The future is tactile. Buttons have been replaced with digital equivalents. Millions of fingers touch cold screens that offer no kind of feedback. We've given up the clonk of a switch, the resistance of a potentiometer, the frantic activity of gauges. But it wasn't always so. The San Diego Air & Space Museum Library has a "Space Shuttle Archive" full of images with the designs of ground equipment and the training simulator of the Shuttle. A true marvel with enormous consoles, columns of buttons, trackballs, and levers.
Past and Future Meet in the Console Designs
Past and future meet in those designs, mockups to prepare all participants of the STS program. Ground equipment, flight simulators, data acquisition stations, radar consoles. A button for each command, lights and levers, indicators and recorders, trackballs and integrated keyboards. Huge CRT tubes accompanied by light pens. These designs date back to 1981. If we compare them with the interior of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, we see that the essence is the same.
Today's Mission Control
Today, NASA's "Mission Control" is a festival of flat and giant screens. Analog solutions are a thing of the past. The same happens in computing, which progresses in retiring classic interfaces. Mobile devices are little more than rectangular blocks of glass with glue. Some things have changed forever, but I admit others might have a kind of "comeback". What do you think? Do you like the idea of more solid controls, or are we drowning in nostalgia? Leave a comment.
The Space Shuttle Console Archive in Images
