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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a 127mm vacuum tube, quite large, is equivalent to 127,000,000 nm which is only 63.5 million times bigger than a cutting edge transistor so that estimate seems a little exaggerated.

I was too tired to go beyond "1nm = 10^-9^ hence 1 billion" and actually do the maths ;)