What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations?

Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 448 points –

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.

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.... 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.