The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms: Analog Dials Before Digital Screens
The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
I present a stunning collection of vintage control rooms from the Soviet era, showcasing the tactile beauty of large buttons and analog dials. These spaces represent a time before the democratization of computers and screens, offering a unique glimpse into industrial design history. The gallery includes iconic locations like the Chernobyl Reactor 4 Control Room, celebrating the aesthetic power of mechanical interfaces.
A beautiful collection of control rooms filled with large buttons and analog dials, long before the democratization of computers and screens.
- stymaar
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.
- padolsey
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)
- cfl2001
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.
- barrkel
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
- beltranaceves
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)