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).
I’ve long had the thought in my head of going on a different kind of “cruise” where instead of getting on a cruise ship I manage to make my way onto a container ship or another type of work boat.
Getting to spend time on a Soviet ice breaker sounds even more exciting!
Going with a US outfitter is the most efficient option, but is also expensive. A poor student with little money and a lot of time could try joining a research team as an unpaid helper. It has been years since I toyed with the idea, but when I did there were university groups of all sorts, from military-funded data collectors to environmentalists. University teams are often interested in saving limited grant money by paying fewer workers. This is a lot less glamorous option and one would need to do some work, but the ticket becomes free.
I went to the Antarctic on a (refitted) soviet era ice-hardened (anything up to ~1m thickness) ship a few years back, as a paying tourist - a lot of the more niche operators who go to more remote corners run old Soviet ships - in fact, the only other ship that we saw in a month down there was a similar vintage soviet ship - Akademik someone-or-other.
The bridge had largely been refitted to modern standards and design, but the engineering control room was a thing of beauty - blinkenlights and dials and levers and buttons like goddamned pornography. The aesthetic (cream, green, black, chrome, domed lamps, tactile light-up buttons) was almost identical to that of a soviet missile silo I visited a few years back near Pervomaisk, Ukraine - which isn’t altogether surprising, as they were likely built in the same shipyard - soviet control bunkers were basically submarines turned on end, mounted on shock absorbers, and shoved down a silo.
Fun aside: our guide was one of the button-men back in the day. He explained that two keys, spaced eight feet apart, had to be turned simultaneously to arm the launch controls. He then explained and demonstrated that the slot in the tip of the flag standard which stood proudly behind the control chairs was designed and curved such that you could hook the key in the control lock through it, sit down at the other key, hold the end of the standard, and give it a pull, which would turn the “out of reach” key as you turned yours. It was “officially unofficially official” in his (translated) words, to be done in the case of the incapacitation of the other launch control officer.
> hold the end of the standard, and give it a pull, which would turn the “out of reach” key as you turned yours. It was “officially unofficially official” in his (translated) words, to be done in the case of the incapacitation of the other launch control officer.
This is a reason why USSR never adopted a end-to-end PAL like US did. Union's PAL system only worked on the command chain level, and the remote launch command was only one of multiple options.
They feared that the US may attack the PAL link component, and it will prevent the launch. The same reason lead to mobile launchers being made one man operable, though even colonel level officers had little knowledge of the system operation besides "press buttons like on this picture if given code word blah-blah"
It is good that now we have Ukrainian launch officers that can divulge information on Soviet launch tech. The part of strategic rocket forces that stayed in Russia managed to keep secrecy perfect for 30 years.
> It is good that now we have Ukrainian launch officers that can divulge information on Soviet launch tech. The part of strategic rocket forces that stayed in Russia managed to keep secrecy perfect for 30 years.
Why is it good ? So that your country thinks they can "win" a nuclear war ?
In a perfect world there wouldn't be any nuclear weapon. But in our imperfect world I'd rather have MAD than some yahoo thinking first strike is a good idea because they think they can stop the opposite side from retaliating.
"Nuclear parity is a condition at a given point in time when opposing forces possess offensive and defensive systems approximately equal in overall combat effectiveness"
World with nukes appeared to be more peaceful than without. While nuclear superpowers have parity, conventional war between them is impossible. This is the reason why we we never had WWIII between Soviets/Russia/China and US/NATO.
However, other measures like economical pressure and trade wars, espionage, proxy wars, and now informational war are still ongoing. I would leave as a statement that all these things are "much better" than real World War.
This is a reason why USSR never adopted a end-to-end PAL like US did.
There's a lot of information that the USA only nominally had PAL. The military implemented PAL on orders from the President, but then set the PAL code to 00000000.
What you’re saying is that there was a deliberate mechanism by which a single man could turn both keys and trigger a launch? That’s WarGames-level horrifying.
Incidentally I’ve always deeply respected Soviet officers for being very level-headed in situations that should have precipitated a ‘retaliatory’ launch, such as during the Cuban missile crisis and when one of their satellites mistook glints off lakes for the IR sigantures of a first strike launch.
>What you’re saying is that there was a deliberate mechanism by which a single man could turn both keys and trigger a launch? That’s WarGames-level horrifying.
Isn't the opposite mostly a security theater? As if a single person couldn't do it with some ingenuity anyway even on mechanisms that need two persons?
For starters, they could always point a gun to another person to make them turn the other key...
If you point a gun at someone they don't necessarily do as you wish. In military situations the personnel are trained (some might say brainwashed) to sacrifice themselves; which should be relatively easy when the alternative is that all your family die from radiation poisoning (or obliteration if they're lucky).
Arguably in some regimes chain-of-command is a greater incentive than a gun as retaliation against families (for "treason"/cowardice) seems reasonably common.
It's still a mystery to me whether this country had actual industrial design in the Soviet era—I guess it should've had economic research at least. But Soviet industrial looks were mostly regarded as ‘ugly but functional’ by the folks.
IMO it's only now that pre-digital hardware looks appealing, through the nostalgia for ‘simpler times’. What with onscreen controls emulating bulky knobs, buttons and displays of e.g. hifi equipment and 80s' synths.
I was going to say something similar. The panels do look nice but don't seem much different than those of the West pre-digital era. I seem to recall that the nuclear ice breakers were a point of pride for the USSR, so it's likely that the panels received an above-average level of attention and are atypical.
I don't think that the appeal is just nostalgia though. Modern control rooms and equipment racks just don't have the pretty-looking hardware that the older ones do. Control rooms usually have big displays with network diagrams on them that aren't sexy anymore, along with a bunch of workstations. Equipment racks usually are dominated by LCDs and membrane switches that look a bit chintzy, no big pushbuttons in chromed bezels anymore.
I've heard the US Navy is going away from screens; they were a bad idea, cause a lot of confusion and they're reverting back to analog switchgear because of the tactile feedback.
Ugly but functional might be the way of the future!
Touchscreens are just evil in any sort of physically involved environment, e.g. a car or even a kitchen stove. You can have ‘good-looking and functional’ (with physical controls too), but touchscreens in such a setup are rather ‘good-looking and dysfunctional’.
Game controllers are the perfect example of ergonomically-tuned physical controls with sleek looks. And afaik the US military uses Xbox controllers in drone control or something like that.
I recall that there were some pretty long threads here after the US warship hitting some commercial vessel. The big issue wasn't using a screen but that the designers had taken advantage of having screens to create a multi-functional interface so one station could serve different functions, or functions could be moved between stations. Flexible, but confusing. I think the move is not to analog control, but back to single-purpose controls. Also, even if mechanical controls replace touchscreens, I'm sure that there will still be an optical encoder and field bus behind everything.
Why not physical analogue controls that are motorised like in some aeroplane controls. You can turn the dial, or the computer can turn the dial - and supposedly (737Max aside) allow physical control to override.
Being able to replace a physical station seems a great benefit in a warship.
I think of it this way: tactile controls for operation, read-only screens for situational awareness, touch or keyboard/mouse for configuration. Just don't put them on real-time critical paths.
There was no design,as a subject, in Soviet Union. It all fell under industrial engineering blanket and the looks were just a part of the entire process to get a working product. Architecture, however,was somewhat unique in this aspect,as there was more expressiveness in some works(non residential only,though).
This is not true. There was a whole institute doing industrial design: the Soviet Scientific Research Institute of Industrial Aesthetics [1].
That institute was also publishing a monthly "Technical Aesthetics" magazine from 1964 to 1992.
Ok,fair enough, looks like they were taking it more serious than I ever thought.
It's quite interesting that they called it Industrial Aesthetics.
Also,the Russian Wikipedia article is extremely detail on what was going on there:
https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%...
Oh heck, I've seen pics of the PT minivan back in the 90s, in the stash of either ‘Tech for the Youth’ or ‘Science and Life’. Its look has stuck with me as the embodiment of Soviet retrofuturism, which is what I actually remember as daring Soviet tech design.
I kept wondering a bit if RAF-2203 took some cues from the PT. Other RAF minivans seem to be obviously inspired by VW Type 2.
I don't think there's any such thing as "no design" (though I understand you to mean the academic subject).
All design evokes something. Colours, font, margin and spacing, edges and borders - it all evokes some things that came before it more than others, and the relationship with the human body and its feeling of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, kinematics - whether controls are pointy or smooth, hard or soft, stiff or slick or springy, continuous or with detents - it all adds up to an aesthetic.
You can't help but have design. You know when things don't "feel" right. When something feels flimsy instead of solid; when it's haphazard instead of regular. And when the design is exceptionally poor, chaotic, that too is a design - a kind of mad, insane design, or primitive and naive, unskilled - it always evokes something.
I meant it as an academic subject. In terms of colour,shape,form, function,and other,so called design properties, were well understood, however not always applied, especially in consumer products.
> the looks were just a part of the entire process to get a working product
Well, that would be enough for ‘industrial design’ as a discipline—the question is whether ‘the product does not cause suffering from looking at it and touching it’ was considered a part of the criteria for ‘working’.
Seen that, yeah. Alas it has an obvious flair of a ‘photoshop design’ with no connection to any engineering work.
The ortholinear keyboard would be notable, if again it had any basis in reality aside from the ‘йцукенг’ Cyrillic layout—which however has punctuation cast away beyond reach.
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.
I think it's somewhat similar to the cookie-cutter houses in the USA: The best possible accommodation for the masses at the least cost possible.
I grew up in one of those blocks till age of 15. They are not all the same but they come in a few types and few sizes. It's strangely comforting to have the house out of the equation, everybody has the same house so it's not a matter of discussion. That said, for some strange reason it was customary to show all the rooms to the people who visit you for the first time.
These blocks are ugly and are getting uglier as they decay but there are many people who "made it" and still live in these blocks and park their Bentleys in the parking that 30 years ago was full of Lada, Moskwitsch and Trabants.
Also, not everyone "made it" so some floors are renovated others are in desperate situation.
They don't necessarily get uglier, as many are insulated/painted/renovated/etc. and become quite presentable, especially if they become a bit more individualized.
But one thing that is noticeable that blocks built earlier (50s/60s) are usually better than those built later (70s/80s). Better quality material, more thought to living spaces around them, playgrounds, etc.
Sad to see the decline. I still don't fully understand - what went so wrong after Khrushchev? Did the leaders just get too old and they couldn't trust new blood in the upper echelons of the party?
(Note: obviously things were bad before Khrushchev too - Stalin was horrible and committed genocide, but he was more purgy and less stagnant than Brezhnev and Andropov)
There is a great movie about a guy that drunkenly gets deposited in the wrong city, which has the same street names, apartments and so on. Hilarity ensues when he's dropped off in front of what he thinks is his house on his street:
A funny Russian movie called the irony of fate actually highlights the phenomenon of duplicated buildings and neighbourhoods. A guy gets home drunk at the wrong apartment which looks identical, even the surrounding streets and names. a good watch
The buildings,while slightly different in design,are very similar to what a lot of countries in Europe were building at the time to meet the needs of growing population. The biggest mistake the urban planners did was underestimation of how many cars there will be in the future. That's why it's so common to have a 12 story building with only 20 or so parking lots.
[Edit]
It's more interesting what happened at the end of the soviet occupation,which is usually less visible to foreign visitors: planning permissions for residential properties were relaxed,which meant that there was no longer any limitations on what kind of houses people could build. And most went absolutely bananas. People started building large,most often tasteless buildings with weird features. Fuel was dead cheap so nobody cared too much about insulation and etc.An example built in 1995:
https://m.aruodas.lt/namai-kaune-zaliakalnyje-kalnieciu-g-pa...
Swathes of such houses were built.
A lot of people did self builds and etc.
In a period of 10-15 years,a new class of rich and super rich was formed. This was followed by formation of gated communities, identical to those in all western countries. There, houses do look very different:
https://m.aruodas.lt/namai-vilniuje-valakampiuose-lauru-g-pa...
The argument could be made, that cookie cutter apartments can be interpreted as “white cubes”[0] - and those are a big thing in the art world, since they allow the art to shine and the room design stays out of the way.
You had all the modern comfort at a reasonable price.
Of course most of these buildings aged terribly and now they're mostly inhabited by very poor people. Now you see these decrepit, often crime-ridden "cités" and you wonder why anybody ever thought that was a good idea.
Pretty much every country has it. Khrushchev implemented their mass deployment in the Soviet Union to stem a housing crisis (I think maybe even as one of his earliest actions as chairman...it's been a while since I read about it in an architecture magazine). Once you recognize the form, you see it everywhere, even outside the Soviet bloc; in the US, Canada, etc. The political influence makes their prominence within the urban fabric rise or fall, but the idea behind the building form is pretty much the same: cheap housing for an increasingly urban population without regard to street life, scale, etc., very much in the vein of Corbusier's Cité radieuse. I suspect the economic argument of that kind of construction was hard to argue with at the time.
Corbusier's ideas were often part of the inspiration, only to get heavily pared down due to cost cutting.
For example, a lot of standardized blocks in USSR were originally planned to be made from large "library of designs" to provide varied and well adapted neighbourhoods, however after first few went through the cost cutting measures meant that they were replicated en masse.
Another example is one I have lived in - the longest building in Poland, at over 1.5km length, nicknamed Beijing by many due to super-high density. Critical changes into how the building was built were made by building company on occasion when architects were not around, resulting in long-term damage to comfort and quality of living. Once the architects were back in, it was too late to fix as you'd have to rip out the foundations and start anew.
Several other more "Avant garde" neighbourhoods in Poland suffered from similar issues, often caused by policy that was supposed to encourage innovation, where "rationalisation proposals" (not a good translation but close) that, for example, would lower the cost, were rewarded and often not well checked (if at all). The initial cost savings then turned into heavy issue later on.
A lot could be also said with regards to non-design problems during building, which caused issues due to materiel deteriorating sitting outside waiting for shipment of components necessary to build the required predecessors to the use of the now-rotting ones.
Yep, it's a pool that was filled with saltwater pulled in from Arctic ocean. There was also a sauna! The pool was even full while the ship was breaking ice... check it out:
Looks to me like the pool is stationary relative to the ship, so I would think that the pool water would slosh around. I'm not sure, though. Modern cruise ships have much fancier systems for that sort of thing.
this pool is there by design. On some mid-size and large USSR/Russian military ships which don't have a pool by design, you can find what your local building department would call "unpermitted remodeling" - as you can't really make a hole in a ship's deck floor (i mean theoretically you can, yet it would be a can of worms of totally different scale), the crew would build the pool up so there is only hardly a couple feet between the ceiling and the water and you get into it by climbing up the ladder.
The Russians appear to be super fond of including extravagant amenities on such vessels. The Typhoon class submarines had pools, saunas, gyms, lounges, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrULRXlAlMU
Somehow, I feel like a short inclusion in "The Hunt For Red October" would have been nice. Pointless to the story, of course, but it would have contributed to the sense of grandeur, impressiveness, and "serious business" of the submarine as a machine.
I recall that at the time the movie was made, nothing was known of the Typhoon class except for spy photos of the portion above the waterline while they sat at the docks. One notable error from the movie was a fight scene between the rows of missile tubes. In reality, the submarines had two pressure hulls stuck side-by-side and that space was filled with water.
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.
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!)
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.
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].
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think "HN's world" is kind of large, it doesn't only consist of web developers. The reason these were made in hardware is there were no software-driven SCADAs and cheap and abundant large displays back then, or at least they were in their infancy.
>starting up new things and experiments within months
>you don't know what you're building yet, whether it will work, and if it will still exist next year.
That's exactly how fast things moved when these control rooms were designed, though. Even in the Soviet industries which were generally inflexible and optimized for 5-year iterations, there was constant experimentation and plenty of lean and mean engineering organizations. The reason you're perceiving industrial equipment design as slow is that you live in an entirely different era. It doesn't have to be slow, and it wasn't always like that.
Yeah, but my car has air conditioning, and it's not going away. It needs a button to turn it on and off. It gets pressed several times a day for 20 years (except winter). Why does that button ever need to change?
Yet change it does. In my old car, the A/C is a button labeled "A/C". In new cars, I can't figure out how to turn it on.
It's similar to each iteration of Windows. I'm convinced that Microsoft takes 1000 darts, labels each with a command like "backup", and has a blind monkey throw it at a dartboard to determine where it goes.
At least Microsoft labels them with words, like "Control Panel", even though what's in it is completely random from one iteration to the next. The car companies label all the buttons with random splotches inspired by fingerpainting toddlers.
edit: and now that I think about it, I'm suddenly interested in understanding why consumer products seem averse to providing detailed/specific buttons compared to professional products? Is it to try to not overwhelm the casual / amateur user? (or conversely to be able to reach that user)
For example, professional video cameras that have physical buttons and dials for every function, versus consumer cameras that hide that 3 layers deep in a virtual menu.
Or, the cockpit of a jet (and all its displays and controls) versus a passenger car. Or how about a long-distance truck console -- is it similar?
Maybe it's the issue of casual / lowest common demoninator users not being overwhelmed by such detail. Or that if you cannot filter your users to the ones who can or want to handle the detail, you have to design to the lowest bar.
Which is a shame for those who want / like the detail.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with cost. Iterating hardware is expensive. On top of that tactile buttons are more expensive than you'd think, and Bill Of Materials can trump a lot of other decisions in hardware.
Some of it is also perception. The first cars that were likely to have in touch displays were luxury cars, and there you could show how advanced the car was by showing that there were no buttons anywhere. That said, I'm starting to see a move back towards buttons in high end cars again. Here's hoping that that filters down to lower end cars. Much as I prefer buying used cars, I'd still like to be able to buy a car newer than 2012 some day.
> For example, professional video cameras that have physical buttons and dials for every function, versus consumer cameras that hide that 3 layers deep in a virtual menu.
> Is it to try to not overwhelm the casual / amateur user?
Pretty much yes, at least in photography. Most consumers are perfectly fine with the automated standard profile. Zoom, focus, click, done - and they rarely need any of the advanced functions like exposure adjust, manual aperture setting, or adjusting ISO sensitivity of the sensor, so it's fine to hide this in menus (or, more shamefully, not exposing it at all) for consumer equipment. The fact that most smartphones these days have good enough sensors and processing capabilities to fulfill that "click, done" snapshot scenario is coincidentally also what's driving the market downturn on actual cameras.
On the other hand, professionals or serious hobbyists do need fast and easy access to all the options their cameras offer, so it makes sense to put them on actual physical buttons.
You'd think so, but even semi-pro cameras are falling prey to touchscreen mania.
Case in point: the latest Fuji X100V, sold for $1399, removing dials and buttons and moving some functionality to touchscreen.
The entire point of the camera is that it looks and feels like a film rangefinder.
Now, the first iteration of the camera had a scroll wheel, which enabled one-handed operation and preview, and fast scrolling through photos in the hybrid viewfinder.
You can use FujiX100 without ever turning the touchscreen on. You can use it in the dark. Most people will think it's a film camera.
The new version requires you to swipe the touchscreen, which means that some functionality is missing unless you blast that LCD screen into the world.
A jet cockpit is designed for flying through cloud. That is comparable to driving a car with all the windows painted over, which still has to stay on the road, make the right turns to reach its destination, and stay separated from other cars that also have their windows painted over. You would want to add some extra instruments to your car before trying that.
Yeah, I'm slightly exaggerating but the general comment like "a meter is so much more natural than a foot" is a good opportunity to increase cultural self awareness.
I assume in 10 years everybody has to install Chinese keyboards to their phones so they can translate what the hell is going on. Well, there's already software that interprets text from pictures, translates and embeds it back in.
Probably requires more effort than learning the meaning of some drawings if you don’t speak English. You might guess what a teardrop drawing means, but it’s impossible to know what OIL is.
Air conditioning has more to do with controlling humidity than temperature. Besides, cars are highly-variable environments, and a thermostat setting is a poor indicator of a person's comfort. Maybe the sun is shining on me and I want cold, dry air blowing on me, even though the cabin temperature technically matches the seemingly-reasonable thermostat setting. Maybe a window is open, and blasting the AC is pointless. Maybe I'm driving past a stinky chicken farm and I want to turn on recirculate mode so I don't gag.
I don't care about a specific temperature setting, all I care about is relative comfort. A little warmer or colder by tweaking the temperature dial, dryer with the AC button, maybe a nice 80/20 split between my face and my feet—manual controls can do that, and going from my older car to newer thermostatically-controlled ones is always a frustrating experience because there's a disconnect between the input method and the desired output that makes this more difficult. Ironically, these systems usually have too many buttons, and that's largely why they're hard to use. Just give me three dials (temp, fan speed, blender) and two buttons (AC, recirculate).
Also, air conditioners are power-hungry and significantly affect fuel economy (and power output in ICE-driven cars). I don't turn it on unless I need it.
> 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.
The keys on my keyboard and mouse have been hardcoded into metal and plastic since I started programming. Likewise the frets of guitars I've played since boyhood. That does not mean I've been doing the same thing over and over for decades at a time, rinse and repeat.
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.
Generally not in my experience. Things are still heavily driven from SCADA/HMI systems because its just economical to drop a PC in and be virtually future proof to whatever changes you make at your plant.
I've been part of a few jobs that have panels similar to what you're discussing but my presence there is to make sure the 3rd party builder signs off then we immediately bypass the panel's physical controls with a PLC+HMI system for the client. (Fertilizer blending system)
Some of them look like railway signalling panels. We still have a lot of them in Europe, newer ones are computerised of course but still plenty of relay-based ones in operation.
Speaking of this, when I see metro/subway systems in Asia, I think about how they decide to hard-code vs. have dynamic displays for the in-car maps and station announcements.
You know, because their subway systems actually grow and change over there, during the course of a few years.
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.
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.
Contrast with submarine-launched cruise missiles: “A left mouse push fires it. Kinda crazy really. We actually asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn't give us one.” — http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3078097.stm
"Bike locks" is click-bait style misleading that BBC has adopted more and more.
Tubular tumbler locks.
I first saw them on computer cases in the 80s. They became popular (UK) on bike locks in the 90s as they were perceived as relatively secure. Then there was a famous hack where you could use a biro tube to open them - that would be around the time the BBC page says they stopped using those locks for nukes.
The same locks were used on filling cabinets and such.
You needed, we thought, a special tool to pick locks of this sort, until the "biro hack" came out (though I was young and didn't know about locks then).
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)?
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!
For a ready-made solution, you could look into the Elgato Stream Deck (https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/stream-deck), which could also (I presume) show dynamic images on the buttons. But, it'd only be buttons unfortunately.
There's a few people creating custom control panels to use with e.g. Kerbal Space Program or Elite Dangerous as well.
" [...] 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."
Don't forget certificate deployment. Work has bern done[1] you could build upon...
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.
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)
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.
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.
Tapping the barometric altimeter (and other pressure sensors, but altimeter the most) had been driven hard into me and my friends when training on gliders. Can get you hundreds meters difference lower, and suddenly you find that yes, you're lower than you thought.
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.
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!
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/ and you can dial one phone from the other, and see the relays move as you enter the numbers.
My dad worked at the phone company and as a kid in the late 1970s I went into the switching room with him on a Saturday morning (he was the district boss and would bring donuts in for the folks that had to work weekends). Forty years later and I still remember lots and lots of clicking and a heady smell of ozone.
> 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!
So you are saying the explodey plasma conduits in Star Trek consoles are not that far-fetched after all?
There are some interesting videos on YouTube of the Folsom power house. Some of their panels have live knife switches, never mind being on the other side of a panel.
People were obviously trusted not to be stupid enough to touch them back then. We designed things in Art Deco style, I don't know what the style is now, Health & Safety Mandatory Beige perhaps.
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.
Spoiler alert - most corporations are centrally planned.
In fact, the system design behind Cybersyn is closer to decentralized systems like Toyota Production System rather than centralized approaches exemplified in typical American corporations.
The whole point of cybersyn was that control loops were supposed t be established at multiple levels from bottom up, with higher levels interacting only when required for example to handle cooperation between multiple entities.
The US made sure that doubt was never cleared. Shame, it looked decades ahead of its time, essentially internet + machine learning to dynamically allocate resources and diagnose problems. Essentially what amazon and other big enterprises do today, so... Plus it had a socialist bent, aiming to include workers in that real time decision making process.
The problem Amazon is solving also involves a lot of data, that is true.
But it has lots and lots of price information to go on, both prices people are willing to pay for various goods at various times & places, and prices at which suppliers stop selling. That's what command economies didn't have, and it's why they didn't work. That was the criticism.
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?
Indeed, one of them is a subway control panel, and another one a railway panel. :) [See http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 for the links to original image sources.]
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.
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.
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/ 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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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?
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".
They are commonly referred to as a breaker control switch. Some types have a position indicator that is separate from the rotary switch mechanism to show actual breaker state rather than requested breaker state.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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/, or these 12 mobile bridges.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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