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.
CDs and DVDs, because ownership beats convenience when you can get them second hand for pennies on the pound
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.
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.
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 tension.
Then you tightened the rear axle again.
The fuck!
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.
Honestly those are terrifying. I can’t imagine doing any of that whilst on the move.
The Internet.
Telephones making Fennec Fox noises at each other. And that connected you to the world.
Early to mid 90s was peak internet, even go as far as late 90s still being pretty solid!
Early 2000 was best IMO.
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.
I fucking hate cars, including electric ones… And I still agree. Combustion engines are cool as hell.
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.
Suck, squeeze, bang, blow
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.
Please tell me this doesn’t run on gas! Gas explodes, you know?
I recognize that reference, but I can’t quite place it. Futurama? Star Trek: Lower Decks?
It’s from the “I, Robot” movie, but would fit perfectly well in Futurama hahaha
Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones” had a similar description.
maybe I, Robot? been a minute…
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)
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.
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.
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.
Okay, maybe my town is just not up to date, but these are still in use at all the banks and pharmacies where I live. Are they phased elsewhere?
I haven’t seen one in years, but the fact that they’re all used is awesome.
They still use them today in some supermarkets, now they use them to send packets of cigarettes through the store.
That’s actually a pretty good use. In my local market they send the person to a separate counter.
Very cool, I’ve never seen the ones that can send a person. Can they breathe in transit?
Hate someone in the office? Pour hot coffee into the container and send it to your victim.
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
Also, when they catastrophically failed they wound up looking like industrial lovecraftian horrors and produced some of the loudest non-nuclear man made explosions.
None of which is a good thing, but is still pretty cool.
These huge mechanical clocks in church towers.
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).
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.
This was a really cool video!
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.
My kid’s car is like this. I’ve been calling it retro-futuristic, which I think is a pretty apt description.
Oh what kind of car? I’d love for this style to come back for a bit.
Suzuki Aerio SX. I can’t find a picture that shows the whole dash, but here’s part of it:
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 @techconnectify@mas.to over on mastodon.
Portable music players.
They were the coolest when they used minidiscs.
It’s ironic
A microsd card with 64 gigs worth of flag 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.
Cell phones, when they had personality. The 2000s was such a good time for them, you had so many designs. Slide out keyboard, panels that can slide, sleek designs, some had actual buttons .etc
But we’re now relegated to just a varying series of rectangles and squares. Yay…
I got one that slid up to reveal the keyboard after watching The Matrix, and I thought it was the coolest phone ever. I still have it, and I still think it is pretty cool.
Edit: it’s not an actual keyboard though, it’s a phone keypad for dialing or sending texts with t9 input.
It was the Samsung A737.
It looks like this closed
And here it is open
Pictures under glass: literally the only affordance anyone has now for device interaction
When the Vengabus has poorly shielded speakers.
Micheal Fisher’s kbin account.
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.
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.
Narrator: and that is how the great solar storm of 2027 wiped out the entire naval shipping and logistics industry.
Let’s hope not…
