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

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.

Some downtown big cities had the buildings interconnected.

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.

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.

Hate someone in the office? Pour hot coffee into the container and send it to your victim.

The factory i work at occasionally still uses them for delivering tests to the lab, pretty cool to hear them swish around in the pipes.

My kid's car is like this. I've been calling it retro-futuristic, which I think is a pretty apt description.

Many receivers and amplifiers still have VFDs to this day. I still wonder why, LCD has to be significantly cheaper.

They look cool as hell though, so I appreciate that they go the extra step.

Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.

I always ask my friends “How the fuck do you live like this?” when I hop into a car and the music UI is a garish color searing itself into my retinas permanently.

Thankfully, advertising companies have identified this marginal comfort I find in the warm interior lighting of my car and have proceeded to mount insultingly blinding screens all over the city.

The city being the midrise urban sprawl north of Beirut. What do you mean regulations on brightness habibi? You think you live in Paris? Imagine this: half the street is unlit because the power is out, but the advertising company’s invasive bullshit budget™ has enough foreign cash to burn to keep generators running all night for these shitty ads. Gotta beam an extra few kilowatts of photons straight into this sleepy driver’s eyeballs while they operate a motor vehicle, on a highway that a lot of people cross by foot. There’s a special on fish at the fancy supermarket, how will I live without that knowledge?

Thankfully, the “state” of Israel has identified that the civilian structures of Lebanon mildly inconvenienced me, and has proceeded to

This, so much this. As a car enjoyer, seeing cars slowly mutate into giant bloated expensive iPads on wheels is painful. I don't want to buy any car made past 2010 and I know that won't be a viable option soon.

And we can't get small trucks due to a loophole in EPA regulations. I just want something like an old-school Ranger, light, easy on gas, two jump seats in the back for the kids.

I think that some of that is fuel efficiency requirements forcing convergence.

The sedan thing weirded me out too -- I mean, when I think of a "car", I think of a sedan -- but as I understand from reading, that related to people wanting larger maximum cargo space in the car, like if they had to shove a piece of furniture or something in it. I'm in the sedan camp -- in the very rare case that I need to move something really large, I'm just gonna U-Haul it. But I can at least understand the concern people have.

The truck and generally-large vehicle thing, I think, related to a combination of:

• The chicken tax. American auto manufacturers have a 25% protective tariff covering the "light truck" class, making it much more profitable for domestic sales.

• Fuel efficiency exemptions granted that class (which I suspect may have something to do with regulations resulting from lobbying from said manufacturers and them having incentives surrounding the above chicken tax).

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy

  CAFE standards signaled the end of the traditional long station wagon, but Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca developed the idea of marketing the minivan as a station wagon alternative, while certifying it in the separate truck category to allow compliance with less-strict CAFE standards. Eventually, this same idea led to the promotion of the SUV.[106][107]

  The definitions for cars and trucks are not the same for fuel economy and emission standards. For example, a Chrysler PT Cruiser was defined as a car for emissions purposes and a truck for fuel economy purposes.[2] Under then light truck fuel economy rules, the PT Cruiser had have a lower fuel economy target (28.05 mpg beginning in 2011) than it would if it were classified as a passenger car.

• High American towing requirements. That is, American vehicles have far more restrictive towing requirements than in most other countries -- you need a larger vehicle to legally tow a given load than in many other countries. I suspect that the regulations may also have something to do with American automakers lobbying for protective regulation; it pushes American consumers to buy from that protected class of vehicles.

Long story short -- I think that you can probably chalk a lot of that up to rent-seeking out of Detroit.

I'd take it even further: Cars used to be cool - in the 50s to late 60s. Modern cars look so bloody bland in comparison. I'm sure there were duds as well, but the models that show up in period pieces look way cooler than anything we have today.

The engine compartment of a really old car, say pre-1970s, is almost comically empty. Anything newer has so many ducts and hoses you can't see the ground.

I'm tired of fuckin hatchbacks, I just want a regular car, not an SUV, not a truck, just, a fucking car car.

This was a really cool video!

Considering LEDs are so good at producing a very tight wavelength, I wonder if this could be replicated with more energy efficient lamps.

Or if non visible spectrum lights can be used to make similar alpha channel masks that don't affect lighting the scene.

Also, when they catastrophically failed they wound up looking like industrial lovecraftian horrors and produced some of the loudest non-nuclear man made explosions.

None of which is a good thing, but is still pretty cool.

The choochoos got really big at the end of the steam era. UP 4014 happens to be about as long as that bridge which crosses a 4 lane road

I fucking hate cars, including electric ones... And I still agree. Combustion engines are cool as hell.

Please tell me this doesn't run on gas! Gas explodes, you know?

And the fact is "mechanic automated" system for me is what makes it even cooler. All you had to do to start is twist it a couple revolutions and bang, it works as long as you have fuel because everything simply works. Of course, today you have electronic fuel injection and so one, but if you want you can make it works just with a lot of metal to do the right parts.

Man, I'll miss combustion engines (but I hope its use ends ASAP because planet can't wait anymore)

Suck, squeeze, bang, blow

As a subset of this, the fact that carburators worked as well as they did, until we had the technology to invent the simpler fuel injector, I think is pretty cool.

Old camera lenses are awesome. I've got some steel and glass rokkors that are beautiful. They render in such a wonderful way too, so painterly. They have thorium in the glass! Not enough to be sketchy to use but something that obviously isn't done anymore. Bonus points that they can be fixed with a hammer.

Old camera stuff in general is subjectively cooler. The leaf shutters in my 4x5 lenses are incredible little machines. Film in general is cooler than whatever sensor the latest and greatest has. Actual bits of silver suspended in emulsion, with colour filters and dye couplers that react in development. There's a great three part video on YouTube breaking down Kodak's manufacturing process. It's mind boggling that stuff even works. Ohhhh and actually darkroom optical prints! Don't get me started there!

I'm going to develop some rolls I think. Got me in the mood.

Just wanted to say thank you for writing this. Very cool take, that was so well written to get us on board for how and why "that old junk" has personality that is being lost.

Also

Damn.

Damn.

Not much to say other than -- "Damn."

You're right, though.

Great post! I was thinking about it the other day. I have a Citizen wrist watch from the 60s from my grandfather. It looks like new and functions well (mainly because of its self-winding mechanism). I also have a high-end Garmin watch, which from my personal experience lasts about 2 years, so I decided to start treating modern watches like the junk they are: get the cheapest possible that still has the features I want, because I'd be replacing it in two years' time anyway.

I also have an old mechanical typewriter. The drum doesn't move on the A key, so I'm used to hit the space bar whenever I type an "a". It moves the drum slightly more, which is something I always notice when I read pages typed on other typewriters. And don't get me started on the font. No computer can recreate the idiosyncrasies of a good typewriter.

Damn, now I got all nostalgic again. If you excuse me, I'll be in the attic, hammering away on my Consul...

Yes. I'd rather smash my femur at a pop up headlight while lounching over the engine hood than being dragged underneath an SUV street tank and being squashed.

I miss plastic electronics. Oddly enough glass and metal feel more fragile.

YEYEYEYEYEYEYE

One of my dream projects would be to get a dead iMac G3 and make a modern-day sleeper build inside it. It was honestly the COOLEST a computer has EVER looked.

I bought the translucent nitro purple back plate. Very easy to install.

If you go to a United States prison, all of the electronics are clear!

Even the corp pages back in the day where cooler. I remember going to the Warnerbrother webpage to play some Daffy duck game they had. Same with cartoon network's page and probably a bunch others I can't remember. It was more passion than profit.

You could try Gemini or gopher web, it reminds me a lot of web 1.0, both style and community feel.

The idea of punch card programming blows my mind.

To add, there is something about those old 40s and 50s era technical films like you linked that is just so... I don't what exactly it is, but I find them fascinating and genuinely informative, even though they are explaining tech that is decades obsolete.

It's pretty awesome that they are still available 70+ years later in excellent quality!

Someone showed me a record turntable with what must have been a centrifugal governor! What an ingenious device. (I got the impression from him this was unusual for a turntable, at least...)

H model C-130s, the ones with the 4 square blade props? The engines and props are mechanically governed. There are electronic corrections applied, but the core of the systems are purely mechanical. Still flying.

Source: former flight engineer on them.

Centrifugal governors are possibly one of the origins of the phrase "balls out" or "balls to the wall" (although many say "balls to the wall" has to do with the ball-shaped handles on old aircraft throttle levers)

Also somewhat similar to governors are centrifugal switches, which are used in just about anything with an electric motor to disconnect the motor from a capacitor which gives the motor a little extra juice to get it going (I like this video for an explanation of how they work)

My friend's dad had one with a remote that when you changed the volume on the remote the volume knob would move. I thought it was so cool

Luckily, the age of proper home stereo systems isn't over unless you want it to be. But be warned, it's an expensive rabbit hole to fall into...

To make sure I understand, you reached back and grabbed those levers while pedaling and riding the bike?

How many people lost fingers by sticking them into the spokes, I wonder?

This sounds like a gadget specifically designed to make people fall off their bikes and break their bones.

......... Cool.

Honestly those are terrifying. I can't imagine doing any of that whilst on the move.

Hi there

The fuck!

I think a lot of old school products worked better than modern equivalents. Take toasters - when I was a kid our toaster consistently made toast with the same degree of doneness. I've had modern ones that said "microprocessor controlled" on them that couldn't make consecutive pieces the same. Also flashlights. Simple metal flashlights just worked. My new sophisticated one cycles through multiple levels of brightness and then strobing (so I can what, have my own rave?) but sudden motions make it spontaneously turn off. I mean how hard is an ON/OFF switch?

And what's the deal with airline food? I'm thinkin' hey!

My grandmother used to have one. I never realized how it worked before that video, but I was always fascinated by the fact that the bread would lower itself

I think Nixie tubes are actually a kind of neon lamp rather than incandescent bulbs; but yes they are very mid-20th century.

I got a bunch of them to try to build a divergence meter, but I'm too intimidated by the ungodly wiring it would require.

They definitely have a look, although I like the sleek, almost solar punk look of modern sails.

We went from bedsheets that get blown around to clean and optimized vertical wings.

Narrator: and that is how the great solar storm of 2027 wiped out the entire naval shipping and logistics industry.

Similarly, at airports they had these alternating white and blue lights that would sweep the sky for miles around. When we were on the road at night I used to know where we were based on that. I loved it.

.... We (as in humanity) made a lot of cool shit before we realised it was slowly killing us.

You've set off something in the woodworker's side of my brain.

There's a style of furniture called Arts & Crafts. The Arts & Crafts movement was bigger than furniture, but in the furniture world there was kind of a clap back at both ostentatious Victorian furniture a la Chippendale, and the mass produced crap the industurial revolution brought forth. So a style of well built, hand made furniture arose. The joinery was often exposed and in fact celebrated as features of the piece; through tenons would stand out proud, pinned joints would be done in contrasting wood exposed on the face side of the piece. I've heard it described as "in your face joinery." The intention is to say "Look at this table. This table was not manufactured in a factory, it was built in a workshop. Look. At. It." In the United States this movement often went for an aesthetic reminiscent of the furniture and fittings of old Spanish missions, so over here we often call it Mission furniture.

Compare this to the shaker style of furniture. The shakers were a sect of Christianity who were so celibate that men and women were required to use separate staircases, which is why this paragraph is largely written in the past tense. They led very modest lives in communal villages, and were known for their simple and yet extremely well made wooden furniture. A shaker table is the universal prototype table. It has legs, a top, and whatever apron or other structure is required to hold it together. Decoration was often limited to choosing pleasing proportions and maybe tapering the legs. I think a shaker craftsman would see the exposed joinery of the Mission style as sinfully prideful.

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 love seeing old workshops where all of the machines are powered off of a single source of rotational energy. Just so whimsical and kinetic when everything is moving

My mill grinds

pepper and spice

Your mill grinds

rats and mice

Those remotes used little spring-loaded mechanical chimes that emitted ultrasonic notes. As a kid I discovered my parents' big Magnavox console stereo would change channels if I clinked a handful of coins.

Even the replacement and most modern remotes (with an LED at the tip that you have to point at the device) use pretty cool tech.

Usually to send data you want a data channel and a clock channel. When the clock changes say from high to low you read the next bit in the data channel. With one LED to send info you need to combine them.

For transmission that's easy. You make the low to high change at a fixed frequency. For the high to low change if it's a zero you make the high to low change 1/3 the way through the cycle. For a 1 you make the change 2/3 the way through the cycle.

On the receiver you you sync up a signal at the same frequency rising with the start of the transmission at a 1/2 on 1/2 off. You look at the data when the reference falls 1/2 the way through the cycle.

If a zero was sent the line had fallen at the 1/3 and it is a zero. If a one was sent the line doesn't drop until 2/3 and it's a one.

The trick is how do you get a signal at the same frequency and in synch. You compare the transmission frequency revived to the frequency of a voltage controlled oscillator. If it's slower you up the voltage and increase the frequency if it's faster you lower the voltage and lower the frequency.

You similarly use a phase detector to determine if they are in phase slightly boosting the frequency until they are in sync.

This system is called a phased lock loop (pll). All this so you don't have to getup to change the channel. The same sort of system is used for reading data from the magnetic disk on a hard drive.

Our first TV remote was on a cable! This would have been in the early 80s I think.

Replying to this just so people are less likely to accidentally scroll past.

Completely agree, of course. I do miss Web 1.0, when you had to go to IRC, usenet, etc, for the "social" part.

Also in town halls!

Prague astronomical clock

I remember those radios. And I remember the small town radio stations that had shows filled with local happenings and people with local voices providing the information. Not canned shows from a central location.

Even though the story involves drum memory instead, your mention of delay-lines reminds me of The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer. Y'all should read the whole thing (it's not long), but here's a quick excerpt:

 Mel's job was to re-write
 the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
 (Port?  What does that mean?)
 The new computer had a one-plus-one
 addressing scheme,
 in which each machine instruction,
 in addition to the operation code
 and the address of the needed operand,
 had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
 the next instruction was located.

 In modern parlance,
 every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
 Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.

 Mel loved the RPC-4000
 because he could optimize his code:
 that is, locate instructions on the drum
 so that just as one finished its job,
 the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
 and available for immediate execution.
 There was a program to do that job,
 an "optimizing assembler",
 but Mel refused to use it.

They use to have weaving grannies for the magnetic core memory production.

I love that Replaceable Parts is a technology you can research in Civilization. The first time I saw it I thought it was kinda stupid until I thought "Oh wait, does that mean that there was a time when replacement parts just wasn't a thing?"

Yes!

Also, the static on the screen. I don't mean snow, but the actual static that raised your arm hairs. Whenever my parents needed to leave a note for us, they'd just stick the paper to the TV screen and it would stay there because of the static.

I will beat you to death with a wet piece of tissue.

The force is strong with this one.

Computers making Fennec Fox noises at each other over the telephone line. And that connected you to the world.

Early to mid 90s was peak internet, even go as far as late 90s still being pretty solid!

Yeah, I miss those times too. I've had two very good friends and we'be played together so much... plenty of games from Settlers 1, through Carmageddon and some FPS to real time strategies and lastly Heroes of Might and Magic 3 which we played A LOT. I still remember plenty of units stats to this day, lol.

There’s a company called Unihertz that sells a line of keyboard Android phones similar to the last batch of Blackberry models. I know it’s not slider phones but they are inexpensive.

There is also Planet Computers which makes sliding Qwerty phones but they are expensive.

A fuel injector is measurably better in basically every way.

I might still rather have a carburetor...

Really fucking cool.

How Does A Carburetor Work? | Transparent Carburetor at 28,546 fps Slow Mo - Smarter Every Day

Turns out manufacturing individual, low-power-draw, micron-sized lights is not easy. Even if it's conceptually not as cool, it requires much better manufacturing processes and materials.

Come to Germany, we still use parts from emperors time😂

It's ironic

A microsd card with 64 gigs worth of flac files is smaller, more reliable, and sounds better.

.... But minidiscs still LOOK like the future to me. Something about their shape and size just gives that vibe.

Edit: Phone autocorrect turned flac into 🚩

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.

In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant.

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

The General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994, also known by its initials GARA, is Public Law 103-298, an Act of Congress on Senate Bill S. 1458 (103rd Congress), amending the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.

General aviation aircraft production in the U.S. -- following its 30-year peak in the late 1970s—dropped sharply over the next few years to a fraction of its original volume—from approximately 18,000 units in 1978 to 4,000 units in 1986. to 928 units in 1994. (In a 1993 speech, Sen. John McCain said "nearly 500 last year [1992]".)

General aviation aircraft manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s began to terminate or reduce production of their piston-powered propeller aircraft, or struggled with solvency.

At the time, industry analysts estimated that the U.S. decline in general aviation aircraft manufacturing eliminated somewhere between 28,000 and 100,000 jobs—as unit production dropped by 95% between the 1970s peak and the early 1990s—sharply different from other segments of the global aerospace industry, where U.S. market share was still strong.

Product liability costs

Those manufacturers reported rapidly rising product liability costs, driving aircraft prices beyond the market, and they said their production cuts were in response to that growing liability.

Average cost of manufacturer's liability insurance for each airplane manufactured in the U.S. had risen from approximately $50 per plane in 1962 to $100,000 per plane in 1988, according to a report cited by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 2,000-fold increase in 24 years.

Rising claims against the industry triggered a rapid increase in manufacturers' liability insurance premiums during the 1980s. Industry-wide, in just 7 years, the manufacturers' liability premiums increased nearly nine-fold, from approximately $24 million in 1978 to $210 million in 1985.

Insurance underwriters, worldwide, began to refuse to sell product liability insurance to U.S. general aviation manufacturers. By 1987, the three largest GA manufacturers claimed their annual costs for product liability ranged from $70,000 to $100,000 per airplane built and shipped that year.

Also they were fun and comfy and shit and the TSA wasn't the TSA

I want this so I can be sure my phone isn't sneaking a peek at my pooping face

My previous had this & I liked the privacy of it.

Technology connections is the gent that inspired this thread. Was watching one of his videos about old camera flashes (LITERALLY TINY FLASHBANG GRENADES. WE USED TO USE FUCKING BOMBS TO TAKE PHOTOS IN THE DARK HOW FUCKING COOL IS THAT???) and figured "huh... There are a lot of old inventions that might suck to use but are conceptually really cool, aren't there?"

Fun fact, he's in the fediverse! He's @techconnectify@mas.to over on mastodon.

Zip drives still hold the most data of any media. Science may say otherwise, but science doesn't usually come in bright neon colored sleeves.

Not a fan of indie games are you?

Baba is you, is a pretty original puzzle game. I'm not really into factorio, but it made tower defense cool again. There's lots more that are weird and interesting like brigadore, airships conquer the skies, cruelty squad, superliminal.

As far as I remember, portal was a mod or indie game that valve picked up because they thought the idea was really good. It was really good.

Literally play any indie game.

You're talking about the AAA space. Fuck those games. Play indies. There are so many creators carrying out the legacy of game development you're talking about. Don't buy the games directed by suits. Currently I'm playing Factorio: Space Age, which is great. I recently played Lorelie and the Laser Eyes, which is a really cool puzzle game where you're actually going to want to write notes on paper, which feels very classic. There are so many out there, but you actually have to look because the don't have the marketing budget of Ubisoft or EA.

The imagination came from the limitations of the hardware.

Computers today are too powerful for gaming. Its resulted all the famous studios racing to the bottom with graphics their primary and generally only concern, and everything else coming a distant second.

But at least it left the door open for indie devs, whose lack of resources and experience are still capable of keeping that ember of imagination and innovation burning.

If you're only talking about AAA games, sure.

Along with the others I'd also mention Outer Wilds and Viewfinder

What is the formula you're talking about? Games are so diverse it's pretty hard to see what single formula there could be that covers them all.

Alan Wake 2 and Control are fantastic!

I have a broken Nixie clock, at home, it looked great when it was working

Everyone who shaves should own a safety razor. The blades only cost a few pennies each, and they shave so well. Blade preference might be individual, but it's so cheap it's easy to experiment.

It's mainly cool to me because of what it represented in its era. It was personal computing available for the masses, yes, but it's also the embodiment of the American dream. Here's these guys soldering and writing code in their garage, and all of the sudden they're in stores across the world, and competing with giants such as Xerox, and IBM. It's a product from a story for the ages.

Never did I wish I'd been born 30 years earlier quite how when I saw 8 bit guy's video on the workings of an Apple II

I simply adore how tinkerable that thing seems to be.

cybersex and online matchmaking

For when your team literally gets fucked.

Tell that to the furries. Every furry I know that has a VRChat avatar feels more at home with a VR headset strapped to their face.

The indie shit is great tho. Analogue Pocket is an outstanding gaming device to run a whole bunch of portable console games (and some originally non-portable consoles too, like Genesis/Megadrive)

And folks are still making and sometimes even selling Gameboy games right now in 2024

Indie is great, and honestly vital when so much mainstream/AAA shit is such shit

Have you tried a Steam Deck?

I think indie is pretty cool. Its at the point where you can basically design a console by yourself. You can emulate up to ps2 on some of them so you got all the classics in your pocket.

Very much agree. I'd love if Valve would consider filling this niche considering the great success of the Steam Deck. A small clam-shell handheld sized like the GBA SP or the DS.

Modern warfare, when it becomes necessary, should be fought purely with weapons designed prior to the 16th century. Just replace horses with dirtbikes and ATVs.

You do not want this, the level of suffering that came with these battles was insanely worse than the fighting we have today with guns/explosives.

I disagree, firearms are way cooler than bows or swords. Sure, swords are cool but there's only so many ways you can make a pointy sharp metal stick, or put a string on a piece of wood. But firearms in the early 1900s where absolutely wild when it comes to internal mechanics. Same thing goes for siege weapons and artillery, a trebuchet, catapult or ballista are cool at a medieval exhibit, but they ain't a Schwerer Gustav railway canon.

But this is a statement on its own. Now every gas operated gun is either a AR-15 or AK. Every "new" gun is a "Tactitech Eaglefire XK-34-1050-Superbadger Ultradog", and at the end its just another AR-15 with some sharp bits added to it.

Older firearms where way cooler an they don't make them like that anymore.

Guns are pretty neat once you start to understand the engineering and extremely precise tolerances that go into them.

Dune style personal shields can't be invented soon enough.

Then knife fighting will make a big comeback.

That's extremely the aesthetic I love about cyberpunk. Sure the story in Blade Runner is great but look at all the neat shit!

I still have mine sitting on a shelf in my office.

It is entertaining to consider that modems were just computers screaming at each other in shrill voices.

Subscribed

But also, hint:

If instead of pasting a direct link to a community, you use the !communityname@instance.url syntax, people who click that will get sent to view the community from inside their home instance.

So in your case it'd be !crtart@lemmy.world