The Riga control room in this photo was built in 1985 to manage the USSR's North-Western power grid. Every light on the wall is a live substation. That wall is a mosaic mimic board. The entire grid topology of northwestern USSR rendered as a real-time analog dashboard, before consumer GUIs existed. Macintosh had launched the year before. Windows 1.0 wouldn't ship for months. This room was already running real-time visualization for an entire regional grid. The pipe organ ceiling fixtures are…