Some of the consoles had neon tubes for number display. They emit warm orange lights when triggered by ~300Vdc.
stymaar•Jul 11, 2026
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:
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•Jul 11, 2026
There is a specific Soviet design sensibility in the post in question that is lacking in those images.
stymaar•Jul 11, 2026
I'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•Jul 11, 2026
That'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.
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•Jul 11, 2026
Heat dissipation and gracious distances for installation and servicing.
roryirvine•Jul 11, 2026
Good 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.
Very 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.
> 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•Jul 11, 2026
Sorry 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•Jul 11, 2026
A 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.
viciousvoxel•Jul 11, 2026
There's a big difference between the (controlled) chaos of an ER vs scheduled surgery, but it's still dramatized for TV obviously.
ChrisMarshallNY•Jul 11, 2026
META: Make sure that your adblocker is set to 11 on that site.
In the first edition of The Design of Everyday Things[0], Norman has a photo of beer tap handles on control levers in a nuclear power plant control room. This was done, to differentiate two important handles.
I won’t link to the photo, because it’s on personal blogs, and I don’t want to hug anyone’s site to death.
The lessons of TMI have been learned though, the accident has been thoroughly investigated and that's the reason why it's now being discussed in class.
Lio•Jul 11, 2026
Of course but we're talking about vintage control room designs here, some of which predate that investigation, so it still seems relevant to point out.
stymaar•Jul 11, 2026
AFAIK All of them have been retrofitted to take the lessons from TMI into account (I can't be sure about other countries, but in France it's definitely the case).
And more importantly, the process around how you're supposed to take information from the controls during a crisis has been completely rethought, negating the issues found during TMI investigations.
raffael_de•Jul 11, 2026
control 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•Jul 11, 2026
French operators wearing jeans, Soviets wearing white coats and sailor's caps.
beltranaceves•Jul 11, 2026
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)
stymaar•Jul 11, 2026
Firefox mobile + ublock origin is the way.
johnny_canuck•Jul 11, 2026
I use brave on mobile and didn't notice a thing
SoftTalker•Jul 11, 2026
Orion browser works great for me on my iPhone.
lll-o-lll•Jul 11, 2026
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.
unsnap_biceps•Jul 11, 2026
Has 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•Jul 11, 2026
Basically you had way more people involved in operations. Automation was always sold as labor-saving.
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?
elzbardico•Jul 11, 2026
Navigation 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•Jul 11, 2026
Modern 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•Jul 11, 2026
I love these!
Highly relevant: "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green"
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.
Leonard_of_Q•Jul 11, 2026
AI 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•Jul 11, 2026
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"
fuzzfactor•Jul 11, 2026
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 :)
paradoxyl•Jul 11, 2026
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.
tclancy•Jul 11, 2026
My reaction was, “This is what I imagined McDonalds University to be when I was a kid.”
barrkel•Jul 11, 2026
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
j4k0bfr•Jul 11, 2026
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?
ramses0•Jul 11, 2026
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").
i_am_a_peasant•Jul 11, 2026
I don’t find this beautiful at all tbh. Looks fiddly
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.
Mistletoe•Jul 11, 2026
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.
portly•Jul 11, 2026
We should reintroduce chef's hats back in the control rooms. Switching with real finesse!
manoDev•Jul 11, 2026
Not great, not terrible.
diego_moita•Jul 11, 2026
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".
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.
andrewl•Jul 11, 2026
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.
waltbosz•Jul 11, 2026
I like how some of them are/were recently still in use as evidenced by the modern computer monitors.
Hnrobert42•Jul 11, 2026
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.
ogurechny•Jul 11, 2026
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.
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•Jul 11, 2026
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.
slicktux•Jul 11, 2026
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.
26 Comments
- 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.
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
[2]: https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playtime
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/
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!"
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”.
In the first edition of The Design of Everyday Things[0], Norman has a photo of beer tap handles on control levers in a nuclear power plant control room. This was done, to differentiate two important handles.
I won’t link to the photo, because it’s on personal blogs, and I don’t want to hug anyone’s site to death.
The photo was removed, in the current version.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
I think that is exceptional good design.
To paraphrase, the Three Mile Island Disaster happened because the operators couldn't discern the right red light in a sea of other lights and noise.
https://uxdesign.cc/three-mile-island-how-bad-ux-led-to-a-nu...
And more importantly, the process around how you're supposed to take information from the controls during a crisis has been completely rethought, negating the issues found during TMI investigations.
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.
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
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)
[0] https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47518960
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.
- 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
"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
My god. I didn't even know autoplaying, unmuted ad videos are a thing.
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.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/demolition-of-iconic-...