing rush to swap every damn button panel with a touchscreen is like a million disasters waiting to happen.
    - porknubbins 6y ago
      Not waiting to happen- Wasn’t there a US Navy ship that collided recently because the throttles were done in software?
c-smile 6y ago
USSR's Strategic Rocket Forces Control Rooms were also quite spectacular. It's a pity I do not have photos of them (for obvious reasons). This https://habr.com/ru/post/446098/ https://habr.com/ru/post/446098/ is close but not quite. The satellite state map (ru: Карта спутниковой обстановки) and rooms themselves were less fancy but more brutally-functional I would say.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Presumably USA (GB, DE, ???) have pictures!
aivisol 6y ago
The colors seem a bit exaggerated - these pictures were for sure originally mostly black and white, and whoever digitized them, added a lot of bright colors. In reality it was greyish as in the last picture from Chernobyl. I worked in a Soviet semi-military chip factory, it looked pretty much similar.
- varjag 6y ago
  Seconded. Grew up in USSR, been to industrial sites, they were as bleak as the everyday life. Remember Gibson's quote about "sky was the color of TV tuned to dead channel"? Well back home the whole manmade environment was like that.
chkaloon 6y ago
Awesome. Some observations/questions: - The control rooms probably required a good amount of maintenance themselves with all the mechanical switches, light bulbs, and paper loggers. - Why the white lab coats in a nuclear control room? - Would love to see the wiring behind these panels.
benburleson 6y ago
This one isn't even vintage, look at the flat monitor! https://main-designyoutrust.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/9-14.jpg?iv=146 https://main-designyoutrust.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/upload...
- Dahoon 6y ago
  Did the flat screen travel back in time?
isoprophlex 6y ago
Imagine the task of testing and maintaining all those dials and switches, and the data lines flowing into them... i can't even keep a hand full of shell scripts under control
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time, though only a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17332791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17332791
Biggleman 6y ago
Reading the comments it seems many people are in awe of the physical/analog meters and switches. Most the vessels sailing the oceans worldwide have similar looking controlrooms at the present time. As a former maritime engineer (advanced plumber at sea) I also would like to add that these physical/analog systems are in fact much more reliable and problems are easier to isolate. Please also keep in mind that at the locations where these controlrooms are implemented, the operators usually have more experience with mechanical stuff than PLC I/O's (those are done by contractors more often than not)
- projektfu 6y ago
  The digital dials also don’t give us the drama in the movies of tapping and unsticking the indicator to reveal the crisis situation. Although I wonder how common that cliché is in real life.
  - basicplus2 6y ago
    one is watching all the readings together which "make sense". If one reading is out from where it should be relative to the others (for the given load/condition) it is investigated immediately so anomalies don't usually go unnoticed. One gets a sense.. a feeling for the whole.. like a simulation running in your own head to feel whats going on as well.
  - nullc 6y ago
    My experience is that displays that silently stop updating is a more common property of digital readouts. :-/
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      Indeed. Had a little surgery under general anesthesia a while ago. Shortly before that time Hewlett-Packard ran adverts in the mainstream press about Windows on Itanium, with that hospital as flagship case. Was my 2nd general anesthesia only, so i've been a little nervous because i don't like to be 'switched off'. Anyways, been in the preparation room on that rolling stretcher thing, got some IVs and electrodes while looking around. All very modern, many, many flat panel displays mounted on swivel arms from down the ceiling, showing and beeping my vital signs. Interesting for biofeedback, i thought. Got the mask on, got asked how i feel: 'pleasantly light'. Then all the beeping died, and all the screens froze. No reset, bluescreen, static or other unusual stuff. Just frozen. Heard a loud 'SHIT!' from behind, and the clacking of running shoes on the tiles. Clacking shoes came back in an instant and rewired me to some shoebox-thing covered in orange rubber with some mini-displays, knobs and sliders. 'How do you feel now?' i've been asked... Lifting the mask i only growled: 'very confidence inspiring...' 'Sleep deep sweety!' was the last thing i heard. Afterwards i had a surreal night at the 20ieth floor or so, with hot and cold shivers running up and down my spine and the harbour in my view. Anyways, next morning i asked the surgeon if i hallucinated that, and she answered: No, you didn't. But it was a first! I LOLd hard. edit: It had to happen this way/to me, because all my life i've been an open-source fanboi. Incompatible 'fates', so to speak :-)
andybak 6y ago
If you are a fan of switches, dials, chipped enamel paint, typed instruction sheets and a vague 50s aesthetic I can thoroughly recommend this Soviet themed space game (in VR): https://store.steampowered.com/app/579110/Interkosmos/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/579110/Interkosmos/
- Taikonerd 6y ago
  I was sure you were going to say Red Matter: https://store.steampowered.com/app/966680/Red_Matter/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/966680/Red_Matter/
_bxg1 6y ago
This aesthetic always reminds me, weirdly enough, of 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Several scenes go out of their way to look "high-tech", and as a child of the 90s it was one of my few exposures to what that meant in 1970s terms.
remarkEon 6y ago
Where do I find more content like this? I absolutely love looking at and reading about Soviet era tech - from nuclear reactors to their rockets. This is history I’m itching to get more of. I’d also love to see some interviews of the designers of these things, if they still exist. And yes I watched Chernobyl on HBO and loved it.
- keiferski 6y ago
  You might like http://www.CalvertJournal.com http://www.CalvertJournal.com
  - remarkEon 6y ago
    This is great, thank you. Do you speak Russian? How long did it take you to learn?
    - keiferski 6y ago
      Nope, unfortunately I don’t (yet), although I know the Cyrillic alphabet from living in Belgrade for awhile, and I speak some Polish and Serbo-Croatian. I’d say learning Russian is easier than it seems, especially if you’re from a technical background and are comfortable with complex grammar structures. Probably on par with Latin in terms of difficulty.
colanderman 6y ago
Does anyone know what those large centrally-located circular grids in a few of the photos are?
- pvarangot 6y ago
  I think that represents the vessel of a nuclear reactor. The things inside the circle are probably representing clusters of rods or sensors spread around the vessel and show the state of different subsystems or parts of the reactor that need to be monitored.
martopix 6y ago
I've been to a 1950s decomissioned nuclear research reactor in Italy. It's still being monitored even if it's been turned off for years; with the addition of a few computers in a corner, the control room still looks pretty much like that. Printers instead of monitors, small bulbs instead of LEDs. At some point I stepped too closed to one of the desks, and an actual HORN went off.
janee 6y ago
I wonder how much design choice goes into the actual layout and controls being used on these, i.e. is it mostly physical hardware constraints that dictate the look or user interaction. Wondering because I see a lot of symmetry in the panels, but others seem very hodgepodge
01100011 6y ago
So what would you call this style? Relaypunk?
- jpindar 6y ago
  I've seen the terms dieselpunk and atompunk.
Ididntdothis 6y ago
This stuff used to look high tech. Now it’s computer screens that look high tech. I wonder what’s next. How will a control room in 50 years look or will there be no control rooms?
- GloriousKoji 6y ago
  It'll just be Alexa.
  - bregma 6y ago
    "Alexa, open the pod bay doors." "I'm sorry, Dave, you know I can't do that."
- TheCapn 6y ago
  Personal opinion time. Aside from whatever modern screens become I can't see control rooms changing too much from where they are currently. What is likely to change is how equipment is approached within the field which may mean less reliance on control rooms in general. What I mean is, imagine a Google Glass style augmented reality goggle on your operators. As they walk the plant they can look at a process system and up blips the efficiency/product/status info in real time. If that guy is out there for maintenance he'd see the time since last fault, reason for fault, downtime, and whatever else you'd call relevant all in front of his eyes instead of having to radio with the controls operator for info.
WalterBright 6y ago
I always wanted my computer setup to look like that.
jgalt212 6y ago
2020 version, but even this is more for show than functionality. https://www.weytec.com/en/solutions/kvm-video-wall/ https://www.weytec.com/en/solutions/kvm-video-wall/
coryfklein 6y ago
What is the purpose of these rooms, what do they control, and how? Like, what information is it providing to the users, and what actions can they take by flipping the switches or turning the knobs?
sebastianconcpt 6y ago
Cool. I'd love to see us romantisizing their gulags too so we can all be inspired about designing the next generation and revolutionary progressive reeducation camps.
- StellarTabi 6y ago
  Whether it's Guantanamo Bay, legalized for-profit slave labor of prisoners, migrant toddler concentration camps, or mass incarceration of black people, we have plenty of our own gulags for you to romanticize.
  - sebastianconcpt 6y ago
    Show me the numbers of the cases you alledge and the ones demonstrated by the communist movement and we might continue talking about it. If you put together the URSS and Mao's China that would be a good start.
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
I’ve noticed that a lot of futuristic movies from the 1970’s (like on a space ship) feature rooms where the walls are completely covered in buttons and lights and stuff. From today’s perspective it looks ridiculous but when you see these Soviet control rooms you can see why people would have found it believable at the time.
analognoise 6y ago
I want a fully accurate simulation of sitting in front of one of these control panels, and a tutorial that explains what every single thing does. There's so damn many knobs and buttons, and I have no idea how to interpret what everything is. Surely someone else out there would pay for ReactorControlSimulator 2020?
- jpindar 6y ago
  There are reactor simulators, but the ones I've seen use ordinary GUIs. I haven't seen any that tried to be visually accurate.
  - analognoise 6y ago
    Do you know the names of any, or where I could look? I mean what if you had a fully immersive, functionally and spatially accurate model of a reactor control room? How absolutely badass would that be?
    - jpindar 6y ago
      Here's a simple one [1] I had some fun with. (There's a Flash version too [2]). That one's just a game, so I have no idea how accurate it is. But if you search you might find something that's used in some university's nuclear engineering program or something like that. Very realistic ones used for actual training exist - this one [3] uses VR! - but those probably won't be online. [1] http://www.ae4rv.com/store/nuke_pc.htm http://www.ae4rv.com/store/nuke_pc.htm [2] http://esa21.kennesaw.edu/activities/nukeenergy/nuke.htm http://esa21.kennesaw.edu/activities/nukeenergy/nuke.htm [3] https://www.hitachi-hgne.co.jp/en/business/examination/simulator/index.html https://www.hitachi-hgne.co.jp/en/business/examination/simul...
      - analognoise 6y ago
        ...yeah so long story short, I have had the "How do you LEARN that?" thought before, which led me to some very niche companies that sell some (very awesome) educational kit. Like this: https://www.turbinetechnologies.com/educational-lab-products/turbojet-engine-lab https://www.turbinetechnologies.com/educational-lab-products... Maybe I could rig up an industrial-style control panel to an RPI and actually run a simulation on that. Why go virtual when you can build some cool boxes? I guess accuracy.
varjag 6y ago
To those interested in Soviet industrial design, a selection of Technical Aesthetics magazine issues dating back to 1960s: https://issuu.com/0083398 https://issuu.com/0083398 Be aware though that most of these concepts never materialised and actual aesthetics were rather grim for the most part.
DubiousPusher 6y ago
If you are ever in Berlin absolutely pay to go up the Soviet radio tower. The one that looks a bit like the Space Needle. The room you enter before you board the elevator is stunningly beautiful. In fact, generally it's a far more beautiful structure than most such towers. The interior design is especially impressive.
pippy 6y ago
My dad worked in a substation in the 90's which had the aesthetic of many of these pictures. Wall to wall switches which controlled the power distribution to half of New Zealand. Halfway through the 90's they upgraded to a few boring beige boxes in an office, and there was no need to use the manual switches. I loved going there because his workmates would give me pirated MS-DOS games on floppy disks, but the magic was lost. Later on they restructured all control through a single office in the capital and my dad lost his job.
alfiedotwtf 6y ago
Robert Moog had nothing on these Soviet beauties
golemotron 6y ago
They remind me of Wes Anderson's sets.
Robotbeat 6y ago
I have seen some 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s era control rooms in old wind tunnels from NACA/NASA, and many of them look like this. My favorite is where they indicators are in the shape of a big flow diagram so they're self-describing in function as well.
anyfoo 6y ago
We are physical beings, and even as someone who has enjoyed working with computers since a very young age in the 80s, I always felt that the more things are virtualized into intangible data and user interfaces, the less interesting and real things feel.
FillardMillmore 6y ago
Am I crazy, or does the fifth to last photo have a Windows XP screensaver? Windows XP was released in 2001 and the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 - what gives? Am I mistaken?
- john2x 6y ago
  It's on an LCD panel, so new equipment brought into an old room.
artsyca 6y ago
Nowadays these rooms would be staffed by brocoders in t shirts where once it was scientists in lab coats go figure
bsaul 6y ago
Having recently worked on creating monitoring dashboard for some backend, there are a few things that strikes me : - The indicators are physically disposed in a way to represent the physical location of what they are monitoring. It helps understand what it is measuring (instead of just adding a label.. or putting all the "tension" indicator in the same row, for example). - Next to the indicators are the buttons to physically interact with that part of the system. This is very logical : you see the red light, and right below it you have the button to shut the thing off. I don't know of any infrastructure monitoring dashboard system that works this way. I wonder how that would translate in our world of virtual instances. But i'm pretty sure there's something to take inspiration from here.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Part of me has always wanted to work in a control room, doing things with buttons and switches and the like. Or operate heavy machinery. But the other part knows it'll take a lot of training initially (domain specific), followed by what likely is a lot of boredom. Working on a PC as a developer with internet access gives a lot more stimulation and variation in my day to day job.
7leafer 6y ago
The last photo of Chernobyl reactor 4 control room is the most reassuring of them all.
bregma 6y ago
Everything needs more Nixie tubes.
GeekyBear 6y ago
I've always been fond of the Battersea electric power station in England. >The station's design proved popular straightaway, and was described as a "temple of power", which ranked equal with St Paul's Cathedral as a London landmark. In a 1939 survey by The Architectural Review a panel of celebrities ranked it as their second favourite modern building. The A Station's control room was given many Art Deco fittings by architect Halliday. Italian marble was used in the turbine hall, and polished parquet floors and wrought-iron staircases were used throughout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station It's amazing that they went so far out of their way to make an industrial plant beautiful, inside and out.
- Foivos 6y ago
  This one looks very similar to the C&C red alert power plant [1]. I wonder if this not a coincidence. [1] https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Power_plant_(Red_Alert_1) https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Power_plant_(Red_Alert_1)
Nginx487 6y ago
In Soviet Russia, room controls you (Sorry, just a tradition:)

Not great, not terrible

Very pretty, but not sure they were anything that 60s and 70s style were ... elsewhere in many cases. That's not a knock on them. Usability though I hear was pretty rough in some cases... but again for the same reasons UI can suck any other place too. Old soviet era posters looked great too, even if sort of static as you look at them over time and they don't evolve much.

_n_b_ 6y ago

The ones I can see that are clearly nuclear power plant control rooms really don't look all that different than the Western designs of the same era. They don't even look that different now in those plants, except for more computer screens (at the operator desks mostly, not necessarily many "on the boards") and digital strip chart recorders. The biggest difference I see is that the Soviet stuff clearly wasn't seismically qualified.

mgibbs63 6y ago
I agree - many older particle accelerators in the U.S. have/had control rooms that look very similar to these photos (go see the 88-inch cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab if you ever get a chance!). I think this is more 'vintage control system aesthetic' than a particularly soviet look.
- vilhelm_s 6y ago
  In fact one of the photos in this collection is from the American ship NS Savannah (launched in 1959)... it's not easy to spot which one is the odd one out!
  - rootbear 6y ago
    I’ve toured the Savannah. It’s docked at Baltimore, MD, and they do tours one a year (but not this year). And yeah, the control rooms are very retro.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  This? https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/rawImage.jpg https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/rawImage.jpg
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  I used to work near there[1] (and take prom dates on the spook show at the then abandoned Bevatron[2]); the Soviet stuff does have a distinct look to it. The US racks were filled with this grey stuff, generally put together rather haphazardly by EM techs, where the soviet stuff is vastly more .... designed. At least in these photos. Possibly because the control systems were for larger, longer lived technology. Though the 88 has had a pretty good run. By contrast the ALS control room looks like a devops room; just a bunch of Sun workstations. Just for contrast; the Dubna cyclotron in Russia is pretty equivalent to something like the Bevatron or 88", and it has that swoopy designed look to its control room[3]. [1] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/640x0.jpg https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/640x0.jpg [2] https://nara.getarchive.net/media/bevatron-control-room-fred-lathrop-at-control-panel-photograph-taken-june-2-82ae09?zoom=true https://nara.getarchive.net/media/bevatron-control-room-fred... [3] https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-dubna-moscow-region-ussr-the-central-control-desk-of-the-synchrophasotron-80589121.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-dubna-moscow-region-ussr-t...
trimbo 6y ago
I just finished "Midnight in Chernobyl". One of the things mentioned in there was that the automation for their RBMK reactors was primitive compared to Western reactors. Even for normal operation, the operators had to be hands on continually to keep those beasts under control.
hansthehorse 6y ago
They are very similar to the nuclear control room I worked at except mine had orders of magnitude more annunciators and didn't have the schematics of systems on the board. I really can't imagine running a nuclear plant with so few alarms.
- _n_b_ 6y ago
  I've been to plants with the P&ID schematics on some of the boards. I worked at a new build where we had to adjust some of them after design changes, which was done with racing stripes and squirrel hair paint brushes from Amazon.
kevinskii 6y ago
Interesting. How can you tell that they're not seismically qualified by looking at the exteriors of the instruments?
- _n_b_ 6y ago
  Not necessarily the control boards, but look at the consoles and tables around--they don't look like they're ready to survive an earthquake.
  - rimliu 6y ago
    That part of the world is not exactly known for earthquakes.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
A lot of architecture and design around the world a better sense of aesthetics than most English-speaking countries, but this nuclear power plant control rooms are indeed quite plain.
DrPhish 6y ago
I also agree. I was IT lead for a Kraft paper plant in the recent past, and the control rooms were indistinguishable from these. The big difference, which you wouldn't realize from pictures, is that the guts of all the old relay-based control systems had been ripped out, and the entire place was being run on a few racks of Delta-V automation controllers. The also had an enormous data centre room in the admin building that had been knocked back to two sparsely populated racks from maybe 50 at its peak. So much crufty and interesting tech at that place...VAX, AS/400, Netware 4...and I could go on about the scale of the place (7 story tall boiler!)

obiefernandez 6y ago

These are great for my collection of realistic yet not-realistic Zoom meeting virtual background!

_jal 6y ago

A lot of them have an interesting visual grammar - some of them almost look like subway maps. For some reason I love trying to work out the communicative intent behind the design of some of these things when I don't know what the system actually does - there's clearly a lot of thought behind the presentation that turns it into an interesting puzzle. ...And then I compare some of that to modern industrial design. Everything must be a touch screen, who cares if the UI makes any sense or the operating context makes demanding both visual and manual attention distracting or dangerous?

duxup 6y ago
I've read that some of these systems were brutal to try to figure out. Not unlike today (or anywhere else) engineers were king and they often made the call on how things worked in ways that you might not do day to day. Walking across the room to compare two readings both on opposite sides of the room in a myriad of other similar controls and displays was not uncommon. Granted I would never do that ... /s
dogma1138 6y ago
The lines link components of the same system in their actual order for example: fuel pump - furnace - gas turbine - generator. When the space permits layout and iconography is also used to put the various components in more context next to each other often based on things like the layout of what ever they are used to control or monitor. For example if it’s a plant control components will be laid out based on the exact layout / blueprints of the plant if it’s a ship or a train if would be laid out by decks or cars. This helps people orient themselves and find the exact thing they need based on familiarity with what is being monitored rather than the control room itself. It not only helps with day to day operations since the the visual association is faster but also allows staff that isn’t familiar with the control room and specialists which may be called in to effectively operate within it. This isn’t unique to Soviet control rooms this is constantly used in monitoring all over the world across all fields even IT.
vilhelm_s 6y ago
Indeed, one of them is a subway control panel, and another one a railway panel. :) [See http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 for the links to original image sources.]

earthscienceman 6y ago

I recently had the luck of spending several weeks/months on a Russian icebreaker from the soviet era. It was incredible. The engine control room was a work of art. Room after room of thoughtfully constructed controls with a huge emphasis on design. The bridge was also stunning. As someone who grew up post-cold-war in the United States, it was really something to be immersed in the aesthetic and culture of Russia in that era. I'll dig up some photos and post them here in a bit maybe. EDIT: Alright, here they are. I'm currently working on building a static website for my photography/work... but it's not done. So I'm sharing a small selection quickly in the stupidest way possible (google photos). https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7 https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7

nathan82 6y ago
Please do, that sounds amazing.
na85 6y ago
Wow! Was it the Arktika-class?
joshdance 6y ago
yes please
winrid 6y ago
Please do!!
semisober 6y ago
I had the luck of visiting post-soviet countries in Eastern Europe, and I can say I was somewhat admired by the block buildings that they have. Rows and rows of massive constructions that look alike, we even visited some apartments, and they had the same room placement, some had really old chandeliers, which gave a strange sense of luxury in a room that's really plain and simple. I think we visited the district where Chernobyl was filmed, but right now I can't remember the exact country.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago

detaro 6y ago

Seems taken from http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2, which did link to the sources for the images.

gamegoblin 6y ago

See also a dubiously useful but very aesthetic "control room for the economy" in early 70's Chile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

ceejayoz 6y ago
> After the CIA-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed. I do wish we'd had a chance to see how well it worked.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- eigenvalue 6y ago
  You can see from this chart that the entire economic program of which Cybersyn was a part was more akin to sabotage than anything helpful: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Chile-the-real-wage-1967-1977_with_lines.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Chile-th...
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Sabotage is probably the correct term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_Chile#Allende_presidency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...
  - p_l 6y ago
    It was used to successfully navigate strikes, and the general idea was more decentralized than typical system these days.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
    Nixon also asked the CIA to "make the economy scream". It's really unfortunate that most experiment in central planning were also complicated by the world's super power at the time trying to ensure that the experiment failed. Not to mention that their key export (copper) price crashed during those years. Not to say that there wouldn't have been bad economic outcomes here otherwise, but it's clear that they were going up against the CIA.

microcolonel 6y ago

I'm really not fond of much of this sort of design. So many objects from the 60s and 70s were too focused on looking “cool”. The furniture strikes me as impractical and inhumane, and most of it was poor quality; I've seen a lot of it thrown out, and it just gets ratty and the laminates peel off if the climate control wasn't just right in whatever building it was in. The organization of controls is alright, and the SCADA-style visual HMI definitely looks intriguing, but I wouldn't say it's “beautiful” in any way I would recognize; and it's not really any different from the design language of similar-period U.S. control rooms (see examples below). You'll even note in my third example one of the images in the article isn't even of a soviet control room but rather a U.S. nuclear ship control room. This error seems to stem from this article being from a family of slapdash articles based on a webpage with a collection of control room photos [0] claimed to be Soviet; though they they note several corrections, the U.S. ship control room is still there, right at the top, taunting you. https://www.atomicheritage.org/sites/default/files/Three%20Mile%20Island%20Control%20Room.jpg https://www.atomicheritage.org/sites/default/files/Three%20M... https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2133/gallery-1436388894-monticello-training-simulator.jpg https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2... https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2133/gallery-1436388667-ns-savannah-control-room-md1.jpg https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2... [0]: http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2

dpflan 6y ago

This reminds of content on the site OObject. It has lists of interesting images of real-world things like control rooms, neutrino detectors, etc: like these 12 space inflatables: http://www.oobject.com/category/12-space-inflatables/ http://www.oobject.com/category/12-space-inflatables/, or these 12 mobile bridges.

VBprogrammer 6y ago

This is a bit of a random question but if anyone will know this answer I'm sure it's the HN hive mind. I was looking for those handle shaped switches, the tall ones you can wrap your whole fist around and activate. I've no idea if they have a specific name but I've not been able to find them in industrial parts catalogues but they are common in power station control rooms world wide by the looks of things. The third photo down has a lot of examples. Anyone have any idea if there is a specific name for those which I'm missing?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whatgoodisaroad 6y ago
I'm not an expert, but I like the question a lot. My best guess from some scrolling through industrial parts ordering websites is that they're called "pistol grip levers". Here's a couple examples found using that as a query: https://images.app.goo.gl/NRHyawiKxrsvZUhu5 https://images.app.goo.gl/NRHyawiKxrsvZUhu5 https://images.app.goo.gl/9qyhBAdqBy9Tqxxh9 https://images.app.goo.gl/9qyhBAdqBy9Tqxxh9
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  That would never have occurred to me as the key word, thanks!
intrepidhero 6y ago
Examples https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switches-relays/manual-standard-instrument-and-control-switches/series-24 https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switche... https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switches-relays/manual-standard-instrument-and-control-switches/type-w https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switche...
- watsocd 6y ago
  I think that was the GE model. Here is the Westinghouse version. https://nationalswitchgear.com/Products/WH-TYPE-W2-CIRCUIT-BREAKER-CONTROL-SWITCH-3-STAGE__013-385.aspx https://nationalswitchgear.com/Products/WH-TYPE-W2-CIRCUIT-B...

osamagirl69 6y ago

I always loved the look of older switchgear (as in power transmission, not network switches...). There are few examples given here, but some of the early gear genuinely wouldn't look out of place in a Frakenstein movie, like the original control room in at Battersea[1]. There is just something about a room covered in mechanical meters (not analog meters hooked up to a computer - literally mechanical computers hooked up with sense transformers to the high voltage lines) that read thousands of amps and 10s if not 100s of thousands of volts, often times with the megawatts of power traveling just on the other side of the panel! [1] http://benedante.blogspot.com/2015/05/battersea-power-station.html http://benedante.blogspot.com/2015/05/battersea-power-statio...

asteli 6y ago
Why no love for network switches? The old mechanical telephone exchange equipment is enormously satisfying to watch as well. https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs
- PoachedSausage 6y ago
  You can see them in action at Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings[0] which includes a working telephone exchange. About a mile from there is Droitwich Transmitting Station, an ArtDeco era station, see page 13 of [1] for exposed knife switches with 400V. [0] https://avoncroft.org.uk/avoncrofts-work/special-collections/ https://avoncroft.org.uk/avoncrofts-work/special-collections... [1] http://www.bbceng.info/Operations/transmitter_ops/Reminiscences/Droitwich/droitwich_calling2.pdf http://www.bbceng.info/Operations/transmitter_ops/Reminiscen...
  - barrkel 6y ago
    There's a functional mechanical switching relay, the kind triggered off of the clicks of a rotary dialing wheel, attached to two phones at the communication museum in Frankfurt https://www.mfk-frankfurt.de/ https://www.mfk-frankfurt.de/ and you can dial one phone from the other, and see the relays move as you enter the numbers.
- 6y ago

mikepurvis 6y ago

It's super cool to see the natural light (even skylights!) present in some of the rooms pictured. That would be unthinkable when glare from monitors is an issue, but makes total sense when everything is mechanical.

ur-whale 6y ago

From the good old days when complex systems were still mostly 'fits in head' and could be drawn on a wall ... beautiful.

yumraj 6y ago

What did the US control rooms from the same era look like? Any links to photos somewhere?

watsocd 6y ago
If you are talking pre-1970, they looked pretty much the same!

blattimwind 6y ago

These don't look much different from control rooms elsewhere from the same time? Heck, a lot of process control rooms still look a lot like this (and for good reason), just with a row or two of desks with screens in front and perhaps some screens sprinkled in here and there.

dylan604 6y ago
Hopefully, we won't start seeing these types of pictures with touchscreens in the consoles.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  I've got some bad news for you: https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

at_a_remove 6y ago

I feel a strange urge to rewatch Colossus: The Forbin Project.

technothrasher 6y ago
Have you read the books? They're even more of a hoot than the movie, which was actually a reasonably faithful retelling of the first book and enjoyable in its own right where it does diverge.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Yeah, about fifteen years back. They were rather enjoyable. Frankly I am surprised the movie got made. It's a little on the cerebral side. There's something about the cold, tense abstraction of it that matched these huge banks of somewhat cryptic control panels.

dvirsky 6y ago

I've had this idea for a long time but haven't gotten to actually doing it, to create a physical dashboard for production services using that aesthetic. Controlled by some Raspberry Pi or something, exposing an API, so I can hook it to real dashboard data for my work. With the API you bridge it to something like Grafana etc, to make the gauges and lights go, and for bonus points have some buttons do things like silence alerts, a big red button to roll back a deployment, and a missile-launch like button with a key you need to turn to deploy to production. The closest thing I've found on eBay that could be used as a base and was somewhat similar in design, was the control panel of a Soviet tank. But I think it will just have to be made from scratch using bought gauges and buttons.

jraines 6y ago
seconded! For me, I'd add that I want high quality, almost superfluously "chunky" ones -- think heavy, metal knobs that would get a positive grunt from Knob Feel[1]; switches with a physical resistance and heft that would be apropos for arming the Death Star laser. Hyperbole, but . . . the point is since I'm a total noob regarding this stuff, I wouldn't know where to start and would be nervous about buying them sight unseen without a good rec from someone knowledgable. Anyone have recommendations for where/how to look for such things online or in person (Bay Area)? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csrxxcLhW2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csrxxcLhW2c
- jaquers 6y ago
  Depends on how hard you wanna go. I dunno about any prebuilt console/control panels, but this guy built a whole A-10 cockpit by himself w/ RasbPI's ;) Pretty neat. I too want a control panel for my apps! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJq3cq9N6xYF0fAvTgpwoBg/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJq3cq9N6xYF0fAvTgpwoBg/vid... Edit: here's the build breakdown video: https://youtu.be/gDy10Wy4vw4?t=57 https://youtu.be/gDy10Wy4vw4?t=57
FiatLuxDave 6y ago
a big red button Back in the day when we were building our fusion reactor at Fiat Lux, we saved some money by buying an old Varian ion implanter (for the HV power supplies). We scrapped whatever good parts we could find off it. One of the goodies we got out of that thing was an absolutely huge (~5 inch diameter) red button with the word STOP on it. I always wanted to find a good use for that button, because it was just so amazing! But the thing about a fusion reactor, is that turning it off is pretty easy. The only thing that it might have been useful for was as an emergency stop button for the high voltage power supplies. And the only time that would have been useful, we didn't think to hook up the button beforehand. I like your idea. The aesthetics of web-based design seem rather confined to the screen, and bringing that control of information out of the screen sounds like a cool idea.

markvdb 6y ago

Watch Solaris [0] by Andrei Tarkovsky! It's an amazing Soviet era sci-fi movie. While the controls in there are obviously fake, it's interesting to look at how the director and his team imagined a space station to look in 1972. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%281972_film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%281972_film%29

pengaru 6y ago
There's also significant Russian space ship interiors shown in the 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel; 2010: The Year We Make Contact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact
- twoheadedboy 6y ago
  Also interesting to note that Tarkovsky hated 2001: A Space Odyssey.

ornornor 6y ago

Would love to find high resolution files for these, so they can be printed on a large format printer and hung to my wall. But the most I can find is 1000px Eire which is not enough to print larger than a postcard afaik

jdonaldson 6y ago

I see these rooms as part of the "aesthetics of control" that is common in a lot of communist and socialist cultures. The control and wall surfaces seem to almost celebrate the existence and relationship between component dials and indicators. Everything is highly centralized and intentional, and everything has a place and role. This notion of "everything has a place" is common in Soviet propaganda art as well. Some of these control surfaces are as much a communication medium as they are a functional one. In some cases I'm reminded of Egyptian hieroglyphics on walls. They are an act of communication as much as an act of engineering.

323454 6y ago

How did they test a control room like this, with so many inputs and outputs? It seems like there would be many opportunities to botch a contact or two.

vmh1928 6y ago

These look like pre-computer analog control rooms at large plants everywhere. There wasn't much automation then so the operators really had to know the process and how to manually start, stop and modify the behavior of whatever it was - chemicals, power, steel, etc..

Simulacra 6y ago

IIRC the photographed control rooms were often staged to look more high tech, and functional than they really were. Like new paint on a tank with no running engine.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

That is cool. Thanks for sharing it! I remember seeing this image in an older version of Don Norman's famous book The Design of Everyday Things:https://pictures.abebooks.com/JVALLES/3324134975.jpg https://pictures.abebooks.com/JVALLES/3324134975.jpg I think that was a US plant, but it was a cool idea.

supernova87a 6y ago

I think this is a world totally foreign to what HN's world is about, which is why it's so charming/aesthetically pleasing. (exaggerating a bit, but not that much) The reason that these switches and dials are ok to be hardcoded in metal and glass is that they (and the people) do the same thing, over and over, year after year, for decades at a time. Rinse and repeat. Versus the software world (or more accurately, the world of starting up new things and experiments within months) -- where you don't know what you're building yet, whether it will work, and if it will still exist next year.

atemerev 6y ago
There are many Russians on HN, myself included. So, not foreign to everyone. :)
- jscheel 6y ago
  I believe they meant functionally foreign, not culturally foreign.
- varjag 6y ago
  It's pretty foreign to Russians who grew up after Soviet collapse.
eecc 6y ago
I'm sure there's plenty of hardcoded panels that will be used to control the same process for decades also in the "western" world.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  No idea if they're doing the same thing in the military, but the ongoing rush to swap every damn button panel with a touchscreen is like a million disasters waiting to happen.
  - porknubbins 6y ago
    Not waiting to happen- Wasn’t there a US Navy ship that collided recently because the throttles were done in software?

c-smile 6y ago

USSR's Strategic Rocket Forces Control Rooms were also quite spectacular. It's a pity I do not have photos of them (for obvious reasons). This https://habr.com/ru/post/446098/ https://habr.com/ru/post/446098/ is close but not quite. The satellite state map (ru: Карта спутниковой обстановки) and rooms themselves were less fancy but more brutally-functional I would say.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Presumably USA (GB, DE, ???) have pictures!

aivisol 6y ago

The colors seem a bit exaggerated - these pictures were for sure originally mostly black and white, and whoever digitized them, added a lot of bright colors. In reality it was greyish as in the last picture from Chernobyl. I worked in a Soviet semi-military chip factory, it looked pretty much similar.

varjag 6y ago
Seconded. Grew up in USSR, been to industrial sites, they were as bleak as the everyday life. Remember Gibson's quote about "sky was the color of TV tuned to dead channel"? Well back home the whole manmade environment was like that.

chkaloon 6y ago

Awesome. Some observations/questions: - The control rooms probably required a good amount of maintenance themselves with all the mechanical switches, light bulbs, and paper loggers. - Why the white lab coats in a nuclear control room? - Would love to see the wiring behind these panels.

benburleson 6y ago

This one isn't even vintage, look at the flat monitor! https://main-designyoutrust.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/9-14.jpg?iv=146 https://main-designyoutrust.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/upload...

Dahoon 6y ago
Did the flat screen travel back in time?

isoprophlex 6y ago

Imagine the task of testing and maintaining all those dials and switches, and the data lines flowing into them... i can't even keep a hand full of shell scripts under control

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time, though only a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17332791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17332791

Biggleman 6y ago

Reading the comments it seems many people are in awe of the physical/analog meters and switches. Most the vessels sailing the oceans worldwide have similar looking controlrooms at the present time. As a former maritime engineer (advanced plumber at sea) I also would like to add that these physical/analog systems are in fact much more reliable and problems are easier to isolate. Please also keep in mind that at the locations where these controlrooms are implemented, the operators usually have more experience with mechanical stuff than PLC I/O's (those are done by contractors more often than not)

projektfu 6y ago
The digital dials also don’t give us the drama in the movies of tapping and unsticking the indicator to reveal the crisis situation. Although I wonder how common that cliché is in real life.
- basicplus2 6y ago
  one is watching all the readings together which "make sense". If one reading is out from where it should be relative to the others (for the given load/condition) it is investigated immediately so anomalies don't usually go unnoticed. One gets a sense.. a feeling for the whole.. like a simulation running in your own head to feel whats going on as well.
- nullc 6y ago
  My experience is that displays that silently stop updating is a more common property of digital readouts. :-/
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Indeed. Had a little surgery under general anesthesia a while ago. Shortly before that time Hewlett-Packard ran adverts in the mainstream press about Windows on Itanium, with that hospital as flagship case. Was my 2nd general anesthesia only, so i've been a little nervous because i don't like to be 'switched off'. Anyways, been in the preparation room on that rolling stretcher thing, got some IVs and electrodes while looking around. All very modern, many, many flat panel displays mounted on swivel arms from down the ceiling, showing and beeping my vital signs. Interesting for biofeedback, i thought. Got the mask on, got asked how i feel: 'pleasantly light'. Then all the beeping died, and all the screens froze. No reset, bluescreen, static or other unusual stuff. Just frozen. Heard a loud 'SHIT!' from behind, and the clacking of running shoes on the tiles. Clacking shoes came back in an instant and rewired me to some shoebox-thing covered in orange rubber with some mini-displays, knobs and sliders. 'How do you feel now?' i've been asked... Lifting the mask i only growled: 'very confidence inspiring...' 'Sleep deep sweety!' was the last thing i heard. Afterwards i had a surreal night at the 20ieth floor or so, with hot and cold shivers running up and down my spine and the harbour in my view. Anyways, next morning i asked the surgeon if i hallucinated that, and she answered: No, you didn't. But it was a first! I LOLd hard. edit: It had to happen this way/to me, because all my life i've been an open-source fanboi. Incompatible 'fates', so to speak :-)

andybak 6y ago

If you are a fan of switches, dials, chipped enamel paint, typed instruction sheets and a vague 50s aesthetic I can thoroughly recommend this Soviet themed space game (in VR): https://store.steampowered.com/app/579110/Interkosmos/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/579110/Interkosmos/

Taikonerd 6y ago
I was sure you were going to say Red Matter: https://store.steampowered.com/app/966680/Red_Matter/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/966680/Red_Matter/

_bxg1 6y ago

This aesthetic always reminds me, weirdly enough, of 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Several scenes go out of their way to look "high-tech", and as a child of the 90s it was one of my few exposures to what that meant in 1970s terms.

remarkEon 6y ago

Where do I find more content like this? I absolutely love looking at and reading about Soviet era tech - from nuclear reactors to their rockets. This is history I’m itching to get more of. I’d also love to see some interviews of the designers of these things, if they still exist. And yes I watched Chernobyl on HBO and loved it.

keiferski 6y ago
You might like http://www.CalvertJournal.com http://www.CalvertJournal.com
- remarkEon 6y ago
  This is great, thank you. Do you speak Russian? How long did it take you to learn?
  - keiferski 6y ago
    Nope, unfortunately I don’t (yet), although I know the Cyrillic alphabet from living in Belgrade for awhile, and I speak some Polish and Serbo-Croatian. I’d say learning Russian is easier than it seems, especially if you’re from a technical background and are comfortable with complex grammar structures. Probably on par with Latin in terms of difficulty.

colanderman 6y ago

Does anyone know what those large centrally-located circular grids in a few of the photos are?

pvarangot 6y ago
I think that represents the vessel of a nuclear reactor. The things inside the circle are probably representing clusters of rods or sensors spread around the vessel and show the state of different subsystems or parts of the reactor that need to be monitored.

martopix 6y ago

I've been to a 1950s decomissioned nuclear research reactor in Italy. It's still being monitored even if it's been turned off for years; with the addition of a few computers in a corner, the control room still looks pretty much like that. Printers instead of monitors, small bulbs instead of LEDs. At some point I stepped too closed to one of the desks, and an actual HORN went off.

janee 6y ago

I wonder how much design choice goes into the actual layout and controls being used on these, i.e. is it mostly physical hardware constraints that dictate the look or user interaction. Wondering because I see a lot of symmetry in the panels, but others seem very hodgepodge

01100011 6y ago

So what would you call this style? Relaypunk?

jpindar 6y ago
I've seen the terms dieselpunk and atompunk.

Ididntdothis 6y ago

This stuff used to look high tech. Now it’s computer screens that look high tech. I wonder what’s next. How will a control room in 50 years look or will there be no control rooms?

GloriousKoji 6y ago
It'll just be Alexa.
- bregma 6y ago
  "Alexa, open the pod bay doors." "I'm sorry, Dave, you know I can't do that."
TheCapn 6y ago
Personal opinion time. Aside from whatever modern screens become I can't see control rooms changing too much from where they are currently. What is likely to change is how equipment is approached within the field which may mean less reliance on control rooms in general. What I mean is, imagine a Google Glass style augmented reality goggle on your operators. As they walk the plant they can look at a process system and up blips the efficiency/product/status info in real time. If that guy is out there for maintenance he'd see the time since last fault, reason for fault, downtime, and whatever else you'd call relevant all in front of his eyes instead of having to radio with the controls operator for info.

WalterBright 6y ago

I always wanted my computer setup to look like that.

jgalt212 6y ago

2020 version, but even this is more for show than functionality. https://www.weytec.com/en/solutions/kvm-video-wall/ https://www.weytec.com/en/solutions/kvm-video-wall/

coryfklein 6y ago

What is the purpose of these rooms, what do they control, and how? Like, what information is it providing to the users, and what actions can they take by flipping the switches or turning the knobs?

sebastianconcpt 6y ago

Cool. I'd love to see us romantisizing their gulags too so we can all be inspired about designing the next generation and revolutionary progressive reeducation camps.

StellarTabi 6y ago
Whether it's Guantanamo Bay, legalized for-profit slave labor of prisoners, migrant toddler concentration camps, or mass incarceration of black people, we have plenty of our own gulags for you to romanticize.
- sebastianconcpt 6y ago
  Show me the numbers of the cases you alledge and the ones demonstrated by the communist movement and we might continue talking about it. If you put together the URSS and Mao's China that would be a good start.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

I’ve noticed that a lot of futuristic movies from the 1970’s (like on a space ship) feature rooms where the walls are completely covered in buttons and lights and stuff. From today’s perspective it looks ridiculous but when you see these Soviet control rooms you can see why people would have found it believable at the time.

analognoise 6y ago

I want a fully accurate simulation of sitting in front of one of these control panels, and a tutorial that explains what every single thing does. There's so damn many knobs and buttons, and I have no idea how to interpret what everything is. Surely someone else out there would pay for ReactorControlSimulator 2020?

jpindar 6y ago
There are reactor simulators, but the ones I've seen use ordinary GUIs. I haven't seen any that tried to be visually accurate.
- analognoise 6y ago
  Do you know the names of any, or where I could look? I mean what if you had a fully immersive, functionally and spatially accurate model of a reactor control room? How absolutely badass would that be?
  - jpindar 6y ago
    Here's a simple one [1] I had some fun with. (There's a Flash version too [2]). That one's just a game, so I have no idea how accurate it is. But if you search you might find something that's used in some university's nuclear engineering program or something like that. Very realistic ones used for actual training exist - this one [3] uses VR! - but those probably won't be online. [1] http://www.ae4rv.com/store/nuke_pc.htm http://www.ae4rv.com/store/nuke_pc.htm [2] http://esa21.kennesaw.edu/activities/nukeenergy/nuke.htm http://esa21.kennesaw.edu/activities/nukeenergy/nuke.htm [3] https://www.hitachi-hgne.co.jp/en/business/examination/simulator/index.html https://www.hitachi-hgne.co.jp/en/business/examination/simul...
    - analognoise 6y ago
      ...yeah so long story short, I have had the "How do you LEARN that?" thought before, which led me to some very niche companies that sell some (very awesome) educational kit. Like this: https://www.turbinetechnologies.com/educational-lab-products/turbojet-engine-lab https://www.turbinetechnologies.com/educational-lab-products... Maybe I could rig up an industrial-style control panel to an RPI and actually run a simulation on that. Why go virtual when you can build some cool boxes? I guess accuracy.

varjag 6y ago

To those interested in Soviet industrial design, a selection of Technical Aesthetics magazine issues dating back to 1960s: https://issuu.com/0083398 https://issuu.com/0083398 Be aware though that most of these concepts never materialised and actual aesthetics were rather grim for the most part.

DubiousPusher 6y ago

If you are ever in Berlin absolutely pay to go up the Soviet radio tower. The one that looks a bit like the Space Needle. The room you enter before you board the elevator is stunningly beautiful. In fact, generally it's a far more beautiful structure than most such towers. The interior design is especially impressive.

pippy 6y ago

My dad worked in a substation in the 90's which had the aesthetic of many of these pictures. Wall to wall switches which controlled the power distribution to half of New Zealand. Halfway through the 90's they upgraded to a few boring beige boxes in an office, and there was no need to use the manual switches. I loved going there because his workmates would give me pirated MS-DOS games on floppy disks, but the magic was lost. Later on they restructured all control through a single office in the capital and my dad lost his job.

alfiedotwtf 6y ago

Robert Moog had nothing on these Soviet beauties

golemotron 6y ago

They remind me of Wes Anderson's sets.

Robotbeat 6y ago

I have seen some 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s era control rooms in old wind tunnels from NACA/NASA, and many of them look like this. My favorite is where they indicators are in the shape of a big flow diagram so they're self-describing in function as well.

anyfoo 6y ago

We are physical beings, and even as someone who has enjoyed working with computers since a very young age in the 80s, I always felt that the more things are virtualized into intangible data and user interfaces, the less interesting and real things feel.

FillardMillmore 6y ago

Am I crazy, or does the fifth to last photo have a Windows XP screensaver? Windows XP was released in 2001 and the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 - what gives? Am I mistaken?

john2x 6y ago
It's on an LCD panel, so new equipment brought into an old room.

artsyca 6y ago

Nowadays these rooms would be staffed by brocoders in t shirts where once it was scientists in lab coats go figure

bsaul 6y ago

Having recently worked on creating monitoring dashboard for some backend, there are a few things that strikes me : - The indicators are physically disposed in a way to represent the physical location of what they are monitoring. It helps understand what it is measuring (instead of just adding a label.. or putting all the "tension" indicator in the same row, for example). - Next to the indicators are the buttons to physically interact with that part of the system. This is very logical : you see the red light, and right below it you have the button to shut the thing off. I don't know of any infrastructure monitoring dashboard system that works this way. I wonder how that would translate in our world of virtual instances. But i'm pretty sure there's something to take inspiration from here.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Part of me has always wanted to work in a control room, doing things with buttons and switches and the like. Or operate heavy machinery. But the other part knows it'll take a lot of training initially (domain specific), followed by what likely is a lot of boredom. Working on a PC as a developer with internet access gives a lot more stimulation and variation in my day to day job.

7leafer 6y ago

The last photo of Chernobyl reactor 4 control room is the most reassuring of them all.

bregma 6y ago

Everything needs more Nixie tubes.

GeekyBear 6y ago

I've always been fond of the Battersea electric power station in England. >The station's design proved popular straightaway, and was described as a "temple of power", which ranked equal with St Paul's Cathedral as a London landmark. In a 1939 survey by The Architectural Review a panel of celebrities ranked it as their second favourite modern building. The A Station's control room was given many Art Deco fittings by architect Halliday. Italian marble was used in the turbine hall, and polished parquet floors and wrought-iron staircases were used throughout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station It's amazing that they went so far out of their way to make an industrial plant beautiful, inside and out.

Foivos 6y ago
This one looks very similar to the C&C red alert power plant [1]. I wonder if this not a coincidence. [1] https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Power_plant_(Red_Alert_1) https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Power_plant_(Red_Alert_1)

Nginx487 6y ago

In Soviet Russia, room controls you (Sorry, just a tradition:)