13 ms·

A collection of Soviet control rooms (2017)

369 points by irtefa 4y ago

tabtab 4y ago
What's the sun-shaped thing in photo #2?
- themanmaran 4y ago
  I think it's a graphical representation of the RBMK control rods [1]. It's also in the last two images. These are replaceable control rods that were laid out in a circular pattern in the RBMK class reactors. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    It's not nearly enough rods for an RBMK. Those were huge. And they had nothing outside the circle. Probably another type of nuclear facility. Maybe a medical isotope reactor? The second last photo looks like an RBMK or at least something that size.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      They had channel-type reactors before the RBMK (essentially earlier generations of the design) that were smaller. Could be what these are.
    - vilhelm_s 4y ago
      If you click on the picture it says it's the Kola nuclear power plant, which is a VVER-440 reactor. Searching for other VVER pictures, e.g.[1], confirms that they match. [1] http://www.nucleartourist.com/areas/vver440a.htm http://www.nucleartourist.com/areas/vver440a.htm
- pugworthy 4y ago
  Status of nuclear control rods I imagine?
- hydrogen7800 4y ago
  There are a few pictures with this arrangement. My guess is these are nuclear reactor control rooms, and those representthe control rod arrays.
- mdcds 4y ago
  #2 links to atomic-energy.ru So it's probably nuclear plant control console and I'm guessing nuclear fuel rods are represented by a dot inside the "sun" and rods themselves are suspended in some sort of a circular enclosure
- dale_glass 4y ago
  This one? https://www.atomic-energy.ru/news/2012/05/21/33562 https://www.atomic-energy.ru/news/2012/05/21/33562 That's Кольская АЭС, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Nuclear_Power_Plant This is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER
xattt 4y ago
The most visually appealing part is the use of colours that you wouldn’t expect on an industrial control panel. The first picture shows a shade of blue, as well as red and yellow symbols for whatever they might mean. Also, approximately fifteen images down shows a switch control panel for a two-platform, triple-track Moscow Metro station (Полежаевская) that was intended to have a branch line, but mothballed due to future ridership projections.
- chemeng 4y ago
  Always felt bad when replacing these old control rooms, there is a certain beauty and elegance to their design that is missing in modern HMIs. This sort of color coding is common in industrial settings and definitely was on panelboards of the era. It would be really interesting if the color coding seen here in any way aligns with ANSI/ASME A13.1.
  - xattt 4y ago
    I doubt regarding ANSI, given that Soviet versus US conventions were somewhat divergent. I don’t have specific examples, but I would look at the design of Soyuz in comparison to the design of Apollo.
pugworthy 4y ago
There is a Star Trek bridge vibe to those circular control rooms. I wonder if there's a tradeoff point where if you have less than some number of people, the circular design is more optimal to enable communications between people and access to data. At some point with more people (and more data) it becomes untenable to keep the circular design and you go more linear, such as the NASA mission control room.
sharkjacobs 4y ago
good zoom backgrounds
allanrbo 4y ago
Was just watching the Andor Star Wars series last week. Probably the artists took some inspiration from the soviet control rooms.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  I have to say, the control room of the ship crashed on Kenari was stunning.
wkat4242 4y ago
I wonder why the operators are always wearing lab coats and butcher's hats. Are they afraid they'll get hair in the switches?
- rumdonut 4y ago
  I’m not sure what these rooms control, but it’s possible the control room is simply part of a greater facility that has a mandate for this. Which makes sense, since there’s something to control here that may be more sensitive / dangerous than the control room itself.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    A lot of them are nuclear plants. The ones with the big circular display panels on the wall are: that's the reactor core. They require lab/clean room type of dress so that it's easier to tell if you have any foreign material on your clothes.
- papito 4y ago
  Probably because nuclear plant workers were thought of as lab workers, and those wore these uniforms as well. Not sure if it was also a precaution against hair and threads falling into critical equipment.
- tjohns 4y ago
  Nuclear power plant. Workers would wear those uniforms while on site so that they don't track any stray radioactive particles home on their street clothes.
- Steve44 4y ago
  Slightly different environment, but my dad was a service engineer in the 1960-1980s mainly working on coin counting equipment. His workwear for customer sites was a white coat over his suit. That was fairly normal back then so probably kept to traditions in industry. I've nothing to add about the hat though. I've not got a photo of him at work, but this is him wearing one of his old & dirty coats after he retired. https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecargill/52576937191/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecargill/52576937191/
yamtaddle 4y ago
Can you even imagine how relaxing it would be to have the same interface to your systems, every day, with all the parts in one physical location and never moving? Learn it once, then nothing changes for years and years, or if it does it's usually adding on, not replacing or re-arranging existing stuff? Man, that would be nice.
- Wistar 4y ago
  I used to be an editor in an online digital video suite. All real time and all dedicated controls. GVG Kadenza, Abekas and Accom digital disk recorders, D1 and digi-beta, GVG 141 edit controller. Rarely even looked at the controls, could adjust two or more parameters simultaneously—super important, especially when the parameters affected each other as they were adjusted. Muscle memory ruled—like playing a piano. Plus the physical motion, flying through the settings, looked impressive to the clients and, at those rates which could reach several hundred dollars an hour, that performance, the show, was important.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  Use boring software. Software that releases every few months instead of weeks or even days. Software that is well documented and has an active supportive community.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Works when you're picking the software. Less so in most companies where you spend 75% of your time interacting with half-broken, constantly-changing, barely-interoperable programs and web-services that someone else chose.
  - topspin 4y ago
    I've had an experience like this recently in Java. One of the most storied and heinous areas of Java development: so-called "web services." This is the whole SOAP+WSDL hell that did incalculable damage to the Java language and can be credited with the rise of REST as a sane alternative. I had a system I needed to integrate into a workflow engine. I looked at the available interfaces and, noticing that the SOAP API was the most feature complete of the bunch, I figured I'd give it a try. Guess what; no one is iterating on this stuff anymore. The standards specifications quit changing years ago so the targets aren't moving. The libraries are feature complete, solid and efficient and only infrequent bug fixes are appearing now. It works wonderfully. So now you can grab a WSDL, stick on the resource path, add a code generation step to the build and it all "just works." The endless backflips and somersaults it took to get this stuff working back in the day have been evolved out of the stack and we're left with simple, type-safe RPC over HTTP, which is all most people ever really wanted.
elzbardico 4y ago
The biggest problem with the Soviet Union was Brezhnev not being able to keep with his economic reforms after 1974. Seeing Russia nowadays it is sometimes hard to believe that once they were the second economy in the world, before being removed from this post by Japan. Had they enacted Chinese style reforms they could have avoided the whole disastrous 90s
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Even with market reforms, I think they would have fallen victim to the addiction to energy revenues that's poisoned so many energy exporting economies. Breeds corruption, croneyism, and discourages investment in other industries. Maybe Norway is the only exception.
- LBJsPNS 4y ago
  They tried. Gorbachev wanted to turn Russia into another Sweden. Bush the Elder convinced the World Bank not to loan to them unless they agreed to impose neoliberal economic policies. Which led to oligarchy. And then Putin.
  - taxicabjesus 4y ago
    What is "And then Putin" supposed to mean? Perhaps you mean that Mr. Putin is implementing Gorbachev's goal of "turning Russia into another Sweden", which was blocked by Bush the Elder and the collective west's looting of Russia in the post-Soviet period? My dad hates Mr. Putin because the television tells him Putin is a war criminal. Other sources say Mr. Putin is the moderate who keeps the extremists in the Kremlin under control. That Russia fought in Ukraine with 9 fingers tied behind its back until it realized that there was no way to get the West to respect Russia's red line of Ukraine not being admitted into NATO. Someone on twitter said Russia's transition from 'preserve Ukraine's Soviet-era infrastructure' to 'destroy NATO's proxy army' was in September [0]. Russia didn't gave Ukraine's power grid the "shock and awe" treatment until November. [0] https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/turning-point https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/turning-point & various tweets - https://twitter.com/imetatronink https://twitter.com/imetatronink "[Putin] was a Lt. Col doing a mundane job in Dresden, Germany when the wall came down. He came back to St. Petersburg, Unemployed. He drove a taxi for a while. Got a job with Mayor Sochek's office, and anybody who dealt with him... said he was the most honest man he ever dealt with. ... He inherited a nation that had just undergone a decade of devastation, brought on by the west. But did he hate the west? No. He actually started his first years in office, trying to court the west, trying to come up with normalcy in economic relations. ... 2007 speech to the Munich security conference... The reality that the west is anti-Russia." Scott Riter, https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1583749384486891520 https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1583749384486891520 (emphasis added) "Vladimir Putin is a Russian patriot, a moderate European-leaning leader who rescued Russia from the abyss. in Russia, he is not considered charismatic. He is supported because of Russia's economic and spiritual recovery. The Neocons hate Putin because they hate Russia." - https://twitter.com/DietHeartNews/status/1605275170138214425 https://twitter.com/DietHeartNews/status/1605275170138214425 Thought this video on Putin was interesting: https://rumble.com/vxm7sv-president-2015-documentary.html https://rumble.com/vxm7sv-president-2015-documentary.html Just curious what you meant.
canadianfella 4y ago
bloomingeek 4y ago
I've operated in boiler room offices at large plants for almost 40 years, the mimic panel is a very valuable tool. With miles of piping carrying water and steam for various reasons, the panels help keep it all straight in your mind. These panels are in hospitals, chemical plants, data centers, Navy ships and subs and many other places similar to where I work. I can't imagine what it feels like to work in a nuke facility. I do work with some men who worked on subs, their training was astounding.
- sizzle 4y ago
  Working with some SCADA control unit in a factory right now. It’s all digital and keeps changing configuration. Wish there were physical buttons.
- i_am_proteus 4y ago
  After working with mimic panels for years on steam plants, I got exposed to an older, pre-mimic-panel design. I appreciated the mimic panel's beauty for the first time on that day.
- zhrvoj 4y ago
  I was maintaining instrumentation is similar control rooms. The man behind panel. Petrochemical industry, recorders, indicators, alarms, tranducers, pneum. controllers. Mix of pneumatic and electronic technology (thermionic valves mostly). US technology from 50's/60's and it looked the same like this. Remember Taylor 700T chopper stabilized thermocouple transducer, Honeywell, Fisher instrumentation...
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Did you ever work with the Honeywell TDC-3000 ?
    - zhrvoj 4y ago
      No. Honeywell TDC's were in other plants - polyethylene, polystyrene. This was old olefin plant. Not any kind of control logic, no computers, no scada. Just control loops for flow, presssure, temperature on the field - with control room indications, and/or PI/PID controllers in the control room. So we could adjust PID loops from control rooms. And most important - there was man in the middle, and his logic! Later I lead maintenance on steam generation plant, and there we also didn't have any visualization of process, just bunch of logic cards in two racks, cards full of CMOS 4000 IC! I loved it. We searched for logic faults looking at the bad xeroxed paper logic circuit schematics!! Checking inputs from field, and deducing why output is not ok, and some valve not actuating. Changing IC's, or repairing cold junctions. People knowing chemical proccess were crucial!
rpmw 4y ago
Reminds me of the Homer Simpson's control room, #5 especially so
kjellsbells 4y ago
Id love to know what Edward Tufte thinks of this sort of design. I get very strong small-multiples vibes from seeing all those needle-style meters, and I assume, given the stakes, that the Soviets applied some psychology and human information design principles to them. Or maybe they just hacked it together, who knows.
Aardwolf 4y ago
I agree it's really aesthetic (I love the circle arrangements with indicator lights occurring in several in them, I assume it's something reactor related). Are such control rooms still made today, or is it all digital screens?
- sizzle 4y ago
  Remind me of Homer Simpson working at the Springfield nuclear site
- folmar 4y ago
  Digital screens, but they mimic the mimics shown here.
bmitc 4y ago
I worked at a fusion company and would have loved to be involved in the control room design. People generally aren't interested in designing rooms like this. People are happy with just big monitors at desks likely displaying hard to interact with interfaces that are ever changing. One engineer even wanted to install physical barriers to keep people away from stations.
alexellisuk 4y ago
Who spotted the GitHub commit graph towards the end of the page? Looks like they were busy.
Humphrey 4y ago
We still have control rooms like this (I think in use) in Tasmania Australia. They sometimes have open days for our Hydro Power Plants, and they are some of the most interesting tours around. The one I visited was like using a time machine to travel back to the age of Art Deco. Obviously some more modern control systems have been added, but the Art Deco vibe is still there!
- Arrath 4y ago
  I was lucky enough to tour a lot of hydroelectric dams around the western US as a child, thanks to frequent roadtrips and a dad who could talk his way into nearly any place, and a more permissive security culture[1]. As you say, a lot of the control rooms are beautiful in a certain functional way. [1]Another thing ruined by 9/11.
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Soviet control rooms and CRAY-1 aesthetics is what's missing in my life
jamestimmins 4y ago
I keep wondering if there's a market to build things in this style. Either smart-home/Raspberry Pi controls or something similar.
- chunkles 4y ago
  I love the concept of a raspberry pi controlled smart home with this type of control panel.
  - jamestimmins 4y ago
    Right?? So glad I'm not alone in this.
akoster 4y ago
Great find! Reminds me of this 2020 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339 https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-control-rooms/ https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-con...
smm11 4y ago
My mind sees a very small green control panel with a Soviet knock-off iPhone beneath it.
pram 4y ago
They’re amazing. I can’t imagine the process to ensure all the metrics are correct. Seems like you’d have to check every single little dial for accuracy. Insane considering there’s hundreds. I assume there was one of these rooms for every reactor too, crazy.
- klabb3 4y ago
  There was an experiment that I forgot the origin of, but interesting nonetheless: A hospital used some standardized table on print papers as a medical journal summary. Doctors were apparently very quick at extracting relevant information. Some software engineers came along, and designed a computer system. Instead of this big table, they decided to put the most relevant information and display it first, like a list. This reduced visual clutter, and most non-doctors could now read it better. However, the doctors took longer to parse it than before, and didn’t like the new system. And they were the primary user after all. It turned out that the doctors had memorized were everything was supposed to be. With the new system, there was no way of finding a specific piece of information quickly, even though the total amount was reduced. The interesting thing here is that all solutions have hidden features, that are useful but we don’t even know that it’s there even if (and perhaps especially if) we use it every day. It seems as if our brains are extremely capable of spatial memory. Of course, there are more such examples, for instance fine motor skills (how would you like a keyboard which rearranged the keys depending on their frequency of use?) The reason why some of us find these control rooms almost soothing is precisely because modern technology have depraved us of these neglected features: things are in the same place, physical dials, everything is predictable. This is closely related to my hate against anything “smart”. In adding features (sometimes for good reason) product managers and engineers don’t consider that they’re removing hidden features, often related to predictability, that are much more valuable than the features they added.
VBprogrammer 4y ago
Is it just me that cannot look at one of these photos without trying to work out what each switch does and what each guage is measuring?
- TuringTest 4y ago
  I'd say most of us with technical minds will do that. Problem is, figuring out most of them depends on having the thorough user manual at hand to read each gauge or button's purpose; AND understanding what that purpose means, which depends on having an engineering education from the same era when they were built.
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    I'm not sure you need the manual and an education from that era. When I've read everything I can find about a subject it's surprising how much you can understand. The challenges are often that so many of the systems are kinda uninteresting (gland steam pressure on a turbogenerator for example), only used in specific circumstances (fire control panels) or duplicated (ship controls often have 4+ controls which turn the azipods, not to mention the repeated controls on the bridge wings). The last time I deducted too much time to this endeavour I started to understand the ballast controls on a O-class submarine...
29athrowaway 4y ago
What are the hats for?
josefrichter 4y ago
What was the name of the discipline of designing these control rooms? I guess it wasn’t “user experience” or “unused interface” back then..
Aeolun 4y ago
It feels like I’m looking at a physical representation of my metrics dashboards. I can only imagine the issue would be much harder to trace down if anything was off though.
Fuzzwah 4y ago
I want to mess around in an oculus quest 2 version of these. Flicking switches and causing meltdowns just to hear and see the alarms firing.
- ianklug 4y ago
  You might enjoy Please Don't Touch Anything [0], a VR puzzle game about operating a cryptic control panel like this. [0] https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2706567592751319/ https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2706567592751319/
- jimmySixDOF 4y ago
  Mimic controls are so possible in VR with almost unlimited enhancements. I know they have existing simulators where you stand at a mock control desk in a headset running test cases, but, at some point, it will just make sense to use XR enhanced 3D control centers.
twilightzone 4y ago
These really make you appreciate the transistor, don’t they.
earthscienceman 4y ago
I have posted this here before but I had the opportunity to live on Soviet/Russian icebreakers in the arctic for a period of time. Here's a small snippet of my photos, including of the control panels in the engine room and in the ship's bridge. Such an interesting perspective on utilitarianism: https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7 https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7
- q-base 4y ago
  Wow - how did you manage to get that opportunity?
adav 4y ago
Not Soviet per se... Londoners can visit Battersea Power Station Control Room B. It's a rather similar aesthetic. Just ask at the bar to have a look and they'll let you through a little gate.
osigurdson 4y ago
These would make great Zoom/Teams backgrounds!
unrealp 4y ago
Space ambiance! this is one topic that really interests me - how spaces create psychological states that are unique and satisfying. there is a similar set of spaces - liminal spaces (google image search this term to see examples) - these are similar spaces - like corridors which have a unique feel.
Animats 4y ago
Here are some pictures of a General Railway Signal NX system board, for train dispatching.[1] This was the first intelligent user interface. From 1924. Previous systems had "interlocking", to prevent collisions. Early systems had big levers and mechanical bars and blocks to prevent setting up conflicting routes. Signals had to be set to stop on all ways into a switch before you could throw the switch. Later systems added train detection, and you couldn't physically move the levers if a train was in the way. But this just prevented errors. It didn't help with the job. NX (for eNtry eXit) was the next step. When a train was approaching an interlocking (a set of switches and tracks under one controller), lights on the board showed train presence. The dispatcher then pushed a button ahead of the train, indicating that they wanted to dispatch the train coming in on that track. That's when the magic happened. Lights then lit up on all the tracks where it was possible to exit the interlocking. This took into account conflicting routes already set and trains already present. The system routed around conflicting traffic if possible. Only the reachable exits lit up. Then the dispatcher would push one of the lit exit lights, and the system took over. All the un-selected exit lights went out. The selected route lit up and was locked in. Commands were sent out to the switches along the route to physically move the switches. Lights flashed on the board as the switches moved, and when contacts at the switch had verified that the switch was in the correct position and locked, the flashing stopped. Then, with all switches set and locked, the signals changed to allow the train to proceed. As the train passed through, the track segments and switches behind it were released and could be used for other traffic. All automatically. This system was so good there are still working installations, a century later. [1] http://rrsignalpix.com/grsnx.html http://rrsignalpix.com/grsnx.html
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwit89023 4y ago
Can we stop it with the soviet union nostalgia? Considering that it's being used to fuel a russian imperialist invasion in eastern Europe, it leaves a bad taste. No longer fun.
- schizo89 4y ago
  Tasty, and that's it!
bmitc 4y ago
Does anyone have any references to research or studies discussing the design and approach of control rooms? Research on human factors, human machine interfaces, and cognitive load? Fro example, I assume the airplane and astronaut industries have thought about this a lot.
berniedurfee 4y ago
This would make an amazing escape room style experience.
thy77 4y ago
How far from the camera should I be for one of these to look good on zoom?

369 points by irtefa 4y ago

tabtab 4y ago

What's the sun-shaped thing in photo #2?

themanmaran 4y ago
I think it's a graphical representation of the RBMK control rods [1]. It's also in the last two images. These are replaceable control rods that were laid out in a circular pattern in the RBMK class reactors. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
- wkat4242 4y ago
  It's not nearly enough rods for an RBMK. Those were huge. And they had nothing outside the circle. Probably another type of nuclear facility. Maybe a medical isotope reactor? The second last photo looks like an RBMK or at least something that size.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    They had channel-type reactors before the RBMK (essentially earlier generations of the design) that were smaller. Could be what these are.
  - vilhelm_s 4y ago
    If you click on the picture it says it's the Kola nuclear power plant, which is a VVER-440 reactor. Searching for other VVER pictures, e.g.[1], confirms that they match. [1] http://www.nucleartourist.com/areas/vver440a.htm http://www.nucleartourist.com/areas/vver440a.htm
pugworthy 4y ago
Status of nuclear control rods I imagine?
hydrogen7800 4y ago
There are a few pictures with this arrangement. My guess is these are nuclear reactor control rooms, and those representthe control rod arrays.
mdcds 4y ago
#2 links to atomic-energy.ru So it's probably nuclear plant control console and I'm guessing nuclear fuel rods are represented by a dot inside the "sun" and rods themselves are suspended in some sort of a circular enclosure
dale_glass 4y ago
This one? https://www.atomic-energy.ru/news/2012/05/21/33562 https://www.atomic-energy.ru/news/2012/05/21/33562 That's Кольская АЭС, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Nuclear_Power_Plant This is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER

xattt 4y ago

The most visually appealing part is the use of colours that you wouldn’t expect on an industrial control panel. The first picture shows a shade of blue, as well as red and yellow symbols for whatever they might mean. Also, approximately fifteen images down shows a switch control panel for a two-platform, triple-track Moscow Metro station (Полежаевская) that was intended to have a branch line, but mothballed due to future ridership projections.

chemeng 4y ago
Always felt bad when replacing these old control rooms, there is a certain beauty and elegance to their design that is missing in modern HMIs. This sort of color coding is common in industrial settings and definitely was on panelboards of the era. It would be really interesting if the color coding seen here in any way aligns with ANSI/ASME A13.1.
- xattt 4y ago
  I doubt regarding ANSI, given that Soviet versus US conventions were somewhat divergent. I don’t have specific examples, but I would look at the design of Soyuz in comparison to the design of Apollo.

pugworthy 4y ago

There is a Star Trek bridge vibe to those circular control rooms. I wonder if there's a tradeoff point where if you have less than some number of people, the circular design is more optimal to enable communications between people and access to data. At some point with more people (and more data) it becomes untenable to keep the circular design and you go more linear, such as the NASA mission control room.

sharkjacobs 4y ago

good zoom backgrounds

allanrbo 4y ago

Was just watching the Andor Star Wars series last week. Probably the artists took some inspiration from the soviet control rooms.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
I have to say, the control room of the ship crashed on Kenari was stunning.

wkat4242 4y ago

I wonder why the operators are always wearing lab coats and butcher's hats. Are they afraid they'll get hair in the switches?

rumdonut 4y ago
I’m not sure what these rooms control, but it’s possible the control room is simply part of a greater facility that has a mandate for this. Which makes sense, since there’s something to control here that may be more sensitive / dangerous than the control room itself.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  A lot of them are nuclear plants. The ones with the big circular display panels on the wall are: that's the reactor core. They require lab/clean room type of dress so that it's easier to tell if you have any foreign material on your clothes.
papito 4y ago
Probably because nuclear plant workers were thought of as lab workers, and those wore these uniforms as well. Not sure if it was also a precaution against hair and threads falling into critical equipment.
tjohns 4y ago
Nuclear power plant. Workers would wear those uniforms while on site so that they don't track any stray radioactive particles home on their street clothes.
Steve44 4y ago
Slightly different environment, but my dad was a service engineer in the 1960-1980s mainly working on coin counting equipment. His workwear for customer sites was a white coat over his suit. That was fairly normal back then so probably kept to traditions in industry. I've nothing to add about the hat though. I've not got a photo of him at work, but this is him wearing one of his old & dirty coats after he retired. https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecargill/52576937191/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecargill/52576937191/

yamtaddle 4y ago

Can you even imagine how relaxing it would be to have the same interface to your systems, every day, with all the parts in one physical location and never moving? Learn it once, then nothing changes for years and years, or if it does it's usually adding on, not replacing or re-arranging existing stuff? Man, that would be nice.

Wistar 4y ago
I used to be an editor in an online digital video suite. All real time and all dedicated controls. GVG Kadenza, Abekas and Accom digital disk recorders, D1 and digi-beta, GVG 141 edit controller. Rarely even looked at the controls, could adjust two or more parameters simultaneously—super important, especially when the parameters affected each other as they were adjusted. Muscle memory ruled—like playing a piano. Plus the physical motion, flying through the settings, looked impressive to the clients and, at those rates which could reach several hundred dollars an hour, that performance, the show, was important.
RedShift1 4y ago
Use boring software. Software that releases every few months instead of weeks or even days. Software that is well documented and has an active supportive community.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Works when you're picking the software. Less so in most companies where you spend 75% of your time interacting with half-broken, constantly-changing, barely-interoperable programs and web-services that someone else chose.
- topspin 4y ago
  I've had an experience like this recently in Java. One of the most storied and heinous areas of Java development: so-called "web services." This is the whole SOAP+WSDL hell that did incalculable damage to the Java language and can be credited with the rise of REST as a sane alternative. I had a system I needed to integrate into a workflow engine. I looked at the available interfaces and, noticing that the SOAP API was the most feature complete of the bunch, I figured I'd give it a try. Guess what; no one is iterating on this stuff anymore. The standards specifications quit changing years ago so the targets aren't moving. The libraries are feature complete, solid and efficient and only infrequent bug fixes are appearing now. It works wonderfully. So now you can grab a WSDL, stick on the resource path, add a code generation step to the build and it all "just works." The endless backflips and somersaults it took to get this stuff working back in the day have been evolved out of the stack and we're left with simple, type-safe RPC over HTTP, which is all most people ever really wanted.

elzbardico 4y ago

The biggest problem with the Soviet Union was Brezhnev not being able to keep with his economic reforms after 1974. Seeing Russia nowadays it is sometimes hard to believe that once they were the second economy in the world, before being removed from this post by Japan. Had they enacted Chinese style reforms they could have avoided the whole disastrous 90s

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Even with market reforms, I think they would have fallen victim to the addiction to energy revenues that's poisoned so many energy exporting economies. Breeds corruption, croneyism, and discourages investment in other industries. Maybe Norway is the only exception.
LBJsPNS 4y ago
They tried. Gorbachev wanted to turn Russia into another Sweden. Bush the Elder convinced the World Bank not to loan to them unless they agreed to impose neoliberal economic policies. Which led to oligarchy. And then Putin.
- taxicabjesus 4y ago
  What is "And then Putin" supposed to mean? Perhaps you mean that Mr. Putin is implementing Gorbachev's goal of "turning Russia into another Sweden", which was blocked by Bush the Elder and the collective west's looting of Russia in the post-Soviet period? My dad hates Mr. Putin because the television tells him Putin is a war criminal. Other sources say Mr. Putin is the moderate who keeps the extremists in the Kremlin under control. That Russia fought in Ukraine with 9 fingers tied behind its back until it realized that there was no way to get the West to respect Russia's red line of Ukraine not being admitted into NATO. Someone on twitter said Russia's transition from 'preserve Ukraine's Soviet-era infrastructure' to 'destroy NATO's proxy army' was in September [0]. Russia didn't gave Ukraine's power grid the "shock and awe" treatment until November. [0] https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/turning-point https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/turning-point & various tweets - https://twitter.com/imetatronink https://twitter.com/imetatronink "[Putin] was a Lt. Col doing a mundane job in Dresden, Germany when the wall came down. He came back to St. Petersburg, Unemployed. He drove a taxi for a while. Got a job with Mayor Sochek's office, and anybody who dealt with him... said he was the most honest man he ever dealt with. ... He inherited a nation that had just undergone a decade of devastation, brought on by the west. But did he hate the west? No. He actually started his first years in office, trying to court the west, trying to come up with normalcy in economic relations. ... 2007 speech to the Munich security conference... The reality that the west is anti-Russia." Scott Riter, https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1583749384486891520 https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1583749384486891520 (emphasis added) "Vladimir Putin is a Russian patriot, a moderate European-leaning leader who rescued Russia from the abyss. in Russia, he is not considered charismatic. He is supported because of Russia's economic and spiritual recovery. The Neocons hate Putin because they hate Russia." - https://twitter.com/DietHeartNews/status/1605275170138214425 https://twitter.com/DietHeartNews/status/1605275170138214425 Thought this video on Putin was interesting: https://rumble.com/vxm7sv-president-2015-documentary.html https://rumble.com/vxm7sv-president-2015-documentary.html Just curious what you meant.

canadianfella 4y ago

bloomingeek 4y ago

I've operated in boiler room offices at large plants for almost 40 years, the mimic panel is a very valuable tool. With miles of piping carrying water and steam for various reasons, the panels help keep it all straight in your mind. These panels are in hospitals, chemical plants, data centers, Navy ships and subs and many other places similar to where I work. I can't imagine what it feels like to work in a nuke facility. I do work with some men who worked on subs, their training was astounding.

sizzle 4y ago
Working with some SCADA control unit in a factory right now. It’s all digital and keeps changing configuration. Wish there were physical buttons.
i_am_proteus 4y ago
After working with mimic panels for years on steam plants, I got exposed to an older, pre-mimic-panel design. I appreciated the mimic panel's beauty for the first time on that day.
zhrvoj 4y ago
I was maintaining instrumentation is similar control rooms. The man behind panel. Petrochemical industry, recorders, indicators, alarms, tranducers, pneum. controllers. Mix of pneumatic and electronic technology (thermionic valves mostly). US technology from 50's/60's and it looked the same like this. Remember Taylor 700T chopper stabilized thermocouple transducer, Honeywell, Fisher instrumentation...
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Did you ever work with the Honeywell TDC-3000 ?
  - zhrvoj 4y ago
    No. Honeywell TDC's were in other plants - polyethylene, polystyrene. This was old olefin plant. Not any kind of control logic, no computers, no scada. Just control loops for flow, presssure, temperature on the field - with control room indications, and/or PI/PID controllers in the control room. So we could adjust PID loops from control rooms. And most important - there was man in the middle, and his logic! Later I lead maintenance on steam generation plant, and there we also didn't have any visualization of process, just bunch of logic cards in two racks, cards full of CMOS 4000 IC! I loved it. We searched for logic faults looking at the bad xeroxed paper logic circuit schematics!! Checking inputs from field, and deducing why output is not ok, and some valve not actuating. Changing IC's, or repairing cold junctions. People knowing chemical proccess were crucial!

rpmw 4y ago

Reminds me of the Homer Simpson's control room, #5 especially so

kjellsbells 4y ago

Id love to know what Edward Tufte thinks of this sort of design. I get very strong small-multiples vibes from seeing all those needle-style meters, and I assume, given the stakes, that the Soviets applied some psychology and human information design principles to them. Or maybe they just hacked it together, who knows.

Aardwolf 4y ago

I agree it's really aesthetic (I love the circle arrangements with indicator lights occurring in several in them, I assume it's something reactor related). Are such control rooms still made today, or is it all digital screens?

sizzle 4y ago
Remind me of Homer Simpson working at the Springfield nuclear site
folmar 4y ago
Digital screens, but they mimic the mimics shown here.

bmitc 4y ago

I worked at a fusion company and would have loved to be involved in the control room design. People generally aren't interested in designing rooms like this. People are happy with just big monitors at desks likely displaying hard to interact with interfaces that are ever changing. One engineer even wanted to install physical barriers to keep people away from stations.

alexellisuk 4y ago

Who spotted the GitHub commit graph towards the end of the page? Looks like they were busy.

Humphrey 4y ago

We still have control rooms like this (I think in use) in Tasmania Australia. They sometimes have open days for our Hydro Power Plants, and they are some of the most interesting tours around. The one I visited was like using a time machine to travel back to the age of Art Deco. Obviously some more modern control systems have been added, but the Art Deco vibe is still there!

Arrath 4y ago
I was lucky enough to tour a lot of hydroelectric dams around the western US as a child, thanks to frequent roadtrips and a dad who could talk his way into nearly any place, and a more permissive security culture[1]. As you say, a lot of the control rooms are beautiful in a certain functional way. [1]Another thing ruined by 9/11.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

Soviet control rooms and CRAY-1 aesthetics is what's missing in my life

jamestimmins 4y ago

I keep wondering if there's a market to build things in this style. Either smart-home/Raspberry Pi controls or something similar.

chunkles 4y ago
I love the concept of a raspberry pi controlled smart home with this type of control panel.
- jamestimmins 4y ago
  Right?? So glad I'm not alone in this.

akoster 4y ago

Great find! Reminds me of this 2020 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339 https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-control-rooms/ https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-con...

smm11 4y ago

My mind sees a very small green control panel with a Soviet knock-off iPhone beneath it.

pram 4y ago

They’re amazing. I can’t imagine the process to ensure all the metrics are correct. Seems like you’d have to check every single little dial for accuracy. Insane considering there’s hundreds. I assume there was one of these rooms for every reactor too, crazy.

klabb3 4y ago
There was an experiment that I forgot the origin of, but interesting nonetheless: A hospital used some standardized table on print papers as a medical journal summary. Doctors were apparently very quick at extracting relevant information. Some software engineers came along, and designed a computer system. Instead of this big table, they decided to put the most relevant information and display it first, like a list. This reduced visual clutter, and most non-doctors could now read it better. However, the doctors took longer to parse it than before, and didn’t like the new system. And they were the primary user after all. It turned out that the doctors had memorized were everything was supposed to be. With the new system, there was no way of finding a specific piece of information quickly, even though the total amount was reduced. The interesting thing here is that all solutions have hidden features, that are useful but we don’t even know that it’s there even if (and perhaps especially if) we use it every day. It seems as if our brains are extremely capable of spatial memory. Of course, there are more such examples, for instance fine motor skills (how would you like a keyboard which rearranged the keys depending on their frequency of use?) The reason why some of us find these control rooms almost soothing is precisely because modern technology have depraved us of these neglected features: things are in the same place, physical dials, everything is predictable. This is closely related to my hate against anything “smart”. In adding features (sometimes for good reason) product managers and engineers don’t consider that they’re removing hidden features, often related to predictability, that are much more valuable than the features they added.

VBprogrammer 4y ago

Is it just me that cannot look at one of these photos without trying to work out what each switch does and what each guage is measuring?

TuringTest 4y ago
I'd say most of us with technical minds will do that. Problem is, figuring out most of them depends on having the thorough user manual at hand to read each gauge or button's purpose; AND understanding what that purpose means, which depends on having an engineering education from the same era when they were built.
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I'm not sure you need the manual and an education from that era. When I've read everything I can find about a subject it's surprising how much you can understand. The challenges are often that so many of the systems are kinda uninteresting (gland steam pressure on a turbogenerator for example), only used in specific circumstances (fire control panels) or duplicated (ship controls often have 4+ controls which turn the azipods, not to mention the repeated controls on the bridge wings). The last time I deducted too much time to this endeavour I started to understand the ballast controls on a O-class submarine...

29athrowaway 4y ago

What are the hats for?

josefrichter 4y ago

What was the name of the discipline of designing these control rooms? I guess it wasn’t “user experience” or “unused interface” back then..

Aeolun 4y ago

It feels like I’m looking at a physical representation of my metrics dashboards. I can only imagine the issue would be much harder to trace down if anything was off though.

Fuzzwah 4y ago

I want to mess around in an oculus quest 2 version of these. Flicking switches and causing meltdowns just to hear and see the alarms firing.

ianklug 4y ago
You might enjoy Please Don't Touch Anything [0], a VR puzzle game about operating a cryptic control panel like this. [0] https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2706567592751319/ https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2706567592751319/
jimmySixDOF 4y ago
Mimic controls are so possible in VR with almost unlimited enhancements. I know they have existing simulators where you stand at a mock control desk in a headset running test cases, but, at some point, it will just make sense to use XR enhanced 3D control centers.

twilightzone 4y ago

These really make you appreciate the transistor, don’t they.

earthscienceman 4y ago

I have posted this here before but I had the opportunity to live on Soviet/Russian icebreakers in the arctic for a period of time. Here's a small snippet of my photos, including of the control panels in the engine room and in the ship's bridge. Such an interesting perspective on utilitarianism: https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7 https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7

q-base 4y ago
Wow - how did you manage to get that opportunity?

adav 4y ago

Not Soviet per se... Londoners can visit Battersea Power Station Control Room B. It's a rather similar aesthetic. Just ask at the bar to have a look and they'll let you through a little gate.

osigurdson 4y ago

These would make great Zoom/Teams backgrounds!

unrealp 4y ago

Space ambiance! this is one topic that really interests me - how spaces create psychological states that are unique and satisfying. there is a similar set of spaces - liminal spaces (google image search this term to see examples) - these are similar spaces - like corridors which have a unique feel.

Animats 4y ago

Here are some pictures of a General Railway Signal NX system board, for train dispatching.[1] This was the first intelligent user interface. From 1924. Previous systems had "interlocking", to prevent collisions. Early systems had big levers and mechanical bars and blocks to prevent setting up conflicting routes. Signals had to be set to stop on all ways into a switch before you could throw the switch. Later systems added train detection, and you couldn't physically move the levers if a train was in the way. But this just prevented errors. It didn't help with the job. NX (for eNtry eXit) was the next step. When a train was approaching an interlocking (a set of switches and tracks under one controller), lights on the board showed train presence. The dispatcher then pushed a button ahead of the train, indicating that they wanted to dispatch the train coming in on that track. That's when the magic happened. Lights then lit up on all the tracks where it was possible to exit the interlocking. This took into account conflicting routes already set and trains already present. The system routed around conflicting traffic if possible. Only the reachable exits lit up. Then the dispatcher would push one of the lit exit lights, and the system took over. All the un-selected exit lights went out. The selected route lit up and was locked in. Commands were sent out to the switches along the route to physically move the switches. Lights flashed on the board as the switches moved, and when contacts at the switch had verified that the switch was in the correct position and locked, the flashing stopped. Then, with all switches set and locked, the signals changed to allow the train to proceed. As the train passed through, the track segments and switches behind it were released and could be used for other traffic. All automatically. This system was so good there are still working installations, a century later. [1] http://rrsignalpix.com/grsnx.html http://rrsignalpix.com/grsnx.html

deleted 4y ago

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throwit89023 4y ago

Can we stop it with the soviet union nostalgia? Considering that it's being used to fuel a russian imperialist invasion in eastern Europe, it leaves a bad taste. No longer fun.

schizo89 4y ago
Tasty, and that's it!

bmitc 4y ago

Does anyone have any references to research or studies discussing the design and approach of control rooms? Research on human factors, human machine interfaces, and cognitive load? Fro example, I assume the airplane and astronaut industries have thought about this a lot.

berniedurfee 4y ago

This would make an amazing escape room style experience.

thy77 4y ago

How far from the camera should I be for one of these to look good on zoom?