I love the Internet Archive, but I don’t love its interface.

It’s just… not great all around, homely and confusing. It has some endearing qualities, harking back to the web of the 1990s without endless commerce and incessant growth hacking – Wikipedia feels the same – but it’s unpleasant in many ways, and won’t inspire you the way good interfaces will. (Even the thing I once praised it for falls apart in details.)

So this below, once more, is going to be caveated.

I have been uploading things to Internet Archive for almost a decade now, and my collection of various font and typewriter and interface documents just reached a round 1,000 items, which made me proud and happy.

While browsing it myself yesterday, I noticed a new-to-me alphabet bar that pops up when you sort by title:

I am guessing it’s inspired by tabs in library catalogs?

The interface is ugly. There are big non-clickable gaps between letters. The tooltips were a mistake. But outside of that, I found it fun and delightful to explore a collection this way, and I’m not sure I have ever seen this kind of an “old-fashioned” approach before.

It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

Speaking of fireside stories, this is a classic 1983 post called “The story of Mel, a real programmer”:

[…]
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster — drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren’t here to stay, anyway.
(That’s why you haven’t heard of the company,
or the computer.)
[…]

I don’t super love this presentation/​style, but it’s an interesting “close to the metal” programming anecdote (similar in some ways to Duff’s device), and doubly interesting to try to go through the jargon and actually understand it all.

Not particularly relevant to the story itself, but this is LGP-30, launched in 1956:

I’ve known LGP-30 for a while – some of the photos people put in the Wikipedia entry are actually ones I took at the Computer History Museum – but I saw a running one only earlier this year at a computer museum in Stuttgart. I particularly loved the industrial, lit up buttons…

…and the “display” which was just an oscilloscope contorted to fit within a specific binary template:

As far as I know, RGP-4000 – the 1960’s successor – didn’t feel much different, so perhaps seeing these might actually enhance the spooky story.

In my recent visits to German and Polish museums, I noticed a recurring theme: modular industrial dashboards, which I imagine have by now been all replaced by software.

I don’t know much about these – please write me if you do – but I wanted to share them anyway, perhaps for context, or amusement, or inspiration. They’re interesting design systems, and interesting interaction systems as well.

This was a very cool physical display for air traffic control, at the The Deutsches Museum in Münich:

At Fernmeldemuseum Stuttgart, these were used to monitor subway trains, or light rail. I do imagine these panels must have been interactive with all the buttons?

I like that they light up to show status:

One of the modules was a counter:

And I believe this was a way to annotate that something was… fixed, maybe? Or on its way to being fixed?

A railway museum in Nuremberg used what looks like the exact same system, and I spotted a few modules with their plates removed:

And, here’s a similar panel shown in a tram museum in Stuttgart, filled with an incredible typographical tension between DIN and the German equivalent of Dymo:

Warsaw’s train museum had a slightly different system, but similar in look and feel:

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:

And this was at the DASA Museum in Dortmund, from a power plant control room:

This was by far the biggest one of the ones I’ve encountered…

…with the biggest variety of modules…

This was also the panel I showed some molly guards from before. But today I want to end at this great switch:

Don’t you just want to rotate it, no matter what it does?

Some years ago, the inimitable channel Technology Connections posted a 17-minute video about the peculiar design quirk of ceiling and room fans – they usually order their options Off → High → Medium → Low rather than the more natural Off → Low → Medium → High. The video is a bit off topic for this channel, but check it out if you’re interested how sometimes weird physics considerations influence design in the real world:

In the video, the host also talks about the more natural order that typically looked like this:

I wonder if you recognize this kind of an interface. I have a distinct memory of it from radios (where “zero volume” would mean “off”) and from TVs/​early computer displays (where “zero brightness” meant “off,” too). There was something special about these controls that stuck in my memory, motor and otherwise: this tangible, heavy click when you ventured outside or back into “off,” almost as if you had to break the interface itself.

I thought this, too, was a convention from an old analog time. Yet, I keep occasionally finding the “the first notch is special” interfaces on screen.

Sometimes, they are pretty literal translations of the concept, like when you adjust the key repeat rate in macOS:

Or, similarly, when you choose the dock magnification:

But sometimes they are a bit more conceptual. Here, Nova treats the first notch of the zoom scale as a “list” option:

Or: The new horizontal tabs in Chrome allow you to resize to whatever width you want. Below 125px, however, they snap directly to the minimum 55px width, a one-off “column view” with streamlined and purely iconographic controls:

These all have pros and cons, too.

On the con side, just like the fan or volume controls, they miss any memory since turning them off physically moves the knob away from any “value”; if on/off was a separate button, you could just leave the radio at your preferred volume and never touch it again. They also won’t be as discoverable as a separate onscreen toggle would be. (Here’s an example of a more classic treatment from the Nothing Phone.)

Pros? They are compact. They allow you to change from “off” to a value in one quick gesture, skipping an explicit “on” step. You could even argue they are simpler also in a visual sense.

But also, they are a bit… magical. I don’t know. That’s what to me unifies those old physical controls and their newer digital equivalents – they’re a little extra, a little different, a little special. They break the monotony of a predictable interface built out of boring, identical components. (Although, sadly, not a single onscreen example above uses haptics!)

And I think that’s kind of nice. Not just in the very functional sense of breaking up the UI through shape coding etc., but also in a sense of making UIs more interesting.

Speaking of volume, macOS used to show it as a sort of a HUD, using a treatment that borrowed from both the “first notch is special” radio knobs, and from early onscreen interfaces in TVs:

But after 20+ years, macOS Tahoe changed it so it now looks this way:

I can understand the argument that this is more consistent, and that it even teaches you – by proximity – that Control Center is what these controls call home. Yet I can’t help but think (and it seems I am not alone) that this is so boring and exactly how Windows would approach things – and that this change, just like the squared icons, is how macOS lost one more bit of magic.