Take a look at these NASA Apollo Mission Control Console close-up view displays.

[BrianHG]

Enjoy a view of history:

[SilverSolder]

Awesome...   Modern web designers would need a 30 foot video wall to show the same information that our ancestors managed with just a single CRT monitor!

[AlbertL]

In this thread https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/if-you-had-a-time-machine/msg3498842/#msg3498842 I ask when and where you'd want to go if you had a time machine.  The Apollo-era MOCR would definitely be one of my first stops!

Imagine all the interface design involved in communicating between the computer systems and those consoles.  Another video (I'll try to find it) explains that the display screens are actually CCTV monitors viewing computer output from a remotely-located CRT that displayed just the numbers, with the field labels coming from a transparency that was optically overlaid on CRT screen, and the combined image was viewed by a CCTV camera and transmitted to the console.  When a controller selected a display via the thumbwheel switches, the computer would put the corresponding data elements on its CRT, and position the appropriate transparency in the optical system.

[TimFox]

If I remember correctly, the high-quality CRT monitors were made by Conrac.

[themadhippy]

By coincidence  i stumbled across this earlier today

[Tomorokoshi]

What gets me is that it took them only 2 years to put it into operation. And they didn't even have the benefit of Agile.

[SilverSolder]

What gets me is that it took them only 2 years to put it into operation. And they didn't even have the benefit of Agile.

Systems were simpler/easier to understand.

Last w/e, I powered up an instance of Windows Server 2003 just for fun, virtualized on decently powerful modern hardware.  I was amazed at the response speed:  anything you clicked on in the File Explorer or anywhere else responded explosively fast...  beating the sound of the mouse click travelling to your ear! 

I tried running a few applications...   same thing:  unbelievable performance.

Comparing this with a lardy Windows 10 system that can barely get out of its own way...    the old 2003 Windows pretty much ran the same tasks with no issues, and ran them significantly faster.   It feels like all we have been doing for the last several decades is adding bloat to our products, with only a few genuine wins in there...

[james_s]

Comparing this with a lardy Windows 10 system that can barely get out of its own way...    the old 2003 Windows pretty much ran the same tasks with no issues, and ran them significantly faster.   It feels like all we have been doing for the last several decades is adding bloat to our products, with only a few genuine wins in there...

Most of the things that people do with computers matured more than a decade ago, many much longer than that. What else is there to do to get people to upgrade other than add bloat?

[TimFox]

When “2001, a Space Odyssey” was filmed in 1968, the spacecraft computer displays were done by old-fashioned animation, since computer graphics were not available.

[SilverSolder]

Comparing this with a lardy Windows 10 system that can barely get out of its own way...    the old 2003 Windows pretty much ran the same tasks with no issues, and ran them significantly faster.   It feels like all we have been doing for the last several decades is adding bloat to our products, with only a few genuine wins in there...

Most of the things that people do with computers matured more than a decade ago, many much longer than that. What else is there to do to get people to upgrade other than add bloat?

Quite...

The funniest thing about the Server 2003 experiment,  I activated it using the Microsoft phone activation service!  Amazingly, it is still possible to activate Server 2003...  and without signing up for an account or even giving your name!  You'd never get that one past the modern corporate cloud leeches..

[BrianHG]

What gets me is that it took them only 2 years to put it into operation. And they didn't even have the benefit of Agile.

Systems were simpler/easier to understand.

Last w/e, I powered up an instance of Windows Server 2003 just for fun, virtualized on decently powerful modern hardware.  I was amazed at the response speed:  anything you clicked on in the File Explorer or anywhere else responded explosively fast...  beating the sound of the mouse click travelling to your ear! 

I tried running a few applications...   same thing:  unbelievable performance.

Comparing this with a lardy Windows 10 system that can barely get out of its own way...    the old 2003 Windows pretty much ran the same tasks with no issues, and ran them significantly faster.   It feels like all we have been doing for the last several decades is adding bloat to our products, with only a few genuine wins in there...

Win2K pro SP3 is still faster and stable, but, WinNT4 SP5 beats them all hands down.  We are talking an OS which can fit on a few 1.4mb flippies and still offer some of the exact core system capability to run 90% of the software today if they just wouldn't check for the OS version, or use that stupid .NET garbage.

[SilverSolder]

What gets me is that it took them only 2 years to put it into operation. And they didn't even have the benefit of Agile.

Systems were simpler/easier to understand.

Last w/e, I powered up an instance of Windows Server 2003 just for fun, virtualized on decently powerful modern hardware.  I was amazed at the response speed:  anything you clicked on in the File Explorer or anywhere else responded explosively fast...  beating the sound of the mouse click travelling to your ear! 

I tried running a few applications...   same thing:  unbelievable performance.

Comparing this with a lardy Windows 10 system that can barely get out of its own way...    the old 2003 Windows pretty much ran the same tasks with no issues, and ran them significantly faster.   It feels like all we have been doing for the last several decades is adding bloat to our products, with only a few genuine wins in there...

Win2K pro SP3 is still faster and stable, but, WinNT4 SP5 beats them all hands down.  We are talking an OS which can fit on a few 1.4mb flippies and still offer some of the exact core system capability to run 90% of the software today if they just wouldn't check for the OS version, or use that stupid .NET garbage.

Server 2003 still fit on a CD - and includes .NET! 

Great for a web server, for example.

It was all downhill from there...   although Win 7 / Server 2008 is probably as far back as you'd want to go, if you want any hope of running modern software.

Amazing, the days before you were expected to subscribe to your computer...

[james_s]

Win2K pro SP3 is still faster and stable, but, WinNT4 SP5 beats them all hands down.  We are talking an OS which can fit on a few 1.4mb flippies and still offer some of the exact core system capability to run 90% of the software today if they just wouldn't check for the OS version, or use that stupid .NET garbage.

I remember running NT4 on my work desktop in the late 90s. It worked well and was rock solid for the most part, except on one, or possibly two occasions it somehow got so borked that I had to completely reformat and reinstall. I don't remember what happened, but after some troubleshooting we ended up deciding that reformat was the easiest way to get it back up and running. This was *at* Microsoft too so there was no shortage of people with Windows experience. Win2k was always one of my favorite desktop OS's, I ran that on my main PC until probably 2006 when I finally moved to XP because some game I wanted to play required it.

[PlainName]

I am running W2K in a VM here. The entire live c:\windows folder takes up 658MB.

Of course, it doesn't have a lot of the fripperies that make later Windows nice to use - aero, for instance - but at least the windows have actual borders and scrolling windows show the damn scrollbars without having to have the mouse cursor over them. I can't imagine  how deliberately hiding useful user interface clues can add 52.5GB!

[SilverSolder]

I am running W2K in a VM here. The entire live c:\windows folder takes up 658MB.

Of course, it doesn't have a lot of the fripperies that make later Windows nice to use - aero, for instance - but at least the windows have actual borders and scrolling windows show the damn scrollbars without having to have the mouse cursor over them. I can't imagine  how deliberately hiding useful user interface clues can add 52.5GB!

I think there was a push to make it take up more space, so they could keep charging more for it and make it all look like progress!

The more I use Server 2003, the more stoked I get over how good it is...   you can run the entire Datacenter Edition with full NUMA clustering in a couple of GB, incredible!

[Tom45]

What gets me is that it took them only 2 years to put it into operation. And they didn't even have the benefit of Agile.

I think you already have the answer: they didn't have the "benefit" of Agile.

[james_s]

I am running W2K in a VM here. The entire live c:\windows folder takes up 658MB.

Of course, it doesn't have a lot of the fripperies that make later Windows nice to use - aero, for instance - but at least the windows have actual borders and scrolling windows show the damn scrollbars without having to have the mouse cursor over them. I can't imagine  how deliberately hiding useful user interface clues can add 52.5GB!

I think it would be fascinating to see a deep analysis of where all the storage goes with modern software. I mean you have modern versions of software that used to be a few hundred megabytes tops that now consumes tens of gigabytes, that's orders of magnitude! And for what exactly? Sure, a lot of it does more, but not THAT much more. How does an operating system require tens of gigabytes? That's absolute madness.

[SilverSolder]

I am running W2K in a VM here. The entire live c:\windows folder takes up 658MB.

Of course, it doesn't have a lot of the fripperies that make later Windows nice to use - aero, for instance - but at least the windows have actual borders and scrolling windows show the damn scrollbars without having to have the mouse cursor over them. I can't imagine  how deliberately hiding useful user interface clues can add 52.5GB!

I think it would be fascinating to see a deep analysis of where all the storage goes with modern software. I mean you have modern versions of software that used to be a few hundred megabytes tops that now consumes tens of gigabytes, that's orders of magnitude! And for what exactly? Sure, a lot of it does more, but not THAT much more. How does an operating system require tens of gigabytes? That's absolute madness.

That's an interesting question.  There are some tools in Mark Russinovich's Sysinternals suite that lets you see which files have open handles...  could be interesting to compare an older vs. newer OS and see what is actually in use!

[gnuarm]

Awesome...   Modern web designers would need a 30 foot video wall to show the same information that our ancestors managed with just a single CRT monitor!

About 15 years ago I took a class which had a guy in it working for NASA on the cape.  He said that even then they could not replace the specialized electronics for comms and telemetry with generic computers and networks.  The throughput, latency and reliability are just too stringent.  Now it is 15 years later and technology has advanced another leap or two.  I wonder if that is still true? 

[Red Squirrel]

That's really cool.  Crazy to think it was the 70's.  They were really ahead of their time.

At 8:45 that ashtray is a nice touch.  Imagine the uproar now days if someone tried to light up a cigarette in middle of a space mission, indoors. 

[TimFox]

I remember a cheap sci-fi movie from the '50s, where the crew of a rocketship traveling to Mars or somewhere smoked inside the spacecraft.  Indoors!

[VK3DRB]

That's really cool.  Crazy to think it was the 70's.  They were really ahead of their time.

At 8:45 that ashtray is a nice touch.  Imagine the uproar now days if someone tried to light up a cigarette in middle of a space mission, indoors. 

In my early IBM career, key decisions were made at meetings filled with thick cigarette smoke from addicts. You could always tell a VDU from a smoker's desk. The EHT area as well as the front of the CRTs had a layer of tar. TVs in homes of smokers also suffered the same.

By the way, my PC has a more powerful CPU than that of the four IBM System 360s they mention in the video. Maybe even my mobile telephone too. We have come a long way.

[SeanB]

In the early days of stock exchanges the video displays were all driven using analogue video delivered over coax cable. However the video signal was merely there to deliver a blank screen, the actual data was done using TELETEXT decoder chipsets in the TV sets, with each page being assigned to different types of display. This gave a very robust data transfer, yet the actual hardware itself was simple enough and available off the shelf, and you could select any page at any time, and it would come up in sequence. The only change they did to the text standard was to use the entire frame of video to handle text, not just the top 3 lines of the screen normally blanked by the retrace circuit, so that they could transmit the entire 1000 page magazine very rapidly.

These days I doubt you can find a TV set that actually still has a text decoder on the analogue video inputs any more, but there were both Phillips, Nokia and ITT chipsets that implemented this in a set, with various levels of how cooking hot they ran, and how often they would fail in use.

[tszaboo]

What gets me is that it took them only 2 years to put it into operation. And they didn't even have the benefit of Agile.

Yes with Agile, probably 5 years into the project management would decide that they gonna land on Venus actually, and start gathering user stories to what to do there.
But they already launched the rocket 1 years into the project saying they will figure out the rest later. Crew was onboard, oxigen wasn't. No matter, they made a bug report ticket saying oxigen is a "must" for the crew.

[gnuarm]

I remember a cheap sci-fi movie from the '50s, where the crew of a rocketship traveling to Mars or somewhere smoked inside the spacecraft.  Indoors!

I would not be surprised if they smoked in their space suits.  Flicking the ash off would be difficult.  Then I guess they'd have to eat the butt.

[SilverSolder]

I remember a cheap sci-fi movie from the '50s, where the crew of a rocketship traveling to Mars or somewhere smoked inside the spacecraft.  Indoors!

I would not be surprised if they smoked in their space suits.  Flicking the ash off would be difficult.  Then I guess they'd have to eat the butt.

This is back when men were men etc.

[dcac]

I remember a cheap sci-fi movie from the '50s, where the crew of a rocketship traveling to Mars or somewhere smoked inside the spacecraft.  Indoors!

I would not be surprised if they smoked in their space suits.

And having a nice cup of coffee too. (sorry for the poor quality I guess preserving this cutout footage never was a priority) 

[artag]

In the early days of stock exchanges the video displays were all driven using analogue video delivered over coax cable. However the video signal was merely there to deliver a blank screen, the actual data was done using TELETEXT decoder chipsets in the TV sets, with each page being assigned to different types of display. This gave a very robust data transfer, yet the actual hardware itself was simple enough and available off the shelf, and you could select any page at any time, and it would come up in sequence. The only change they did to the text standard was to use the entire frame of video to handle text, not just the top 3 lines of the screen normally blanked by the retrace circuit, so that they could transmit the entire 1000 page magazine very rapidly.

I had a job interview with the part of Logica that built those systems for the LSE around '85. The guy there told me that the reason they used teletext (apart from the good reasons you list) is that it's a broadcast standard : the same data goes to all the terminals at the same instant, not sent to one terminal after another by however fast a terminal i/o processor you might choose to use. Yes, the pages are sent serially one after another, but any given page is sent to all simultaneously.

As a result, there's no way the traders could complain that one person was getting data faster than any other. They all got it at the same time, down to the bit.
 

[AlbertL]

By coincidence  i stumbled across this earlier today

Note that at 1:49 in Fran's video we see a row of large flatbed plotters in front of the first row of consoles.  That's the first time I've seen them in the Apollo MOCR - I believe they were the main graphical display device in Project Mercury as well as military missile tests in that era.  I'm wondering if they were an interim solution for one mission before the the large-screen display was fully operational.