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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Yep! The height and slope of the car's front end is actually one of the leading predictors of health outcomes for pedestrians involved in motor vehicle accidents

https://youtu.be/YpuX-5E7xoU?si=xLLhl4Gb-Yt6lmvh

Now please give me back my cute flippy headlights 🥹 they make me happy and they're not even up during the day when you're most likely to encounter pedestrians!

I drove a '94 Ford Probe for awhile, it was already 15 years old when I bought it, so I had been hearing stories about the shoddy reliability of flip up headlights for years at this point. Imagine my surprise when I never had any issues with them then, even while living in northern Minnesota. I remember one time after a particularly bad ice storm, turning them on and watching them shatter the ice on my hood and send pieces flying while popping up just the same as always. I loved that car and wish I'd had the money to keep it going.

Ah, but at night is probably when you are more likely to actually hit a pedestrian. I wonder if the stats back up that intuition...

Edit: also, yes pop up headlights are way cooler.