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.
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.
My house is decorated with either items from the antique store or from IKEA. There are reasons for both but you need to have unique and mass produced things. We have turned too much for the mass produced
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).
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!
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.
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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People don’t buy station wagons so they don’t make them.
Hatchbacks are just renamed station wagons. Change my mind.
I’d say a hatchback is a sedan with the trunk/boot removed, while a station wagon has the trunk/boot extended to the roofline. Hatchbacks would end up shorter than the sedan or wagon version of cars.
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.
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.
Pre LCD/LED tech for numeral displays. Nixie tubes kicked so much ass, shame they are hard and expensive to source now.
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.
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.
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.
Gpd win mini.
Fits in your pocket, puts the deck to shame and supports an external GPU.
An absolute monster.
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 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.
HTC knew what was up with the HTC One series. Their polycarbonate bodies felt Nintendo 64 controller levels of durable.
I’ve got a drawer that has a stack of my old phones and devices in it. Among them is the CD MP3 player I’ve had since high school. It’s 24 years old, made entirely of plastic, it followed me all the way through high school and part of the way through college, and it’s in perfect working condition and bears only light scuffs. It might be my midlife crisis coming on but I’m tempted to start using the thing again instead of my smart phone. My PC tower has a 5 1/4" bay, I’m tempted to install an optical drive in it.
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
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 bought the translucent nitro purple back plate. Very easy to install.
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.
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?!
Turns out manufacturing individual, low-power-draw, micron-sized lights is not easy. Even if it’s conceptually not as cool, it requires much better manufacturing processes and materials.
LCD isn’t LED.
But, confusingly, an LED TV is an LCD TV. An LED TV is just an LCD TV that uses an LED array for the backlight instead of florescent lights. Quantum dot or QLED displays are also just LCDs with a fancy backlight. OLED displays are the ones that actually have glowing subpixels.
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.
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
I miss the satisfying act of slapping a cassette into a tape deck, then snapping it shut.
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.
Also:
FUCKING LASERS DUDE! Lasers will never NOT be cool.
