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Count Regal Inkwell @pawb.social

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.

480 comments

  • 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 Definitely superseded in the capitalist world.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.

  • 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.

  • 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'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.

  • 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.

480 comments