6 ms·
The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- zyndct 3mo agoSome of the consoles had neon tubes for number display. They emit warm orange lights when triggered by ~300Vdc.
- stymaar 3mo agoIt's not specific to the Soviet world, any control room built before computers looks like that. The examples I'm familiar with is nuclear power plants from the 70s: - here's Bugey, the oldest active nuclear plant in France: https://cdn-s-www.leprogres.fr/images/5A6732BE-29F9-43FA-8060-96C126EB4640/NW_raw/la-salle-des-commandes-permet-de-controler-la-centrale-du-bugey-a-distance-photo-edf-cnpe-bugey-1622657524.jpg https://cdn-s-www.leprogres.fr/images/5A6732BE-29F9-43FA-806... - And here's Dampierre, the second oldest, which I was lucky enough to visit: https://www.larep.fr/photoSRC/Gw--/centrale-nucleaire-industrie-electrique-edf-dampierre-photos_5561495.jpeg https://www.larep.fr/photoSRC/Gw--/centrale-nucleaire-indust... I'm sure their's plenty of other control rooms in the same style, for subways, water networks, electricity grid, train networks, scattered around the western world.
- mysecretaccount 3mo agoThere is a specific Soviet design sensibility in the post in question that is lacking in those images.
- stymaar 3mo agoI'm pretty sure it's just the old photo look (plus the fact that in the current version, part of the space have been colonized by computers, which kind of ruins the mood).
- bayindirh 3mo agoThat's not true. If you look at Chernobyl Family[1]'s videos, modern Russian war equipment internals and their color choices, there's a longstanding research and deliberate choice behind them. Soviets/Russians seems to select the seafoam or tealish green colors as backgrounds since these colors create a calmer environment which helps when everything else is pressuring you. The most interesting thing is public ISS telemetry page at [2]. Go to Russian version and the color scheme changes to a bluish one which they also use with some of the interiors/control panels Russians use in similar equipment. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@ChernobylFamily https://www.youtube.com/@ChernobylFamily [2]: https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/ https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/
- mysecretaccount 3mo agoIs there some sort of cultural revisionism where we are expected to deny the existence of e.g. the Soviet design sensibility because of contemporary politics? What a bizarre response.
- mrweasel 3mo agoWell, how about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant#/media/File:%C3%85gestaverket_1966.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant#/med... This is from Swedens Ågesta Nuclear Plant, the first in the country. I don't really get why you'd need all the used floor space. That seems to really be the key difference from those early control rooms and more modern ones. The old ones had you walking around and the new ones are designed to keep you seated. Still, it seems like the old ones had an excessive amount of floor space.
- varjag 3mo agoHeat dissipation and gracious distances for installation and servicing.
- roryirvine 3mo agoGood point - all those incandescent lamps must have put out huge amounts of heat. Similarly, the stereotypical giant plasma displays in old-school telco/ISP NOCs made for a properly toasty environment. I know one ISP in the early 2000s who had to bring in a spare datacentre aircon unit to reinforce the puny office system which was completely unable to cope by itself.
- masfuerte 3mo agoIt has Playtime vibes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playtime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playtime
- justsomehnguy 3mo agoThat's because you look at it with a modern eye. It required a lot of wires back in the day. A lot.
- Lio 3mo agoVery true. It reminds me of the aesthetic[1] of German musician Hainbach[2]'s studio. He makes use of a lot of early test equipment. The look is very functional but not ugly. It's not colourful but everything is well made because it's made for professionals. I see the same thing in mid-century BBC studios. -- 1. Which I love. 2. https://www.hainbachmusik.com/ https://www.hainbachmusik.com/
- Monotoko 3mo ago> It's not colourful but everything is well made because it's made for professionals. Nuclear plants, planes, etc use colour so you can differentiate very quickly under pressure. Much easier to shout "THE RED BUTTON!!!" than "The second button five down from the left!"
- stymaar 3mo agoSorry to break a myth, but you'll never hear someone about “THE RED BUTTON ” in a nuclear control room. There's way too much buttons that happens to be red for that. Nuclear operators are highly trained professionals (two years of training in France, for instance) who know their machine by heart, so what you'll hear will be much more specific like “isolate vapor generator number 3”. Also, the way it's organized it will very rarely be orders, but instead description if what each of them are doing while following the safety procedure, to keep other crew members aware of what they're doing. So no “Press that god damn red button!” but instead “I'm bypassing turbine through GCTA and moving to step 342.B.3”.
- wwind123 3mo agoA few years ago I listened to a seminar where a few real professional doctors discussed the hospital scenes in movies or TV shows. They mentioned that those dramatic and chaotic operation room scenes where the doctor yells commands with a loud voice look so fake to them. In a real operation room, everyone (including the doctor and the nurses) is highly trained, works in tandem calmly and efficiently -- there's never a need to raise voice.
- raffael_de 3mo agocontrol rooms are central to controlling expensive systems serving important purposes and whose failure might be highly dangerous. that's why function is the essential and indisputable primary goal. accordingly their design is all about "form follows function". why form that follows function is so distinctively appealing and aesthetic is up to debate ... but empirically it is.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoFrench operators wearing jeans, Soviets wearing white coats and sailor's caps.
- KludgeShySir 3mo agoIt gives me strong impressions of the aesthetic in the show Maniac (~2018)
- beltranaceves 3mo agoAs always, big industrial control rooms look amazing. But wow, that way of showing ads is one of the worst I've ever seen. (I really do need adblock on mobile ig)
- stymaar 3mo agoFirefox mobile + ublock origin is the way.
- johnny_canuck 3mo agoI use brave on mobile and didn't notice a thing
- SoftTalker 3mo agoOrion browser works great for me on my iPhone.
- lll-o-lll 3mo agoHaving worked on SCADA software in the past, I find the evolution of the control room UX fascinating. You can see in these pictures, where every input and output is a real physical thing, just how much density of information was required for Operators to process. As we moved to computer screens representing the same, those original screens would represent these control room layouts faithfully (and you can understand why, training an operator must have taken ages; retraining is not palatable). Over time, multiple “control rooms” coalesced into one room of computer screens with fewer operators and yet an exponential increase in information to process. So how on earth can a person keep track of it all? Intervene promptly when things go wrong? Determine what needs attention right now vs something that can wait? As a problem space, the seemingly simply world of designing SCADA UI is quite fascinating.
- unsnap_biceps 3mo agoHas the required operating information increased exponentially? My sense is that computers lowered operating information density by merging multiple signals into fewer, more complex ones.
- elzbardico 3mo agoBasically you had way more people involved in operations. Automation was always sold as labor-saving.
- mellosouls 3mo ago(2018) Previously,eg: 2022, 139 points, 99 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30581867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30581867 2020, 677 points, 268 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339 Etc
- galaxyLogic 3mo agoI always wonder when I see a picture of a cockpit of an airplane how many meters there are. Don't know why they need so many, what meters do you need to fly a plane?
- elzbardico 3mo agoNavigation equipment, radios, autopilot, auto-throttle, multiple engines with multiple parameters to be controlled, multiple hydraulic systems, pressurization and environmental controls. Consider that for each jet engine you have different displays for RPMs, temperatures, oil pressure. Things add up fast.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoModern airliners do away with most dedicated instrumentation (a few critical ones such as airspeed, compass heading, and altitude might still have analog backups) and use a few screens to display all of this. Computers monitor most of the parameters and issue alerts when anything is out of normal.
- padolsey 3mo agoI love these! Highly relevant: "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green" Link: https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms-were-seafoam https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960 (3 months ago)
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- waltbosz 3mo agoalso see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green
- ademarre 3mo agoThis reminds me of "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green": [0] https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms-were-seafoam https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960
- jschveibinz 3mo agoThank you for the rabbit hole
- avian 3mo agoEach time I see beauty in old machinery I think about the recent IEEE article that started with something like "AI designs aren't limited by outdated concepts like simplicity and aesthetics." and remember that there is someone that goes to a museum and sees inefficiences and time wasted on unnecessary detail instead of inspiration.
- Leonard_of_Q 3mo agoAI designs will start to look more (biologicaly) evolved, less intentionally designed. Museums, especially older ones are full of jars with pickled specimens, bags of bones and tubes and strings which somehow seemed to fulfil their purpose. Humans will study the objects to find out what makes them work. You can imagine a scenario where the pervasive use of AI has dumbed down humanity so much that they can only stare at the intricate designs while marveling at the omniscient creator which must have been behind it all.
- iancmceachern 3mo agoI used to work for a guy who said at that company we made stuff that "looked like the soviets designed it in the 70s"
- fuzzfactor 3mo agoI like the top picture where it looks like the chefs are watching the controls while the engineers are down in the cafeteria enjoying a lunch break :)
- paradoxyl 3mo agoGorgeous pictures, but I dislike the "chef hats" in the first image. It makes them seem less like top-notch scientists and more like short-order cooks.
- tclancy 3mo agoMy reaction was, “This is what I imagined McDonalds University to be when I was a kid.”
- barrkel 3mo agoI think these control rooms were superior in some respects to modern software system observability. - modelling the system rather than implementation (system status rather than many individual service statuses) - supporting causal reasoning: the control flow on top means you can trace failure modes back, visually; software systems typically only model their own ontology, and you need to look somewhere else for the next abstraction down - surface state first rather than time series; a pretty graph is nice to look at, but for actionability sometimes what you need is the flashing red light - prioritize first-out indicator. In a complex system with lots of alerts, the most important diagnostic alert is often the first one - the rest are downstream and contribute to alert fatigue, despite them probably being more important business metrics
- j4k0bfr 3mo agoThese older systems design principles have really scratched a part of my brain and I'm keen to keep pulling that thread. Do you have any recommended readings on the topic?
- ramses0 3mo agoSCADA. Mechanism Design. ANSI/ISA-18.2-2016. NASA "Power of Ten" Safe Coding. "The Pit of Success". Poka Yoke. Kaizen/Seiton. "The Five S's". Fuben-eki ("The Benefits of Inconvenience").
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- i_am_a_peasant 3mo agoI don’t find this beautiful at all tbh. Looks fiddly
- sequoia-capital 3mo agoSo true. I'm quite lucky too. This is the control room I grew up with: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/98/1c/c7/981cc7aae4635e372d1db7f90c5a4d6c.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/98/1c/c7/981cc7aae4635e372d1db7f90...
- cfl2001 3mo ago20+ years ago, I worked in several reactor control rooms. The light quality astonished me the first time I entered: it was bright, shadowless, and flicker-free. The entire ceiling acted as a light source; the whole area was covered in fluorescent tubes, positioned beneath a grid similar to those photographers use to control light spill from softboxes. The only way to see a direct light source was to look straight up. To prevent flickering, they used three-phase mains power, connecting one-third of the lamps to each phase. Modern office lighting is far inferior. Almost every time I look up in the office, I am met with a harsh glare piercing my eyes.
- Mistletoe 3mo agoDid the little hats do anything? Or were they just for show? I also wonder if they were only worn when the cameras came out.
- portly 3mo agoWe should reintroduce chef's hats back in the control rooms. Switching with real finesse!
- manoDev 3mo agoNot great, not terrible.
- diego_moita 3mo agoThis reminds me a classic joke: "Fortran was invented by IBM. That is why you get a compiler error when you write Fortran without wearing a blue necktie". Also, you might find interesting some movies by a French comedian called Jacques Tati. He made fun of these aseptic "modern" environments in movies like "Playtime" [1] and "My uncle". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrYB8hgyq4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrYB8hgyq4s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3L7aXoFAIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3L7aXoFAIo
- alansaber 3mo agoBattersea power station in London has preserved chunks of the old control room. Sprawling mechanical complexity certainly has appeal, but we all know frutiger aero is the ultimate aesthetic.
- andrewl 3mo agoTo me they look oppressive and bleak. They are interesting, to be sure. But I don’t find them beautiful. And aesthetics are subjective, of course. I can well believe others find them beautiful.
- waltbosz 3mo agoI like how some of them are/were recently still in use as evidenced by the modern computer monitors.
- Hnrobert42 3mo agoI use Firefox Focus on mobile which blocks ads automatically. This was a cool site, so I thought it only fair to visit it with ads permitted. My god. I didn't even know autoplaying, unmuted ad videos are a thing.
- ogurechny 3mo agoThis is a repost of a repost (of another repost in certain cases). JPEG resizing and quality strongly suggests it for some images. You can visit the (linked but not annotated) blog post to get to the original sources. https://web.archive.org/web/20190308120957/http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 https://web.archive.org/web/20190308120957/http://blog.prese... Most of them come from press tours for bloggers that were really fashionable 15 years ago. Scrolling through the archives of, say, Lana Sator blog on your own would be a much better experience.
- timonoko 3mo agoOnly allowed color: vomit-green. Strangely repulsive. I do not think this is experience induced, because I loved my green XB3-bicycle from Kharkov Bicycle Factory.
- slicktux 3mo agoThe San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station had a similar vintage looking control room. You can see a sad but cool image of the room as it’s being demolished on this nbc article. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/demolition-of-iconic-containment-domes-at-san-onofre-to-start-next-year/3940282/?amp=1 https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/demolition-of-iconic-...
- Lockal 3mo agoIt is not really "vintage" for modern Russia. For example, search Combined Heat and Power control room images: https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B0+%D1%83%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F+%D1%82%D1%8D%D1%86 https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%... - barely any computer screen. I've seen one of those fully functional on 2010; with no plan for modernization (it just works).