What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations?
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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I've got another one: Airplanes.
There used to be crazy designs and a lot of variation between planes. Tandem seats, swing wings, dual tailplanes, gull wings, all sorts of crazy design choices side by side. Even commercial airplanes had lots of variation. Trijets with tail stairs, engines embedded in the wing roots.
Planes now all sort of look the same. Every fifth generation fighter looks the same. Granted, this is because they're hitting physical constraints of aerodynamics and stealth, but that limits the creativity of the designers.
I suspect that some of this in the US was due to the strict liability imposed on civil aviation manufacturers in the US. It increased civil aviation safety, but demolished a lot of the civil aviation manufacturers.
It made manufacturers very risk-adverse, placed overwhelming weight on being a known, mature design.
GARA later rolled back some of this, but things never really returned to their original state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Aviation_Revitalization_Act
Yeah, and since all those plane makers also do military stuff, the military planes all end up looking the same, too.
We'll never see weird designs like the Catalina or the P-38 again and I'm kinda sad about that. The weirdest things in the sky now are drones. The Bayraktar has a empanage that would make Kelly Johnson proud.
There are still X-planes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_X-planes
Also they were fun and comfy and shit and the TSA wasn't the TSA