I recently watched both the 1974 and 2009 versions of The Taking of Pelham 123 and it really stood out how the industrial designs of their respective eras helped elevate the original[1][2] in comparison to the remake[3][4].
> Don’t you just want to rotate it, no matter what it does?
A grandparent's house had light switches that looked kind of like this but black (bakelite). And they are very satisfying, a good amount of resistance while rotating, then click.
>This big industrial switch toggled between day and night. I don’t know if it changed the operation of the system, or is just switched on some sort of a dark mode for the panel itself:
I think we can answer that with 'yes, it changed the operation of the system. The indicator next to it is labeled in Amperes and 30 Amps is a lot of current. depending on the driving voltage at 24 V (pretty common for control panels like this one) that's 700W give or take and if it is a line voltage (220 V in poland at the time) that 6.6KW.
There's really so much physicality to interacting with objects that we've lost as we switch to more and more touch screens and capacitive buttons. Also the reassuring "thunk" of a nice chunky button to confirm you've pressed it is just so important to user confidence
Check out this chunky industrial Bakelite switch with a resonant thunking spring clicking action that you have to overshoot each of the four rotations by 45 degrees before it clicks. It feels so good, it's nice to just turn around and around just for pure audio and kinesthetic pleasure. So much better than a Tesla iPad control. (Never mind the gorilla!)
It's from the Amsterdam Bakelite Collection, founded/curated by Reindert Groot. It isn't actually a museum you can visit at this moment, but it's a huge beautiful collection, with lots of interesting photos and articles and newsletters online, and parts of it surface in museums around the world from time to time.
There are some beautiful photos in the newsletters, like the colossal steel 1500 Kg two-part injection mold, and the restored SAAL Soft SPEAKER with the Bakelite Bell:
That restoration work on the speaker and the paper box is so well done. I spent some time under the Rijksmuseum in the workshops and the people there are similarly skilled and it was very impressive to see them at work, infinite patience and the result of all that work as invisible as possible. That's the bit that really got me, good restorers don't have any fingerprints, their biggest successes are the works that look like they were never worked on in the first place. Which is almost the opposite of every other form of creative art, and yet, they are amongst the best in the field.
That transformer from last link about the phone looks like it was made yesterday.
Maybe every abstraction is a finite state machine, and we can construct an analog circuit of any of them. I have an opinion about metrics where they are not the data, but the emergent analog signal from a system.
The idea of collecting data and deriving metrics from it is absurd when you look at your system as a thing that has inputs and an output and the line for the output goes up or down over time. The beauty of these industrial systems is that the makers understood this principle. The system produces a signal that bears meaning that these interfaces express.
These are tiny compared to what Hans Zimmer is using: https://synthanatomy.com/2025/10/syntesla-giorgio-iii-a-mons...
I recently watched both the 1974 and 2009 versions of The Taking of Pelham 123 and it really stood out how the industrial designs of their respective eras helped elevate the original[1][2] in comparison to the remake[3][4].
[1] - https://media.doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Taking-of...
[2] - https://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/21019979/1118full-the-taking...
[3] - https://c8.alamy.com/comp/K3KWM1/the-taking-of-pelham-123-da...
[4] - https://press.moviewalker.jp/api/resizeimage/content/main/mv...
> Don’t you just want to rotate it, no matter what it does?
A grandparent's house had light switches that looked kind of like this but black (bakelite). And they are very satisfying, a good amount of resistance while rotating, then click.
>This big industrial switch toggled between day and night. I don’t know if it changed the operation of the system, or is just switched on some sort of a dark mode for the panel itself:
I think we can answer that with 'yes, it changed the operation of the system. The indicator next to it is labeled in Amperes and 30 Amps is a lot of current. depending on the driving voltage at 24 V (pretty common for control panels like this one) that's 700W give or take and if it is a line voltage (220 V in poland at the time) that 6.6KW.
You are probably right, but I feel like a gigantic dashboard like that could well use 700W in just its own lighting.
That's true, but I would not expect it to be in a place where there was much difference between day and night lighting to begin with.
There's really so much physicality to interacting with objects that we've lost as we switch to more and more touch screens and capacitive buttons. Also the reassuring "thunk" of a nice chunky button to confirm you've pressed it is just so important to user confidence
Check out this chunky industrial Bakelite switch with a resonant thunking spring clicking action that you have to overshoot each of the four rotations by 45 degrees before it clicks. It feels so good, it's nice to just turn around and around just for pure audio and kinesthetic pleasure. So much better than a Tesla iPad control. (Never mind the gorilla!)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o_n5W2I2p_M
It's from the Amsterdam Bakelite Collection, founded/curated by Reindert Groot. It isn't actually a museum you can visit at this moment, but it's a huge beautiful collection, with lots of interesting photos and articles and newsletters online, and parts of it surface in museums around the world from time to time.
http://www.amsterdambakelitecollection.com/
There are some beautiful photos in the newsletters, like the colossal steel 1500 Kg two-part injection mold, and the restored SAAL Soft SPEAKER with the Bakelite Bell:
http://www.amsterdambakelitecollection.com/newsletter202411/...
Other interesting Bakelite links from previous Hacker News discussions:
1956 Philips 353A Bakelite Vacuum Tube Radio Repair & Restoration
https://retrorepairsandrefurbs.com/2022/09/06/1956-philips-3...
Bakelite to the Future - 1950s rotary phone ESP32 bluetooth headset
https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...
That restoration work on the speaker and the paper box is so well done. I spent some time under the Rijksmuseum in the workshops and the people there are similarly skilled and it was very impressive to see them at work, infinite patience and the result of all that work as invisible as possible. That's the bit that really got me, good restorers don't have any fingerprints, their biggest successes are the works that look like they were never worked on in the first place. Which is almost the opposite of every other form of creative art, and yet, they are amongst the best in the field.
That transformer from last link about the phone looks like it was made yesterday.
Don't worry, now we're about to completely lose touch too: Now you'll just talk to an AI and take its word for having done what you wanted :)
The photos on that article are nice inspiration for some pseudo-steampunk/vacuumpunk stuff.
The very cool https://www.astrouxds.com aims to be the pixel version of the physical dashboards. It's a very cool design library.
Not related to Astro the templating engine.
Maybe every abstraction is a finite state machine, and we can construct an analog circuit of any of them. I have an opinion about metrics where they are not the data, but the emergent analog signal from a system.
The idea of collecting data and deriving metrics from it is absurd when you look at your system as a thing that has inputs and an output and the line for the output goes up or down over time. The beauty of these industrial systems is that the makers understood this principle. The system produces a signal that bears meaning that these interfaces express.