The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)

It'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-806...

- And here's Dampierre, the second oldest, which I was lucky enough to visit: 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.

I love these!

Highly relevant: "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green"

Link: https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960 (3 months ago)

I 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

20+ 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.

As 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)

Having 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.

The 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-...

(2018)

Previously,eg:

2022, 139 points, 99 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30581867

2020, 677 points, 268 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23334339

Etc

This reminds me of "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green":

[0] https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960

Each 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.

I 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.

So true. I'm quite lucky too. This is the control room I grew up with: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/98/1c/c7/981cc7aae4635e372d1db7f90...

To 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.

Battersea 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.

I like how some of them are/were recently still in use as evidenced by the modern computer monitors.

We should reintroduce chef's hats back in the control rooms. Switching with real finesse!

Gorgeous 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.

I 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?

I used to work for a guy who said at that company we made stuff that "looked like the soviets designed it in the 70s"

Some of the consoles had neon tubes for number display. They emit warm orange lights when triggered by ~300Vdc.

I don’t find this beautiful at all tbh. Looks fiddly

This 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=l3L7aXoFAIo

Did the little hats do anything? Or were they just for show? I also wonder if they were only worn when the cameras came out.

I 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 :)

Not great, not terrible.

Only 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.