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.
Home stereo systems. As a kid I remained enthralled by the metal face and the heavily tactile buttons and switches and knobs. You felt a delicious variety of feedbacks for every action you took. I honestly think we really lost something special when tactility left technology. It was so satisfying to just use.
I was thinking the other day how much cooler flap displays at stations and airports were compared to modern displays.
Such a nice interface between computer control and a purely mechanical display. Watching them update, flipping through all the variables to land on the right one, and then clearing was so cool.
I miss the noise they made too. Haven’t seen one for like 20 years now.
The internet when it wasn’t overtaken by a few major corporations.
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.
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.
Toasters. Specifically the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster, with the tag line “Automatic Beyond Belief!”. There is a fan site (https://automaticbeyondbelief.org/, excellent url). Like, what other appliance line has a fan site? Surely no modern day toaster!
But of course I first heard about it from Technology Connections video.
The internet
The original tv remote didn’t use batteries. It used sound. Giant clunky devices with large tactile buttons. Never runs out of batteries and still works if your kid tries to block the screen to keep you from turning it off
Tiny lightbulbs fails to express how uncool led tvs are. They’re just diodes. Adulterated silicon. It’s cool in its own way. But yeah. Everything is just silicon
Slide open phones with a QWERTY keyboard. Those were the bomb.
I wish someone would being those back
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.
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.
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?
It’s pneumatic, not vacuum. Geez.
Making it dangerous to smoke while in transit. I see why the people ones didn’t catch on in the 50s.
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.
The Kroger pharmacy here replaced their awesome pneumatic tube with a boring sliding drawer.
They are used in some hospitals in central Europe
In the Netherlands I see them in nearly every big hospital. I think for sending blood samples to the lab quickly. (Possibly among other things)
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.
Cool. Thanks for the link!
Before ATMs, bank drive-throughs (the ones with multiple lanes for cars) had pneumatic tubes to send cash and checks to the bank teller, or receive cash.
Some probably still do. I feel like I used one within the past 10 years.
I remember those! I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still in use. I’ve never used the drive-through lane at my bank. I can deposit checks online by taking a picture of it (which still seems weird to me), and I use the ATM for everything else.
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.
Tom Scott does a youtube video about one in Canada (IIRC) where they send radioactive medicine from the lab a down the road to a hospital due to the half life of the medication making traditional transport (ie vehicles) impractical.
Edit: bothered to look it up
The two major hospitals, relatively near me, use a combination of tubes, and robots, to dispense medications. One is working on completely robotic food service, and has completely robotic floor cleaning/polishing. Both, also, have robots that do the basic landscaping maintenance, like mowing/edging. There is more, it is interesting to walk around and see all these infrastructure systems work. Feels, at least partially, like the promised future of sci-fi.
My Walmart has them for a pharmacy drive thru.
Hate someone in the office? Pour hot coffee into the container and send it to your victim.
I guess, in a very liberal definition of the term, “cloud gaming”. Specifically the old LodgeNet systems in hotels where you could rent Nintendo games by the hour to be streamed to your room from a physical console somewhere behind the front desk. Every room had a special controller with oodles of extra buttons on it hardwired to the television that also functioned as television remotes.
The service was objectively awful, of course, when factoring in how much the hotel charged compared to what little you got for it. But I’ve always found it fascinating.
Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I’ve heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-
Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅
Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)
Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.
