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)
The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#52I like how some of them are/were recently still in use as evidenced by the modern computer monitors.
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#53I 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.
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#54I 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 ne…
These 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?
SCADA. 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").
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#55Only 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.
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#56I 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.
This 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.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.
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#57The 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-...
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a specific Soviet design sensibility in the post in question that is lacking in those images.
Well, how about this one: 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 lik…
It has Playtime vibes.
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#59This 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
Thank you for the rabbit hole
Re: The vintage beauty of Soviet control rooms (2018)
#60It'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-…
French operators wearing jeans, Soviets wearing white coats and sailor's caps.