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.
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.
The factory i work at occasionally still uses them for delivering tests to the lab, pretty cool to hear them swish around in the pipes.
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.
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?
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.
Some downtown big cities had the buildings interconnected.
Prague had a large pneumatic post system which operated for 100+ years.
I had no idea there were systems that spanned entire cities! Thanks for the link!
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.
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.
Hate someone in the office? Pour hot coffee into the container and send it to your victim.
Ships’ sails. I mean, I know some small vessels still use them, but look at any paintings from 1500s-1800s and tell me those huge white pieces of cloth don’t look cool.
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.
Yes although I would argue cars and highways are just evolutions of horse carts on dirt roads, a way older technology than trains.
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.
I MISS CLEAR COMPUTERS >:(
I mean LOOK AT IT it’s so much cooler than just a box!
The SteamDeck community has been cooking with some clear cases which I would buy if I didn’t have to risk breaking my beloved $500 indie machine.YEYEYEYEYEYEYE
One of my dream projects would be to get a dead iMac G3 and make a modern-day sleeper build inside it. It was honestly the COOLEST a computer has EVER looked.
I bought the translucent nitro purple back plate. Very easy to install.
I miss plastic electronics. Oddly enough glass and metal feel more fragile.
HTC knew what was up with the HTC One series. Their polycarbonate bodies felt Nintendo 64 controller levels of durable.
YOOOOO that purple one! I wonder how hard it would be to do this to mine… time to add this to the Christmas list lol
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:
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:
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.
VFDs are the shit!
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 to
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.
Suck, squeeze, bang, blow
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)
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.
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.
If you want transportation with fire, ride a dragon.
Username checks out. I see you everywhere, and your comments often make me happy.
I definitely agree with you that cars are terrible, and I wish they didn’t exist. Even though I’m a hater, I gotta admit the engineering and history behind them fascinates me, still.
Thank you!
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.
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).
This was a really cool video!
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!
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.
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.
And the technology has evolved that I can actually record and re-record to these plastic discs using lasers and it all fits inside a 1cm-tall drive that sits on my desk. And if the manufacturer uses high-quality materials, the disc will last hundreds of years.
Also some discs I can then either ink-print or laser-print on the top of it? Simply amazing.
Cars used to be cool. Every car company had some kind of sporty car, a couple cheap cars, a big luxury sedan and, a while ago, a station wagon.
Now every car is an SUV or CUV. Sedans are getting phased out. Cool sports cars don’t make money so they don’t make them. People don’t buy station wagons so they don’t make them. And they’re pushing big, angry trucks on everyone.
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 length.
Then you tightened the rear axle again.It’s terrifyingly beautiful:
This sounds like a gadget specifically designed to make people fall off their bikes and break their bones.
… Cool.
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 fuck!
Hi there
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
Usually it’s killing us slower though. I don’t know if that’s progress
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Micheal Fisher’s kbin account.
The internet?
Web 1.0 and even before was way cooler than this corpo bullshit web we have now.