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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Literally play any indie game.
What is the formula you’re talking about? Games are so diverse it’s pretty hard to see what single formula there could be that covers them all.
The imagination came from the limitations of the hardware.
Computers today are too powerful for gaming. Its resulted all the famous studios racing to the bottom with graphics their primary and generally only concern, and everything else coming a distant second.
But at least it left the door open for indie devs, whose lack of resources and experience are still capable of keeping that ember of imagination and innovation burning.
You’re talking about the AAA space. Fuck those games. Play indies. There are so many creators carrying out the legacy of game development you’re talking about. Don’t buy the games directed by suits. Currently I’m playing Factorio: Space Age, which is great. I recently played Lorelie and the Laser Eyes, which is a really cool puzzle game where you’re actually going to want to write notes on paper, which feels very classic. There are so many out there, but you actually have to look because the don’t have the marketing budget of Ubisoft or EA.
Along with the others I’d also mention Outer Wilds and Viewfinder
Alan Wake 2 and Control are fantastic!
Not a fan of indie games are you?
Baba is you, is a pretty original puzzle game. I’m not really into factorio, but it made tower defense cool again. There’s lots more that are weird and interesting like brigadore, airships conquer the skies, cruelty squad, superliminal.
As far as I remember, portal was a mod or indie game that valve picked up because they thought the idea was really good. It was really good.
A student project, actually. Valve saw a college student doing fun/weird shit inside their engine and went “You’re hired”.
That only makes it cooler
If you’re only talking about AAA games, sure.
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…
Pictures under glass: literally the only affordance anyone has now for device interaction
Mine folds in half, so that’s kinda cool
When the Vengabus has poorly shielded speakers.
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
I fell in love with slide phones after watching Densha Otoko!
I still have my Sony Eriksson W580i, also thought it was the coolest thing.
Still works and holds a charge, pulled photos off of the memory card recently, cameras have gotten a lot better… Had the red one, have had some very brightly colored phones, my favourite being the bright yellow Nokia Lumia 1020
Had an amazing camera on it.Those are cool phones too, especially the red one! Yeah, the old digital cameras used to be junk. I have some old digital photos that look like they were taken on a potato.
I think my favourite thing about those old Lumias was the dedicated camera shutter. The 1020 even had a battery grip case so you could hold it more like a digital camera.
Micheal Fisher’s kbin account.
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.
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
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.
Yes although I would argue cars and highways are just evolutions of horse carts on dirt roads, a way older technology than trains.
Electromechanical stuff. Like old jukeboxes, pinball machines or anything else that required programming before the widespread use of microcontrollers.
Some people have already mentioned stuff akin to this, like the mechanical govenor, or the post abt THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE, but it really deserves its own thread.
Technology Connections on YouTube has made some great videos about devices like that.
Interchangeable automotive/bicycle parts.
Or for that matter, interchangeable anything parts.
Both cooler and better at the same time. Interchangeable parts made it easier to both customize and repair your own stuff…
I love that Replaceable Parts is a technology you can research in Civilization. The first time I saw it I thought it was kinda stupid until I thought “Oh wait, does that mean that there was a time when replacement parts just wasn’t a thing?”
Used to be where Mongoose, Huffy, Schwinn, etc bearings and stuff were interchangeable. Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard. I happen to own older things on both ends of that compatible spectrum.
Used to be where an Idle Air Control Valve from a Chevy would fit an Isuzu…
Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard.
They still can.
Oof, wait. I mean when AMD processors were actually compatible with nVidia motherboards.
A8N-SLI Deluxe
But that’s not a thing for intel CPUs either, at least not anymore.
I’m not sure why, but Nvidia hasn’t been making chipsets/motherboard sfor quite a while. Or was there a point in time when it only made chipsets for intel CPUs?
Probably not as well as used to be though.
No, they work fine.
Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard. I happen to own older things on both ends of that compatible spectrum.
I don’t know what you mean by that. The protocol for communication of computer parts is open source. Desktop computers are a great example of interchangeable parts. An Nvidia GPU that can’t run in an AMD motherboard is either not from the same era (so an equivalent AMD GPU wouldn’t work either) or a different form factor (e.g. trying to plug a laptop GPU on a Desktop)
The protocol of communication of computer parts is open source? Since when?
What the fuck is USB? And why is that proprietary?
Regardless, AMD vs nVidia might work together, but not optimally these days.
The protocol of communication of computer parts is open source? Since when?
Since forever, which protocol do you think it’s not? For a few examples here’s PCI and DDR5
What the fuck is USB? And why is that proprietary?
USB is a standardized connector, with again an open source protocol. Here’s the specification in case you’re interested https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-20-specification
Regardless, AMD vs nVidia might work together, but not optimally these days.
I would need a source for that, I’ve had AMD +Nvidia up until very recently and it worked as expected.
USB is absolutely not a standardized connector, otherwise it would only be one type of connector, not the dozen or so they’ve made over the decades. There’s nothing universal about it.
And if it was open source, then why doesn’t VirtualBox release the source code for their USB extension package?
USB is absolutely not a standardized connector,
USB is absolutely standardized, I even sent you the 2.0 spec, you can get the spec for the other versions on the same website.
otherwise it would only be one type of connector, not the dozen or so they’ve made over the decades.
Different versions/connectors have different specs, all of them open, otherwise different manufacturers wouldn’t be able to create devices that use it.
There’s nothing universal about it.
That’s ridiculous, first of all the name relates to the fact that it can be used for any data transfer as long as it’s serial. Secondly the sheer amount of different devices from different manufacturers that can be plugged via USB should give you a hint of just how universal and open the standard is.
And if it was open source, then why doesn’t VirtualBox release the source code for their USB extension package?
The standard is open, implementations of it are not, it’s like OpenGL or Vulkan.
Regardless, AMD vs nVidia might work together, but not optimally these days.
And yet most of the time in the past 2 year the best choice for a gaming PC would be a 3D cache Ryzen with an Nvidia GPU. Is there something particular you have in mind that supposedly doesn’t work with an AMD chipset and an Nvidia GPU?
PCI-Express is not an open standard but both AMD and Nvidia are members and it’s what both use for their GPUs and AMD for it’s chipsets (as well as Intel). It’s certainly not a secret cabal.
It’s all in the same family, literally…
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/05/tech/nvidia-amd-ceos-taiwan-intl-hnk/index.html
This supports your claim of AMD vs Nvidia not working optimally together how?
Being able to build something with off the shelf parts is an art.
The concept of having interchangeable, standardized parts is actually kind of a new idea from the Industrial Revolution. Before then, everything was custom-made to fit. The example that comes to mind is firearms. All of the muskets and rifles used in the revolutionary war, for example, were hand-made and hand-fitted. The lock from one rifle wouldn’t necessarily fit on another. If your stock broke, you couldn’t just go get a new stock and slap it on - you had to bust out the woodworking tools and make a new one.
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.
Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.
I always ask my friends “How the fuck do you live like this?” when I hop into a car and the music UI is a garish color searing itself into my retinas permanently.
Thankfully, advertising companies have identified this marginal comfort I find in the warm interior lighting of my car and have proceeded to mount insultingly blinding screens all over the city.
The city being the midrise urban sprawl north of Beirut. What do you mean regulations on brightness habibi? You think you live in Paris? Imagine this: half the street is unlit because the power is out, but the advertising company’s invasive bullshit budget™ has enough foreign cash to burn to keep generators running all night for these shitty ads. Gotta beam an extra few kilowatts of photons straight into this sleepy driver’s eyeballs while they operate a motor vehicle, on a highway that a lot of people cross by foot. There’s a special on fish at the fancy supermarket, how will I live without that knowledge?
Thankfully, the “state” of Israel has identified that the civilian structures of Lebanon mildly inconvenienced me, and has proceeded toNewer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.
Not sure if you mean VFDs or amber LCDs, but Matrix Orbital sells both sorts in small quantities that you’d use in a project and can interface to a microcontroller – I was interested in them myself when looking for small VFDs, years back. They’re going to be seven-segment or grid displays, though, not things with physical custom display elements like those car dash things, but that’s kinda part and parcel of small-run stuff.
https://www.matrixorbital.com/
https://www.matrixorbital.com/blc2021
Just choose the “amber” option if it’s an amber LCD you want.
Can also get their displays via Mouser or Digikey.
That’s exactly the kind of display I’m talking about. Nice to see they’re still around.
The ones I have are all just grids, higher resolution than these but still comfortingly blocky. I’ve actually replaced the dash display recently since the original one got deep fried under the sun and lost all contrast when the weather was above 20°C.
Ah, good to hear it. They do (or did, and I assume still do) also have higher res displays.
Going back to an earlier bit in the conversation, where you were concerned about light sources in the car, I think that auto-dimming might also help (not just with VFDs, but the brightness of any in-car display). My car dash has the option to automatically set brightness based on ambient light levels (something that I wish my desktop computer monitor could do…part of “dark mode”'s benefit is a mitigation for devices that don’t do this). I don’t know if that was a thing back in the 1980s or so, when these display designs were popular.
I also kind of wonder if eye-tracking, which has come a long way, could be made reliable-enough and responsive-enough to toggle off displays if the car can detect that a user is looking somewhere away from them. Maybe be conservative, not with some critical displays, but stuff like the radio or clock or something. Eye tracking systems normally use the near-infrared, as I understand it, not visible light, so I’d think that you could theoretically do it in a darkened car without problems.
VFDs are the shit!
Many receivers and amplifiers still have VFD displays 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.
As someone who also likes VFDs, I’ve fully expected that they’d be extinct in new products by now thanks to cheap LCDs and OLED. But I find it awesome that they’re still hanging in there.
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:
As a kid, I had this tabletop video game called “Dracula” that featured a multicolor VFD display. I loved that game.
I remember getting a hand-me-down digital ‘black book’ to store phone numbers during the age of the palm pilot. It had a ‘dial’ button and a speaker on the back. You could pick up the phone, put the speaker against the phone’s mouthpiece and it would ‘dial’ by playing the correct tones. Blew. My. Mind.
I dunno about you, but I have a hankering for the mid-to-late-80s aesthetic, but specifically that taken into sci-fi. I’m talking Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star etc. 80s tech but… Future!
Everything’s so chunky and functional. It looks like you could hit it with a sledgehammer and it would still work!
Basically, BUTTONS! Gimme buttons, lots of big buttons! I want things that go click so I can be sure I’ve pressed them. I don’t want a tiddly little touchpanel for my washing machine, I want a button that goes CLACK when I press it!
Automatic watches and grandfather clocks. The way they kept track of time using only mechanical principles is crazy. How does my automatic watch recharge itself using only the movement from wearing it and keep accurate track of time. Grandfather clocks are cool because they’re so power efficient.
They are very cool indeed. And the fact that you can have a century old watch on your wrist and it’s just as useful as a modern one. In fact I’m wearing a watch from the 50s right now!
These huge mechanical clocks in church towers.
St Marks in Venice has a “digital display”
Wild!
I did not know digital had been added to any tower-clocks.
Also, waving a magnet around a crt was fun.
Yes!
Also, the static on the screen. I don’t mean snow, but the actual static that raised your arm hairs. Whenever my parents needed to leave a note for us, they’d just stick the paper to the TV screen and it would stay there because of the static.
Great way to not have a crt anymore.
Nah, that didn’t harm it.
Not in my experience. You use a degaussing tool (which is an electromagnet) on crts when the picture gets all “wonky” (technical term).
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.
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.
You do not want this, the level of suffering that came with these battles was insanely worse than the fighting we have today with guns/explosives.
I disagree, firearms are way cooler than bows or swords. Sure, swords are cool but there’s only so many ways you can make a pointy sharp metal stick, or put a string on a piece of wood. But firearms in the early 1900s where absolutely wild when it comes to internal mechanics. Same thing goes for siege weapons and artillery, a trebuchet, catapult or ballista are cool at a medieval exhibit, but they ain’t a Schwerer Gustav railway canon.
But this is a statement on its own. Now every gas operated gun is either a AR-15 or AK. Every “new” gun is a “Tactitech Eaglefire XK-34-1050-Superbadger Ultradog”, and at the end its just another AR-15 with some sharp bits added to it.
Older firearms where way cooler an they don’t make them like that anymore.
Surprisingly, 3D printing is where most of the firearm innovation is happening now. Some use off the shelf parts from common guns like the AR-15, others are completely printed. It’s a weird rabbit hole to fall into, but definitely interesting.
The “should this be legal/illegal” debate is its own rabbit hole as well.
It always struck me as weird that serial numbers and therefore the weapons tie to the owner are printed on the receiver. A receiver can be milled with a simple CNC mill or as recent development shown using 3D printers. We should rather serialize and register barrels, the one thing that needs highly specialized equipment to manufacture and what defines the guns caliber, potential muzzle velocity and has unique thread profile.
While yeah, AR and AK patterns are everywhere, there’re still neat things to find. The Kriss Vector has their innovative approach to recoil control, the Boberg pistol reverses the usual way rounds are stripped drom the mag.
The magic is still out there, but it never was nor will it ever be common.
Yeah, the most intricate gun in my eyes is the AN-94, canted magazine, recoiling barrel, specialized muzzle device, pulley system, 2 shot hyperburst. What were they smoking when developing this thing?
When you break it down, yeeting a small piece of metal, accurately, up to a mile, through the use of handheld controlled explosions, is way cooler than just yeeting a pointy stick with another stick and a string. So, I am inclined to agree with you.
From an engineering standpoint, firearms are so much more fascinating.
Still amazes me that at the end of the day, most of them are fired by what is essentially a mouse trap. I’m curious when electronically activated cartridges become acceptable. Imagine how much space/bulk you can relocate from a pistol without the need for a mechanical hammer/striker. Think about getting a crisp and responsive trigger on a bullpup style setup. How much more accurate could you be with a long range rifle if you eliminate the trigger pull from moving the weapon (have it disconnected from the firearm, like a remote camera trigger).
Dune style personal shields can’t be invented soon enough.
Then knife fighting will make a big comeback.
Guns are pretty neat once you start to understand the engineering and extremely precise tolerances that go into them.
