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.
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.
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 Definitely superseded in the capitalist world.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.
BlackBerry (RIM)
Sex toys and local multiplayer is a way better combination than cybersex and online matchmaking
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.
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.
… We (as in humanity) made a lot of cool shit before we realised it was slowly killing us.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds like a gadget specifically designed to make people fall off their bikes and break their bones.
… Cool.
Hi there
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
The Internet.
Computers making Fennec Fox noises at each other over the telephone line. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
These huge mechanical clocks in church towers.
