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.
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.
And we’re still making stuff and slowly realizing it’s slowly killing us. Isn’t that neat?
Maybe one day we’ll have it all figured out. :p
Or we’ll keep chasing horizons that will forever be deadly but cool.
But now we’re leaving “this old invention is cool” territory and getting into “humans are space orcs” waters.
Usually it’s killing us slower though. I don’t know if that’s progress
Can someone find a video of that, I have to see it!
Ice. As time has gone by, it has become less cool.
Web browsers about 10 years ago
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.
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
Yes although I would argue cars and highways are just evolutions of horse carts on dirt roads, a way older technology than trains.
cooler then or now? because I would argue all retro tech is cooler now
The internet
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…
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 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.
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.
BlackBerry (RIM)
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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.
Fair, looking back, was a lot of good on the net still, you thinking around MySpace launch was the last of the good times??
Up to around the launch of the iPhone I guess, the web was so diverse and so many ‘places’, before youtube, google, facebook.
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.
Edit: very good idea about using non-visible light!
Is there some filter that you could put up over the LEDs that would block everything but a very narrow frequency of light?
Well, one possibility is using something known as Fabry-Perot filter. It allows an extremely narrow frequency to pass, due to multiple reflections and interferences inside the material. Put the light source material within this filter, and you get a laser. That’s essentially the main difference between a led and a semiconductor laser. The filter makes only a narrow band of the emission be “stuck” there, creating a feedback effect that eventually tends to infinity, and a good chunk of that power passes through the filter reflectors, which are intentionally not perfect.
Other than that, I don’t think there is a filter that could be as narrow as the line emission from vapor lamps. Maybe using metamaterials, but a laser would be so much cheaper and easier. A vapor laser would certainly get the job done, but they are large and hard to maintain.
This was a really cool video!
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.
That’s cool, but punch card programming blows my mind.
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!
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…)
I was under the impression that all wind-up turntables (I.e.: from the shellac records and steel needles and mechanical reproducers era) were using mechanical governors
Maybe I’m wrong though.
Oh I know little to nothing about turntables, so you’re probably right :-)
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!
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.
