Vintage gear

What a marvel of old school engineering. And remember boys and girl, outdated, quaint or backwards it may look now, once this was state of the art engineering. Maybe in half a century someone will pick up an Axe-FX and go 'old school vintage engineering!' If it still works that is. Somehow I can't escape the notion that that old Soviet engineering will outlast our state of the art modern stuff. What they built was made to last, not to become obsolete as ours.
 
My uncle worked for IBM in the 60s -90 doing sales in the Bay Area, they didn't even sell computers back in the day a company would rent them, having been in IT for the past 20 years a single rack of servers of which I manage now has way more CPU powered than the early systems the size of a cargo container if not just a single Dell server and DAS, A x coworker of mine built clean rooms here in Silicon Valley these pics are a good reminder how technology is short lived. Hopefully the ones that are controlling nukes are all retired as that would be very scary if they were still functional.
 
I can only imagine what the back side of all of those control panels looks like. Many miles of wiring. Imagine a rat getting in there and chewing up some random wires.

Reminds me of years ago seeing one of those big AT&T phone line patch boxes on the side of the road that had been plowed over by a car. Must have been thousands of wires ripped off about a foot off the concrete slab it was on. Those poor repair guys had their work cut out for them on that one.
 
I wonder how many fuzz pedals could be powered if you harvest these panels for parts. There's a reason why the former USSR is currently the biggest supplier of vintage germanium transistors.

plexi59 said:
That's Chernobyl. So apparently controls weren't that good, because it blew the fuck up.

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That seems to have been more of a case of human error then the controls failing. And human error is the one thing you cannot 100% safeguard against. Human stupidity is like evolution, it always finds a way.
 
Muad'zin said:
That seems to have been more of a case of human error then the controls failing. And human error is the one thing you cannot 100% safeguard against. Human stupidity is like evolution, it always finds a way.
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Sadly, this is all too true.

Sooooo much collateral damage in the history of the world was/is due to the actions fueled by human stupidity....
 
Well, I'm of the opinion that one should exclude the possibility of human error as much as possible when dealing with something as potent as a nuclear reactor. Clearly that wasn't the case here. Also, no external confinement.

And coincidentally I did make a fuzz pedal (a Soul Bender clone) using some GT402 Soviet transistors made in 1986 that I ordered from Ukraine. Sounds great. I haven't checked if they're still radioactive. If anyone is tempted to make such a pedal, make sure you buy at least 10. The variance of gain and leakage on these is crazy, so you'll need about this many to pick three that are both reasonably close to one another and low leakage.
 
plexi59 said:
Well, I'm of the opinion that one should exclude the possibility of human error as much as possible when dealing with something as potent as a nuclear reactor. Clearly that wasn't the case here. Also, no external confinement.
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Sadly, the only way to find out what works or works not is through trial and error. I remember this Airbus aircraft once crashing because the aircrew desperately tried to make it pull up while the aircraft's software was going error, does not compute. You can code or prepare for a lot of contingencies, but Murphy is patient and inventive. I still prefer nuclear of filling every nook and cranny of this planet with windmills and solar planets though.

And coincidentally I did make a fuzz pedal (a Soul Bender clone) using some GT402 Soviet transistors made in 1986 that I ordered from Ukraine. Sounds great. I haven't checked if they're still radioactive. If anyone is tempted to make such a pedal, make sure you buy at least 10. The variance of gain and leakage on these is crazy, so you'll need about this many to pick three that are both reasonably close to one another and low leakage.
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Thankfully they usually come in lots of 10, don't they? And there's a reason we decided to switch over from Germanium transitors to silicon. They're far more reliable. It's mostly us guitarists and those with ancient tech that still works that still want them.
 
Quarry Heights carrier 5.jpg

When I was in the Army my job was to make sure all this stuff was working perfectly 24/7/365(6). Not as pretty as the Russian nuke plants, but vintage nonetheless and it worked better than its Russian equivalents too! There was another wall of racks on the other side of the room but that was classified, so I never took a photo of it. Photo from 1967.

Danny W.
 
Danny W. said:
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When I was in the Army my job was to make sure all this stuff was working perfectly 24/7/365(6). Not as pretty as the Russian nuke plants, but vintage nonetheless and it worked better than its Russian equivalents too! There was another wall of racks on the other side of the room but that was classified, so I never took a photo of it. Photo from 1967.

Danny W.
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Thats awesome, reminds me of those early RAND corporation data centers, love the retro steel padded chair!
 
My dream at one point was to have a control/mix room stylized like those Soviet control rooms, with some frequency and SPL sensors controlling the room lights for mood.

Mrs B was having none of that dream as that doesn't match the rest of our home decor, LoL.
 
Muad'zin said:
And there's a reason we decided to switch over from Germanium transitors to silicon. They're far more reliable. It's mostly us guitarists and those with ancient tech that still works that still want them.
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It's not just germanium vs silicon. It's also the shittiness of the Soviet semiconductors in general. It used to be that for aerospace applications they'd need to go through a box full of transistors to find one or two that are actually OK per mil-spec. Tough luck - can't use foreign stuff in rockets, since they double as ICBMs. Western germanium transistors had much closer tolerances. A lot of discrete semiconductors that were used in pedals are no longer made BTW. And the ones that are made are surface mount now. So I've stocked up on some parts that haven't yet been discontinued, as well as on J201 SMD JFETs. It's only a matter of time before they're gone, too.
 
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