What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations?
What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations?
I don't mean BETTER. That's a different conversation. I mean cooler.
An old CRT display was literally a small scale particle accelerator, firing angry electron beams at light speed towards the viewers, bent by an electromagnet that alternates at an ultra high frequency, stopped by a rounded rectangle of glowing phosphors.
If a CRT goes bad it can actually make people sick.
That's just. Conceptually a lot COOLER than a modern LED panel, which really is just a bajillion very tiny lightbulbs.
Pneumatic tubes were way, way cooler than email.
Of course, you could only use them to send a message to someone in the same office building, so the comparison isn’t perfect… but you know what I mean.
I'm not crazy old, but I'm old enough that the supermarket I went to as a kid had these at all the checkout aisles and the cashiers would use them to send cheques/reciepts/ whatever.
It was awesome to see.
Some downtown big cities had the buildings interconnected.
Prague had a large pneumatic post system which operated for 100+ years.
Roosevelt Island in New York City uses pneumatic tubes for trash collection!
Ironically, it actually sucks less than the famously terrible way the rest of the city does it.
Big hospitals still have them to send medications and random lightweight stuff around the complex. My wife has worked in two large hospitals that had pretty extensive tube systems, used especially with pharmacy.
Tom Scott does a youtube video about one in Canada (IIRC) where they send radioactive medicine from the lab a down the road to a hospital due to the half life of the medication making traditional transport (ie vehicles) impractical.
Edit: bothered to look it up
My Walmart has them for a pharmacy drive thru.
The two major hospitals, relatively near me, use a combination of tubes, and robots, to dispense medications. One is working on completely robotic food service, and has completely robotic floor cleaning/polishing. Both, also, have robots that do the basic landscaping maintenance, like mowing/edging. There is more, it is interesting to walk around and see all these infrastructure systems work. Feels, at least partially, like the promised future of sci-fi.
Before ATMs, bank drive-throughs (the ones with multiple lanes for cars) had pneumatic tubes to send cash and checks to the bank teller, or receive cash.
Some probably still do. I feel like I used one within the past 10 years.
They're still in use at most banks where I live. Most hospitals use them too; way faster than dumbwaiters
I remember those! I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still in use. I’ve never used the drive-through lane at my bank. I can deposit checks online by taking a picture of it (which still seems weird to me), and I use the ATM for everything else.
Hate someone in the office? Pour hot coffee into the container and send it to your victim.
The factory i work at occasionally still uses them for delivering tests to the lab, pretty cool to hear them swish around in the pipes.
I like the look of vacuum-fluorescent displays (VFDs) -- a high-contrast display with a black background, solid color areas. Enough brightness to cause some haloing spilling over into the blackness if you were looking at it. Led to a particular design style adapted to the technology, was very "high-tech" in maybe the 1980s.
OLEDs have high contrast, and I suppose you could probably replicate the look, but I doubt that the style will come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display
EDIT: A few more car dashboards using similar style:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/skillshare/uploads/session/tmp/50c99738
https://www.pinterest.com/hudsandguis/retro-car-dashboards/
And some concept cars with similar dash:
https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2022/retro-digital-dashboards
Some other devices using VFDs:
Many receivers and amplifiers still have VFDs to this day. I still wonder why, LCD has to be significantly cheaper.
They look cool as hell though, so I appreciate that they go the extra step.
As someone who also likes VFDs, I've fully expected that they'd be extinct in new products by now thanks to cheap LCDs and OLED. But I find it awesome that they're still hanging in there.
Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.
I always ask my friends “How the fuck do you live like this?” when I hop into a car and the music UI is a garish color searing itself into my retinas permanently.
Thankfully, advertising companies have identified this marginal comfort I find in the warm interior lighting of my car and have proceeded to mount insultingly blinding screens all over the city.
The city being the midrise urban sprawl north of Beirut. What do you mean regulations on brightness habibi? You think you live in Paris? Imagine this: half the street is unlit because the power is out, but the advertising company’s invasive bullshit budget™ has enough foreign cash to burn to keep generators running all night for these shitty ads. Gotta beam an extra few kilowatts of photons straight into this sleepy driver’s eyeballs while they operate a motor vehicle, on a highway that a lot of people cross by foot. There’s a special on fish at the fancy supermarket, how will I live without that knowledge?
Thankfully, the “state” of Israel has identified that the civilian structures of Lebanon mildly inconvenienced me, and has proceeded toNewer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.
Not sure if you mean VFDs or amber LCDs, but Matrix Orbital sells both sorts in small quantities that you'd use in a project and can interface to a microcontroller -- I was interested in them myself when looking for small VFDs, years back. They're going to be segmented alphanumeric or grid displays, though, not things with physical custom display elements like those car dash things, but that's kinda part and parcel of small-run stuff.
https://www.matrixorbital.com/
https://www.matrixorbital.com/blc2021
Just choose the "amber" option if it's an amber LCD you want.
Can also get their displays via Mouser or Digikey.
As a kid, I had this tabletop video game called "Dracula" that featured a multicolor VFD display. I loved that game.
VFDs are the shit!
Cars used to be cool. Every car company had some kind of sporty car, a couple cheap cars, a big luxury sedan and, a while ago, a station wagon.
Now every car is an SUV or CUV. Sedans are getting phased out. Cool sports cars don't make money so they don't make them. People don't buy station wagons so they don't make them. And they're pushing big, angry trucks on everyone.
This, so much this. As a car enjoyer, seeing cars slowly mutate into giant bloated expensive iPads on wheels is painful. I don't want to buy any car made past 2010 and I know that won't be a viable option soon.
In the last episode of The Grand Tour Clarkson said that he's done with cars because they've become appliances, and it's no fun reviewing microwaves.
And we can't get small trucks due to a loophole in EPA regulations. I just want something like an old-school Ranger, light, easy on gas, two jump seats in the back for the kids.
The old Ford Rangers were definitely not easy on gas, and those back seats were extremely unsafe. But we could absolutely have trucks that size now that are fuel efficient and safer, and I would buy one in a heart beat. Hell, I tried to buy a Maverick but it's been impossible every year and now they don't even come with the hybrid drivetrain standard so I've lost interest.
I think that some of that is fuel efficiency requirements forcing convergence.
The sedan thing weirded me out too -- I mean, when I think of a "car", I think of a sedan -- but as I understand from reading, that related to people wanting larger maximum cargo space in the car, like if they had to shove a piece of furniture or something in it. I'm in the sedan camp -- in the very rare case that I need to move something really large, I'm just gonna U-Haul it. But I can at least understand the concern people have.
The truck and generally-large vehicle thing, I think, related to a combination of:
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The chicken tax. American auto manufacturers have a 25% protective tariff covering the "light truck" class, making it much more profitable for domestic sales.
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Fuel efficiency exemptions granted that class (which I suspect may have something to do with regulations resulting from lobbying from said manufacturers and them having incentives surrounding the above chicken tax).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
CAFE standards signaled the end of the traditional long station wagon, but Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca developed the idea of marketing the minivan as a station wagon alternative, while certifying it in the separate truck category to allow compliance with less-strict CAFE standards. Eventually, this same idea led to the promotion of the SUV.[106][107]
The definitions for cars and trucks are not the same for fuel economy and emission standards. For example, a Chrysler PT Cruiser was defined as a car for emissions purposes and a truck for fuel economy purposes.[2] Under then light truck fuel economy rules, the PT Cruiser had have a lower fuel economy target (28.05 mpg beginning in 2011) than it would if it were classified as a passenger car.
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High American towing requirements. That is, American vehicles have far more restrictive towing requirements than in most other countries -- you need a larger vehicle to legally tow a given load than in many other countries. I suspect that the regulations may also have something to do with American automakers lobbying for protective regulation; it pushes American consumers to buy from that protected class of vehicles.
Long story short -- I think that you can probably chalk a lot of that up to rent-seeking out of Detroit.
Fuel economy is ruining the sedans and wagons that still exist. Volvos are getting really long and really wide, because CAFE standards take to the area underneath the wheelbase into account, and the bigger that is the less economical they have to be.
I've got a 2015 v60 and while I like the new ones they're just too damn wide and long.
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I'd take it even further: Cars used to be cool - in the 50s to late 60s. Modern cars look so bloody bland in comparison. I'm sure there were duds as well, but the models that show up in period pieces look way cooler than anything we have today.
The engine compartment of a really old car, say pre-1970s, is almost comically empty. Anything newer has so many ducts and hoses you can't see the ground.
I'm tired of fuckin hatchbacks, I just want a regular car, not an SUV, not a truck, just, a fucking car car.
People don’t buy station wagons so they don’t make them.
Hatchbacks are just renamed station wagons. Change my mind.
All the station wagon I ever owned I could comfortable sleep in the back of, with a partner. Hatchbacks are way too short.
It’s because people want a big boot. In Europe hatchbacks/cross overs are favored over sedans for that reason. And people just don’t like the look of a station wagon/estate car. Only the luxury brands still make sedans.
Disney lost their old camera tech used to make a "yellow screen" with sodium vapor lights.
It's actually better than a green screen because the yellow light is so specific that even if you remove that particular frequency of light, everything else still looks fine. You can do all sorts of things that would normally be very difficult to pull off with any of our green screen tech (like drinking water in a clear bottle or wearing a rainbow dress).
This was a really cool video!
Considering LEDs are so good at producing a very tight wavelength, I wonder if this could be replicated with more energy efficient lamps.
Or if non visible spectrum lights can be used to make similar alpha channel masks that don't affect lighting the scene.
A laser, maybe, but definitely not LEDs. Vapor/gas lamps produce the narrowest frequency bands possible, because it comes from very well defined atomic transitions (Hz range). LEDs produce frequency bands with widths in the GHz/THz range, while semiconductor lasers can maybe reach KHz if they are really good. So, unfortunately, for this type of applications, vapor lamps would probably still be needed.
Source: I work with lasers and spectroscopy.
Edit: very good idea about using non-visible light!
Steam locomotives. The crazy streamlining, the size of some of those motherfuckers. 6 foot tall wheels, 100 tons moving at 125mph and all that shit accomplished 80+ years ago
The choochoos got really big at the end of the steam era. UP 4014 happens to be about as long as that bridge which crosses a 4 lane road
In the near to mid future, I think an answer to this question are Internal Combustion Engines. I love electric vehicles and look forward to the tech improving. But the sheer coolness factor of moving a large machine through perfectly timed and calibrated explosions is tough to beat.
And the fact is "mechanic automated" system for me is what makes it even cooler. All you had to do to start is twist it a couple revolutions and bang, it works as long as you have fuel because everything simply works. Of course, today you have electronic fuel injection and so one, but if you want you can make it works just with a lot of metal to do the right parts.
Man, I'll miss combustion engines (but I hope its use ends ASAP because planet can't wait anymore)
That's why I kinda like my carburated 2-stroke motorcycle.
Needs just 3 wires from the engine to work and 1 to shut it off. Weighs just around 100kg and will propel me to 90km/h with just a 50cc cylinder.
Not to mention the smoke, sound, and the narrow powerband, just love that feeling.
Suck, squeeze, bang, blow
Sounds like a good way to spend a Friday evening.
As a subset of this, the fact that carburators worked as well as they did, until we had the technology to invent the simpler fuel injector, I think is pretty cool.
Constant velocity carburetors blew my mind when I learned how they worked, and I got the funniest introduction to them.
I had an Aprilia RS-50 motorcycle which had a slide-type carburetor. Instead of a coin-in-a-pipe throttle, this thing basically had a portcullis across the intake. Pulling on the throttle cable pulled the slide upwards making the aperture/venturi larger, allowing in more air, while also lifting a needle up out of the jet to allow more fuel in. It's a 2-stroke race bike, so you could easily bog down the engine if you opened the throttle too fast.
Then I bought a Ninja 250F, which has constant velocity carbs. Which also have a slide, AND a butterfly valve. The butterfly valve is operated by the throttle cable to control power. The slide is vacuum powered from the engine, and opens and closes the venturi to keep the air velocity through the carburetor constant, in order to keep the suction at the jet constant. It also has a needle in the main jet which it lifts along with the slide, so the needle's taper meters the fuel mixture for the amount of air going through the carb. This inherently compensates for air density; if the air is less dense the vacuum mechanism can't pull the slide open as far so the slide doesn't open as far, and neither does the needle valve. So it automatically maintains the mixture.
Which is why using constant velocity carburetors on the Rotax 912 engine is such a brilliant idea. A carbureted airplane engine with no cockpit mixture control.
I never knew the complexity of ICE until watching the Garbage Time YouTube channel. They repair old cars (and sometimes break them to fix them later) and show the whole process, but do it as a hobby, so it's all for entertainment.
Whenever I hear a running hit and miss engine it brings a smile to my face, similar with small stationary steam engines. There's a club in Baraboo WI that does a big meetup once a year where there's just tons of early tractors and stationary engines powered by all sorts of different types of combustion with all sorts of creative new engine designs that stopped being viable around the time of the first world war. I haven't been able to go most years but it's really incredible to see so many wonky engines wirring and popping and hissing and clanking around, all while struggling to reach the performance of a present day lawnmower (and not a good one at that)
Drag disagrees. If you want transportation with fire, ride a dragon. No need to pollute the earth. The emissions make it uncool, just like the ridiculous Mad Max cars.
If you want transportation with fire, ride a dragon.
Username checks out. I see you everywhere, and your comments often make me happy.
I definitely agree with you that cars are terrible, and I wish they didn't exist. Even though I'm a hater, I gotta admit the engineering and history behind them fascinates me, still.
Does your dragon not fart?
Automatic watches and grandfather clocks. The way they kept track of time using only mechanical principles is crazy. How does my automatic watch recharge itself using only the movement from wearing it and keep accurate track of time. Grandfather clocks are cool because they're so power efficient.
They are very cool indeed. And the fact that you can have a century old watch on your wrist and it's just as useful as a modern one. In fact I'm wearing a watch from the 50s right now!
Oh man...I have an entire ten page paper on the go about this topic and it just keeps growing. One day I'll publish it in a blog or something, but for now it's just me vomiting up my thoughts about mass market manufacturing and the loss of zeitgeist.
The examples that I always use are a) Camera Lenses, b) Typewriters, and c) watches.
Mechanical things age individually, developing a sort of Kami, or personality of their own. Camera lenses wear out differently, develop lens bokehs that are unique. Their apertures breath differently as they age No two old mechanical camera lenses are quite the same. Similarly to typewriters; usage creates individual characteristics, so much so that law enforcement can pinpoint a particular typewriter used in a ransom note.
It's something that we've lost in a mass produced world. And to me, that's a loss of unimaginable proportions.
Consider a pocket watch from the civil war, passed down from generation to generation because it was special both in craftsmanship and in connotation. Who the hell is passing their Apple Watch down from generation to generation? No one....because it's just plastic and metal junk in two years. Or buying a table from Ikea versus buying one made bespoke by your neighbour down the street who wood works in his garage. Which of those is worthy of being an heirloom?
If our things are in part what informs the future of our role in the zeitgeist, what do we have except for mounds of plastic scrap.
Old camera lenses are awesome. I've got some steel and glass rokkors that are beautiful. They render in such a wonderful way too, so painterly. They have thorium in the glass! Not enough to be sketchy to use but something that obviously isn't done anymore. Bonus points that they can be fixed with a hammer.
Old camera stuff in general is subjectively cooler. The leaf shutters in my 4x5 lenses are incredible little machines. Film in general is cooler than whatever sensor the latest and greatest has. Actual bits of silver suspended in emulsion, with colour filters and dye couplers that react in development. There's a great three part video on YouTube breaking down Kodak's manufacturing process. It's mind boggling that stuff even works. Ohhhh and actually darkroom optical prints! Don't get me started there!
I'm going to develop some rolls I think. Got me in the mood.
Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I've heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-
Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅
Yes. I'd rather smash my femur at a pop up headlight while lounching over the engine hood than being dragged underneath an SUV street tank and being squashed.
Yep! The height and slope of the car's front end is actually one of the leading predictors of health outcomes for pedestrians involved in motor vehicle accidents
https://youtu.be/YpuX-5E7xoU?si=xLLhl4Gb-Yt6lmvh
Now please give me back my cute flippy headlights 🥹 they make me happy and they're not even up during the day when you're most likely to encounter pedestrians!
Disregarding the safety comments (which should not be disregarded) purely for the purposes of this conversation, in older cars the vacuum tubes that operated the lights would frequently fail, meaning that the lights wouldn't deploy even when desired.
I MISS CLEAR COMPUTERS >:(
I mean LOOK AT IT it's so much cooler than just a box!
The SteamDeck community has been cooking with some clear cases which I would buy if I didn't have to risk breaking my beloved $500 indie machine.
I miss plastic electronics. Oddly enough glass and metal feel more fragile.
YEYEYEYEYEYEYE
One of my dream projects would be to get a dead iMac G3 and make a modern-day sleeper build inside it. It was honestly the COOLEST a computer has EVER looked.
I’ve still got original Mac from 1984 and have been mighty tempted to see what I could do with a raspberry pi
I bought the translucent nitro purple back plate. Very easy to install.
If you go to a United States prison, all of the electronics are clear!
YOOOOO that purple one! I wonder how hard it would be to do this to mine... time to add this to the Christmas list lol
best of luck! the one in the photo is from the company JSAUX but I don't know much about it, just thought it looked pretty
I remember the clear telephone in my friend's dorm room. He called it Pavlov because he had to respond to it when the bell rang.
The Switch Pro Controller is a little bit transparent which is cool.
I broke the screen on mine doing the transplant. Was able to get a new screen to fix it but it made it a 100 dollar project instead of a 20 dollar project.
The internet?
Web 1.0 and even before was way cooler than this corpo bullshit web we have now.
Even the corp pages back in the day where cooler. I remember going to the Warnerbrother webpage to play some Daffy duck game they had. Same with cartoon network's page and probably a bunch others I can't remember. It was more passion than profit.
You could try Gemini or gopher web, it reminds me a lot of web 1.0, both style and community feel.
Not to mention way faster and more accessible
I feel like you don't actually remember what web 1.0 was like. Or even bbs's. They... kind of sucked. I mean they were great for the time, but compared to the internet of today, pathetic.
The funny part of this comment is that when I was a teenager, I started and ran one of the largest RBBS systems in Canada with about 40 USR modems, and helped out on a couple more big ones like Rusty and Edie's in the US. I also set up one of the first Echomail and Fidonet nodes in the country, and was a very early adopter getting usenet links working via RBBS. I loved that time, it was exciting and new , and western as hell.
So I'm pretty sure I know exactly what I'm talking about.
Home stereo systems. As a kid I remained enthralled by the metal face and the heavily tactile buttons and switches and knobs. You felt a delicious variety of feedbacks for every action you took. I honestly think we really lost something special when tactility left technology. It was so satisfying to just use.
Any mechanical regulation process that used to be handled by actual machine parts. Think of the centrifugal governor, this beautiful and elegant mechanical device just for regulating the speed of a steam engine. Sure, a computer chip could do it a lot better today, and we're not even building steam engines quite like those anymore. But still, mechanically controlled things are just genuinely a lot cooler.
Or hell, even for computing, take a look at the elaborate mechanical computers that were used to calculate firing solutions on old battleships. Again, silicon computers perform objectively better in nearly every way, but there's something objectively cool about solving an set of equations on an elaborate arrangement of clockwork.
The idea of punch card programming blows my mind.
He's not talking about punch card programming, that's way more advanced and requires a Turing machine, what he's talking about is computers as the term was using before what you would think as a computer existed.
The example in the video is for the computer on a cannon in a battleship. If there wasn't a computer you would need to adjust the angle and height of the cannon, but that's not something a human can know, what humans can know is angle to the ship and the distance to it, so instead you put two inputs where a human inputs that and you translate that into angle/height. Now those two would be very straightforward, essentially you just rename the height crank to distance. But this computer is a lot more complex, because wind, speed, etc can affect the shoot, so you have cranks for all of that, and internally they combine into a final output of angle/height to the cannon.
To add, there is something about those old 40s and 50s era technical films like you linked that is just so... I don't what exactly it is, but I find them fascinating and genuinely informative, even though they are explaining tech that is decades obsolete.
It's pretty awesome that they are still available 70+ years later in excellent quality!
Someone showed me a record turntable with what must have been a centrifugal governor! What an ingenious device. (I got the impression from him this was unusual for a turntable, at least...)
H model C-130s, the ones with the 4 square blade props? The engines and props are mechanically governed. There are electronic corrections applied, but the core of the systems are purely mechanical. Still flying.
Source: former flight engineer on them.
Centrifugal governors are possibly one of the origins of the phrase "balls out" or "balls to the wall" (although many say "balls to the wall" has to do with the ball-shaped handles on old aircraft throttle levers)
Also somewhat similar to governors are centrifugal switches, which are used in just about anything with an electric motor to disconnect the motor from a capacitor which gives the motor a little extra juice to get it going (I like this video for an explanation of how they work)
I didn't know that was a thing. Thanks! I'm honestly surprised some MBA bean counter hasn't replaced those with a chip of some sort by now. Really cool!
Bicycle shifters.
The first iteration that could be operated without stopping was the Campagnolo Cambio Corsa.
To shift, you had to reach behind you, where there were 2 levers.The first one loosened the rear axle so it could move freely back and forth in the dropouts.
The second one had an eyelet you could use to move the chain sideways.
You put the chain on a different cog, and the rear wheel jumped forward or back due to the changed chain length.
Then you tightened the rear axle again.It's terrifyingly beautiful:
To make sure I understand, you reached back and grabbed those levers while pedaling and riding the bike?
How many people lost fingers by sticking them into the spokes, I wonder?
Yes.
This sounds like a gadget specifically designed to make people fall off their bikes and break their bones.
......... Cool.
Honestly those are terrifying. I can't imagine doing any of that whilst on the move.
Hi there
The fuck!
A lot of older tech had a way more interesting silhouette. You can see this clearly in how many objects live on in icon form. We still often use handset phones, magnifying glasses, gears, or the infamous floppy disk save icon. I think the staying power of these really comes from how ephemeral and formless digital tech can be.
Reminds me of the device icons in Microsoft Intune.
Android is represented by a rounded rectangle. Linux is a rounded rectangle, but yellow. iOS is, you guessed it, a rounded rectangle, but black.
Windows, however, is a nice flat-screen monitor (read: a rounded rectangle on a stick)
Oh wow, that sounds like a great example
Ships' sails. I mean, I know some small vessels still use them, but look at any paintings from 1500s-1800s and tell me those huge white pieces of cloth don't look cool.
They definitely have a look, although I like the sleek, almost solar punk look of modern sails.
We went from bedsheets that get blown around to clean and optimized vertical wings.
Toasters. Specifically the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster, with the tag line "Automatic Beyond Belief!". There is a fan site (https://automaticbeyondbelief.org/, excellent url). Like, what other appliance line has a fan site? Surely no modern day toaster!
But of course I first heard about it from Technology Connections video.
A nixie tube is a bunch of tiny lightbulbs shaped into numbers in a single pack with different pins each turning on a number.
Clearly the modern number display is better in many ways, but you were asking for coolness.
I think Nixie tubes are actually a kind of neon lamp rather than incandescent bulbs; but yes they are very mid-20th century.
They're fluorescent tubes, yes. I wasn't specific about what kind of lightbulbs.
I got a bunch of them to try to build a divergence meter, but I'm too intimidated by the ungodly wiring it would require.
Trains and railways are cooler and better than cars and highways. Imagine making everyone get their own personal vehicle, engine, tires, fuel, service, license, and insurance, just to watch them all crash into each other and die constantly.
Yes although I would argue cars and highways are just evolutions of horse carts on dirt roads, a way older technology than trains.
Trains aren't old tech though. Just tech that got pushed out by auto-maker lobbying. In places (like Japan, or China, or parts of Europe) where they kept evolving they only got better.
Especially the interurban lines that built every American megacity. Small single driver electric trains (basically trolleys but designed to go faster than streetcars and ran on dedicated right of way outside of the city) they were a really efficient method of transporting people into cities, many allowed for flag stops (where a passenger would flag down the car anywhere along the tracks to stop so they could get on) and would run between cities, feeding from smaller towns into larger ones or just running between nearby cities.
Unfortunately passenger railroad service has always been unprofitable. Until the 1960s most passenger services were largely paid for by lucrative mail contracts and would haul Railroad Post Offices, which were delicated cars with tiny postal sorting facilities in them that post workers would sort the incoming and outgoing mail on and pickup and drop off big bundles of mail at every stop and often even without stopping. Most interurban and trolley lines were largely real estate schemes where they'd buy comparatively cheap farm land, build a rail stop and possibly a few homes and businesses near the stop to sell for a tidy profit, then sell the rest of the land plot by plot now that the rail connection and other nearby homes and businesses made it far more valuable. This was even the tactic when building the transcontinental railroad, where the railroad companies built entire cities along the way.
So simply put, railroad construction and operation is prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, if the US Federal Government matched their spending on highways for railroad expansion the cost of rail transport would probably blow the cost of driving or hiring a truck out of the water entirely
Clothing and towels made with asbestos fabric. During the middle ages you could clean them by throwing them in the fire and they would come out clean. Eventually your lungs would give up on you but for a while you had a very cool way to impress your guests.
Once widely used, the number of operational lighthouses has declined due to the expense of maintenance and the advent of much cheaper, more sophisticated, and more effective electronic navigational systems.
They were quite important for a long time. We used them for thousands of years, and they're often unique in form, iconic. And they're a good subject for photos and paintings, and I think that the light effect from them is neat. Lots of books and such using them, like ones on remote rocks, to get an isolated setting ("the lone lighthouse keeper").
But the past few decades of technological advancement have probably closed the end of their era.
Narrator: and that is how the great solar storm of 2027 wiped out the entire naval shipping and logistics industry.
Let's hope not...
On a modern container ship, by the time you'd see the light, it's already to late to avoid running aground.
Similarly, at airports they had these alternating white and blue lights that would sweep the sky for miles around. When we were on the road at night I used to know where we were based on that. I loved it.
Flight instructor here. That is called a beacon, and airports still have them. And none of them have ever been blue. It may appear blue from the ground but the beam is actually green. The colors actually encode what kind of airport they're at.
At a normal civilian airport that has runways, the beacon will be green and white.
At a military airfield, the beam will flash green and then two whites.
At a heliport with only helipads for helicopters, the beacon will be green, yellow, white.
At a seaplane base, the beacon will be white and yellow.
The beacon will operate from sunset to sunrise, and also during daylight when instrument conditions prevail.
Bonus airport light fact: some smaller, less busy airports like your typical county airport probably does not turn all of its surface lights on all of the time. It'll run the beacon to help pilots find the airport, but the runway and taxiway lights will remain off. Pilots are able to turn them on from the air by tuning their radios to the airport's UNICOM frequency and pushing the PTT key several times in rapid succession. Quite often the brightness is controllable whether you press the key 5, 7 or 9 times. This is called Pilot Controlled Lighting. It's an energy saving system that's been around for decades now, and a fun magic trick for private pilots to pull on their friends lucky enough to be invited on a night flight.
Drag doesn't like light pollution. Imagine living in the light path of a lighthouse. Every minute your bedroom lights up like Christmas then goes dark again.
I think if you lived near a lighthouse you would invest in some blackout curtains.
Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)
Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.
Neither sure how to call it, nor is it a technology, more like a mindset. I am just gonna name it: "Prideful Craftsmanship"
Basically the incorporation of "useless" decorations and embellishments, to show off ones skill and maybe market oneself a little. Definitely superseded in the capitalist world. Things were just prettier or more interesting to look at, even stuff that wasn't meant to be flashy.
But with nearly everything being made to a price point, this practice has been somewhat lost.
You've set off something in the woodworker's side of my brain.
There's a style of furniture called Arts & Crafts. The Arts & Crafts movement was bigger than furniture, but in the furniture world there was kind of a clap back at both ostentatious Victorian furniture a la Chippendale, and the mass produced crap the industurial revolution brought forth. So a style of well built, hand made furniture arose. The joinery was often exposed and in fact celebrated as features of the piece; through tenons would stand out proud, pinned joints would be done in contrasting wood exposed on the face side of the piece. I've heard it described as "in your face joinery." The intention is to say "Look at this table. This table was not manufactured in a factory, it was built in a workshop. Look. At. It." In the United States this movement often went for an aesthetic reminiscent of the furniture and fittings of old Spanish missions, so over here we often call it Mission furniture.
Compare this to the shaker style of furniture. The shakers were a sect of Christianity who were so celibate that men and women were required to use separate staircases, which is why this paragraph is largely written in the past tense. They led very modest lives in communal villages, and were known for their simple and yet extremely well made wooden furniture. A shaker table is the universal prototype table. It has legs, a top, and whatever apron or other structure is required to hold it together. Decoration was often limited to choosing pleasing proportions and maybe tapering the legs. I think a shaker craftsman would see the exposed joinery of the Mission style as sinfully prideful.
CDs and DVDs, because ownership beats convenience when you can get them second hand for pennies on the pound
Also:
FUCKING LASERS DUDE! Lasers will never NOT be cool.
Why are the kind of holograms made by lasers not cool anymore? They're just on credit cards and currency now. I always thought those were awesome. There used to be a hologram museum in Chicago when I was a kid. We went up there a few times and I always insisted on going.
The best ones were holograms of microscopes or telescopes and you could actually look through the eyepiece and see something through it!
And the technology has evolved that I can actually record and re-record to these plastic discs using lasers and it all fits inside a 1cm-tall drive that sits on my desk. And if the manufacturer uses high-quality materials, the disc will last hundreds of years.
Also some discs I can then either ink-print or laser-print on the top of it? Simply amazing.
I miss the satisfying act of slapping a cassette into a tape deck, then snapping it shut.
I was thinking the other day how much cooler flap displays at stations and airports were compared to modern displays.
Such a nice interface between computer control and a purely mechanical display. Watching them update, flipping through all the variables to land on the right one, and then clearing was so cool.
I miss the noise they made too. Haven’t seen one for like 20 years now.
These huge mechanical clocks in church towers.
Older forms of computer RAM.
Before integrated circuits, we had core memory which was a grid of wires and at each intersection was a little magnetic donut that held a single 1 or 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory
Before that they had delay line memory, where they used vibrations traveling down a long tube of mercury, and more bits meant a longer tube to store a longer wave train.
Even though the story involves drum memory instead, your mention of delay-lines reminds me of The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer. Y'all should read the whole thing (it's not long), but here's a quick excerpt:
Mel's job was to re-write the blackjack program for the RPC-4000. (Port? What does that mean?) The new computer had a one-plus-one addressing scheme, in which each machine instruction, in addition to the operation code and the address of the needed operand, had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum, the next instruction was located. In modern parlance, every single instruction was followed by a GO TO! Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it. Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code: that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the "read head" and available for immediate execution. There was a program to do that job, an "optimizing assembler", but Mel refused to use it.They use to have weaving grannies for the magnetic core memory production.
I'm biased because I'm building up a small collection, but radios were cooler when they were made of Bakelite.
My modest collection:
Also, I realize that digital tuning is more accurate, but there's something I find very pleasant about turning a knob and the station suddenly comes in clearly. Just that little "aha" serotonin hit.
Interchangeable automotive/bicycle parts.
Or for that matter, interchangeable anything parts.
Both cooler and better at the same time. Interchangeable parts made it easier to both customize and repair your own stuff..
I love that Replaceable Parts is a technology you can research in Civilization. The first time I saw it I thought it was kinda stupid until I thought "Oh wait, does that mean that there was a time when replacement parts just wasn't a thing?"
The concept of having interchangeable, standardized parts is actually kind of a new idea from the Industrial Revolution. Before then, everything was custom-made to fit. The example that comes to mind is firearms. All of the muskets and rifles used in the revolutionary war, for example, were hand-made and hand-fitted. The lock from one rifle wouldn’t necessarily fit on another. If your stock broke, you couldn’t just go get a new stock and slap it on - you had to bust out the woodworking tools and make a new one.
Also, waving a magnet around a crt was fun.
Yes!
Also, the static on the screen. I don't mean snow, but the actual static that raised your arm hairs. Whenever my parents needed to leave a note for us, they'd just stick the paper to the TV screen and it would stay there because of the static.
Great way to not have a crt anymore.
Not in my experience. You use a degaussing tool (which is an electromagnet) on crts when the picture gets all “wonky” (technical term).
Nah, that didn't harm it.
The technology behind telecommunication.
Today everything happens inside your router, fast and silent. My father was a telecommunications engineer. When I was a amall boy (late 1980s) he once took me to his workplace (it was in the evening and he was supposed to troubleshoot). What today fits onto a few silicone chips inside a router took much more space back them.
I was in a room that was filled with several wardsobe-sized cabinets. Inside there were hundreds of electro-mechanical relays that were in motion, spinning and clicking, each time someone in the city dialed a number (back then rotary phones were quite common). It was quite loud. There also was a phone receptor inside one of the cabinets where one could tap into an established connection, listening into the conversation two strage people had (it was for checking if a connectiion works).
I still remeber the distinct "electrical" smell of that room (probably hazardous vapors from long forbidden cable insulation and other electrical components).
So when you dialed a number at one place with your rotary phone, you were able to move some electro-mechanical parts at another place that could be located somewhere else around the globe (hence long distance calls).
I'm going back to video games that had multiplayer before we had network connectivity. If I wanted to play against a friend, we would have to get together in person and hang out. Game was done, you had a friend over for dinner. Or just a friend to come over and help you with the game. I miss when games were actual social events.
Yeah, I miss those times too. I've had two very good friends and we'be played together so much... plenty of games from Settlers 1, through Carmageddon and some FPS to real time strategies and lastly Heroes of Might and Magic 3 which we played A LOT. I still remember plenty of units stats to this day, lol.
I love that about CRTs, man.
How the fuck could we invent a tiny pocket sized particle accelerator electron beam gun that magnetically aimed its fire with such precision as to hit every individual phosphor, with the appropriate charge to make the right color, across an entire fucking screen, and do that 30+ times a second (for TV, or 60+ for a monitor)..
Yet the LCD is the high tech fancy monitor when its just a little grid of globs being electronically fired? How did the CRT get invented before the LCD?!
Carburetors are pretty fuckin cool.
The concept seems simple: utilize the vacuum from the engine to pull in fuel. But they're extremely complicated with all the tiny orifices and passageways to perfect the amount of fuel going into the engine at different points.Unrelated sidenote: i got deja vu writing this comment. Interesting.
A fuel injector is measurably better in basically every way.
I might still rather have a carburetor...
Railway signalling and interlocking systems. Sure ETCS and other digital systems are far safer, but some dude at a junction used to manually reset the points and crossovers using a giant lever. Now everything’s just a digital system overseen by someone with 8+ monitors in a control room removed from the actual network.
Also, not a technology, but rally cars used to be fully unhinged. I could watch old Group B videos for hours and never get bored.
Come to Germany, we still use parts from emperors time😂
The internet
Portable music players.
They were the coolest when they used minidiscs.
It's ironic
A microsd card with 64 gigs worth of flac files is smaller, more reliable, and sounds better.
.... But minidiscs still LOOK like the future to me. Something about their shape and size just gives that vibe.
Edit: Phone autocorrect turned flac into 🚩
Exactly, a microSD is boring, it is cool in concept but damn boring IRL.
I would love a minidisc player as a fidget toy!
I might finally have reached the point where I no longer see the Wii as a piece of futuristic tech
I guess, in a very liberal definition of the term, "cloud gaming". Specifically the old LodgeNet systems in hotels where you could rent Nintendo games by the hour to be streamed to your room from a physical console somewhere behind the front desk. Every room had a special controller with oodles of extra buttons on it hardwired to the television that also functioned as television remotes.
The service was objectively awful, of course, when factoring in how much the hotel charged compared to what little you got for it. But I've always found it fascinating.
The Gameboy.
The switch is neat, but it's too large.
I've got another one: Airplanes.
There used to be crazy designs and a lot of variation between planes. Tandem seats, swing wings, dual tailplanes, gull wings, all sorts of crazy design choices side by side. Even commercial airplanes had lots of variation. Trijets with tail stairs, engines embedded in the wing roots.
Planes now all sort of look the same. Every fifth generation fighter looks the same. Granted, this is because they're hitting physical constraints of aerodynamics and stealth, but that limits the creativity of the designers.
I could mention toasters or pinball machines or flickering light bulbs or unusual people movers, but instead I'll save some time and just link the whole obligatory channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
Technology connections is the gent that inspired this thread. Was watching one of his videos about old camera flashes (LITERALLY TINY FLASHBANG GRENADES. WE USED TO USE FUCKING BOMBS TO TAKE PHOTOS IN THE DARK HOW FUCKING COOL IS THAT???) and figured "huh... There are a lot of old inventions that might suck to use but are conceptually really cool, aren't there?"
Fun fact, he's in the fediverse! He's @[email protected] over on mastodon.
Horsehide bomber jackets of the sort worn in WW2.
We can make cheaper and lighter synthetic materials. But I like the look that leather jackets acquire with wear over time (and particularly horsehide, which is less-available today than cowhide, as we don't have many horses around any more).
They aren't gone -- it's still possible to obtain them. But in 2024, they're really limited to people going out of their way to get them.
The phones with the internal hidden camera, I was sure it would be the future
https://www.91mobiles.com/list-of-phones/pop-up-camera-phones
I still think ZIP drives are pretty cool. Or using cassette tapes of any kind for data other than video/audio. Hella wish I had a DAT drive still.
Zip drives still hold the most data of any media. Science may say otherwise, but science doesn't usually come in bright neon colored sleeves.
I used to be pretty into machine learning and AI generation circa 2018-ish. It used to be fun and surreal. Sites like artbreeder were a great novelty, and also a pretty good learning tool. Now that it's "good" I feel that not only has a lot of the charm been lost, it's become much easier for malicious actors to use it.
Video games. Way back then there was imagination involved, and companies took risks. Nowadays every game seems to iterate on the same tired formula. The only recent entry I can think of that bucked this trend in the past few decades was maybe Portal, but there have been few to no other recent games that come to mind. Fight me.
Not a fan of indie games are you?
Baba is you, is a pretty original puzzle game. I'm not really into factorio, but it made tower defense cool again. There's lots more that are weird and interesting like brigadore, airships conquer the skies, cruelty squad, superliminal.
As far as I remember, portal was a mod or indie game that valve picked up because they thought the idea was really good. It was really good.
Literally play any indie game.
The imagination came from the limitations of the hardware.
Computers today are too powerful for gaming. Its resulted all the famous studios racing to the bottom with graphics their primary and generally only concern, and everything else coming a distant second.
But at least it left the door open for indie devs, whose lack of resources and experience are still capable of keeping that ember of imagination and innovation burning.
You're talking about the AAA space. Fuck those games. Play indies. There are so many creators carrying out the legacy of game development you're talking about. Don't buy the games directed by suits. Currently I'm playing Factorio: Space Age, which is great. I recently played Lorelie and the Laser Eyes, which is a really cool puzzle game where you're actually going to want to write notes on paper, which feels very classic. There are so many out there, but you actually have to look because the don't have the marketing budget of Ubisoft or EA.
Along with the others I'd also mention Outer Wilds and Viewfinder
What is the formula you're talking about? Games are so diverse it's pretty hard to see what single formula there could be that covers them all.
Alan Wake 2 and Control are fantastic!
Ooh, rotary phone switches. This YouTube channel (THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE) has a bunch of videos on them. I can only imagine how a massive exchange full of them must have sounded. They're so satisfyingly mechanical.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKnS0AB2CTN_eu8k8rgaOW0PWFH2Qv9Ui
Razors. Back in the day you could buy a razor and expect to shave with it every day for the rest of your life. I still have my first razor, a Gillette Slim Adjustable and it still shaves as well as it did the first day I brought it home. The heft and balance are something those new plastic razors and multi bladed monsters can never match.
Thankfully, internet shopping allows me to buy blades from around the world and now I can enjoy my old razor again.
I'm a sucker for Nixie Tubes
I have a broken Nixie clock, at home, it looked great when it was working
This may not apply, (as I know I'm simply saying a commercial product got worse as it had revisions) but Jawbone's first earbud/headset used a small rubber conductor to evaluate skull vibration for noise canceling ( and likely there was some ANC using incoming mic audio from external sources). They continued to include a rubber bumper but I think the device leaned more on incoming audio from mics rather than from the rubber bumper. The oldest device presented the best noise canceling even after 3 product changes. I used every version until they stopped making headsets. I miss my Jawbone. I still have my OG.
Sex toys and local multiplayer is a way better combination than cybersex and online matchmaking
cybersex and online matchmaking
For when your team literally gets fucked.
Tell that to the furries. Every furry I know that has a VRChat avatar feels more at home with a VR headset strapped to their face.
Furries and strap-ons seem to go hand in hand
I generally can't be arsed with online multiplayer -- Just as a concept.
But I made great memories with my cousins playing Wii/GameCube local multiplayer titles. Smash, Mario Kart, Sonic Adventure 2, et cetera.
I have never played a game with random strangers ever. But! My brother and sister both live hours away from me (and each other), and we keep in touch by playing online co-op games every week.
I have a group of friends that I have mostly kept in touch with by playing online games too.
So I agree with what I think you meant, but I'm very glad online multiplayer exists in some form.
Who said you can't do it anymore?
Still trying to find a way to get microtransactions in there, but I've already got horse armour, thanks
BlackBerry (RIM)
The Apple II is still such a fucking cool computer.
Sure, my watch is about a billion times more powerful, but my watch will never be as cool as the Apple II.
It's mainly cool to me because of what it represented in its era. It was personal computing available for the masses, yes, but it's also the embodiment of the American dream. Here's these guys soldering and writing code in their garage, and all of the sudden they're in stores across the world, and competing with giants such as Xerox, and IBM. It's a product from a story for the ages.
Never did I wish I'd been born 30 years earlier quite how when I saw 8 bit guy's video on the workings of an Apple II
I simply adore how tinkerable that thing seems to be.
Video game consoles.
Clarke's third law is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I have the notion that any technology becomes uninteresting and not cool once reaches the level of magic. We are tactile and inquisitive creatures, so objects that appeal to our hands and perceptions are cool. Once we can no longer grasp the parts, literally or metaphorically, they're no longer alluring.
Phones, cars, screens, computers, anything. Why is Amiga HAM mode fascinating to many people still, even when they're emulating it on a 32-bit-depth screen that can concurrently play high-quality video streamed over the Internet? That's why.
Portable consoles. They're dead now or replaced by indie shit. No, the switch doesn't count, if it can't fit in my pocket isn't portable.
The indie shit is great tho. Analogue Pocket is an outstanding gaming device to run a whole bunch of portable console games (and some originally non-portable consoles too, like Genesis/Megadrive)
And folks are still making and sometimes even selling Gameboy games right now in 2024
Indie is great, and honestly vital when so much mainstream/AAA shit is such shit
I think indie is pretty cool. Its at the point where you can basically design a console by yourself. You can emulate up to ps2 on some of them so you got all the classics in your pocket.
Have you tried a Steam Deck?
I don't think they consider that "portable".
Very much agree. I'd love if Valve would consider filling this niche considering the great success of the Steam Deck. A small clam-shell handheld sized like the GBA SP or the DS.
Counterpoint: A modern SBC Console from China (Retroid, Anbernic, whatever) will play a library in the thousands of titles, WHILE fitting in your pocket AND having a modern screen.
Countercounterpoint: Emulation is not as cool as the real thing. Especially for the PSP because it was basically a tiny DVD player.
Most weapons. Bows and swords are cooler than guns and knives. Trebuchets and catapults are cooler than any form of modern artillery.
Modern warfare, when it becomes necessary, should be fought purely with weapons designed prior to the 16th century. Just replace horses with dirtbikes and ATVs.
Modern warfare, when it becomes necessary, should be fought purely with weapons designed prior to the 16th century. Just replace horses with dirtbikes and ATVs.
You do not want this, the level of suffering that came with these battles was insanely worse than the fighting we have today with guns/explosives.
I disagree, firearms are way cooler than bows or swords. Sure, swords are cool but there's only so many ways you can make a pointy sharp metal stick, or put a string on a piece of wood. But firearms in the early 1900s where absolutely wild when it comes to internal mechanics. Same thing goes for siege weapons and artillery, a trebuchet, catapult or ballista are cool at a medieval exhibit, but they ain't a Schwerer Gustav railway canon.
But this is a statement on its own. Now every gas operated gun is either a AR-15 or AK. Every "new" gun is a "Tactitech Eaglefire XK-34-1050-Superbadger Ultradog", and at the end its just another AR-15 with some sharp bits added to it.
Older firearms where way cooler an they don't make them like that anymore.
When you break it down, yeeting a small piece of metal, accurately, up to a mile, through the use of handheld controlled explosions, is way cooler than just yeeting a pointy stick with another stick and a string. So, I am inclined to agree with you.
From an engineering standpoint, firearms are so much more fascinating.
Surprisingly, 3D printing is where most of the firearm innovation is happening now. Some use off the shelf parts from common guns like the AR-15, others are completely printed. It's a weird rabbit hole to fall into, but definitely interesting.
The "should this be legal/illegal" debate is its own rabbit hole as well.
Guns are pretty neat once you start to understand the engineering and extremely precise tolerances that go into them.
Dune style personal shields can't be invented soon enough.
Then knife fighting will make a big comeback.
I dunno about you, but I have a hankering for the mid-to-late-80s aesthetic, but specifically that taken into sci-fi. I'm talking Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star etc. 80s tech but... Future!
Everything's so chunky and functional. It looks like you could hit it with a sledgehammer and it would still work!
Basically, BUTTONS! Gimme buttons, lots of big buttons! I want things that go click so I can be sure I've pressed them. I don't want a tiddly little touchpanel for my washing machine, I want a button that goes CLACK when I press it!
Not really an "older iteration" as much as a "sideways iteration", but the Novint Falcon was the coolest controller I've ever used. It had a ton of potential, but it seemed like the company had no clue how to utilize it.
I still have mine sitting on a shelf in my office.
I still have mine in its original box in my closet. I wish there were modern drivers for it with custom game support; so you could mod support into your favorite games.
What a cool device. I just watched this video on it and lost a bunch of my morning in a quite enjoyable way.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jhGeq_yQYyg
Shame the company died before they could do much with it.
cooler then or now? because I would argue all retro tech is cooler now
Pre LCD/LED tech for numeral displays. Nixie tubes kicked so much ass, shame they are hard and expensive to source now.
"Steam gauges" on car/plane instrument panels. Yeah, digital displays are cheaper to manufacture and less prone to failure, but they kinda suck the fun out of it.
A bunch of tiny lightbulbs that use twisted light and quantum mechanics to turn on or off.
Did someone say CRT??? https://lemmy.world/c/crtart
Car washes. All those pretty lights and water effects are now replaced with an instant transition.
Phones. From anytime up to and including rotary phones.
Electric guitars. They sounded better. Newer ones just sound louder.
They also feel...worse? Jumbo frets, thick coats of polyurethane, cheap pickguards, plastic pickup covers, etc — yuck.
I've been buying weirdo vintage guitars (
teisco, musima) and they feel way better in my hands. The pickups are usually pretty low output, yeah, but the cleans sound so so good.
I remember getting a hand-me-down digital 'black book' to store phone numbers during the age of the palm pilot. It had a 'dial' button and a speaker on the back. You could pick up the phone, put the speaker against the phone's mouthpiece and it would 'dial' by playing the correct tones. Blew. My. Mind.
Electromechanical stuff. Like old jukeboxes, pinball machines or anything else that required programming before the widespread use of microcontrollers.
Some people have already mentioned stuff akin to this, like the mechanical govenor, or the post abt THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE, but it really deserves its own thread.
Technology Connections on YouTube has made some great videos about devices like that.
cars
There was a virus back in the day that could take advantage of old monitors. It would move a turkey around the screen and if you looked at it too long it would cause eye damage.
I searched and didn't find anything, gonna need some specifics on this one
This is the kind of rumor that tech geeks spread at a sleepover.
X
Gotta need more data on that...
Aah.. Boomer bait, we get that a lot :s
I'm. sorry for your thread but in actual fact there is no older tech that is cooler than any modern tech - we get better tech because we get at the same tech as time goes by. Sorry, but your premise is flawed.
And I am sorry that you apparently don't know how to read
Cooler and better are different concepts, and literally everyone else got the idea.
Nope, your premise is flawed.
You forget that "cool" does not equal "better", cool is a vibe, better is a fact.
Minidisc players are cool and futuristic, but an iPhone is a better music player, but not as cool.
The starting scene of The Matrix would not have been as cool if Neo just handed the guy a USB stick, rather than a Minidisc.
That's true in that absent very unusual cases, we don't lose technology, so all the past technology remains. I think that it's a valid insight.
However, I think that it's also true to say that there are technologies that -- while not gone -- fall into disuse because of a changing environment.
You're saying that a "better" technology will remain, and for certain definitions of "better", I agree. We have no reason, absent maybe a changing environment that makes what is "best" different at different points in time or changing understanding of what is "best" (e.g. maybe internal combustion vehicles going away as we understand the impact of carbon dioxide emissions) to stop using a better technology.
But OP is specific in distinguishing between "best" and "coolest":
I don't mean BETTER. That's a different conversation. I mean cooler.
So I think that his question is valid.
Bet you’re fun at parties.
I'm sorry, but your premise is flawed. The actual fact is that they are not fun at parties.
I'm. sorry you couldn't contribute to this conversation constructively but in fact there is nothing you could have added anyway - other people post better comments than you every time a minute goes by. Sorry, but your comments premise is flawed.
A wall full of 12” vinyl versus a hard drive full of flac files? We’re talking cooler - not better. Relax a bit, read the question again.
