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.
The internet
Aah… Boomer bait, we get that a lot :s
Oh man…I have an entire ten page paper on the go about this topic and it just keeps growing. One day I’ll publish it in a blog or something, but for now it’s just me vomiting up my thoughts about mass market manufacturing and the loss of zeitgeist.
The examples that I always use are a) Camera Lenses, b) Typewriters, and c) watches.
Mechanical things age individually, developing a sort of Kami, or personality of their own. Camera lenses wear out differently, develop lens bokehs that are unique. Their apertures breath differently as they age No two old mechanical camera lenses are quite the same. Similarly to typewriters; usage creates individual characteristics, so much so that law enforcement can pinpoint a particular typewriter used in a ransom note.
It’s something that we’ve lost in a mass produced world. And to me, that’s a loss of unimaginable proportions.
Consider a pocket watch from the civil war, passed down from generation to generation because it was special both in craftsmanship and in connotation. Who the hell is passing their Apple Watch down from generation to generation? No one…because it’s just plastic and metal junk in two years. Or buying a table from Ikea versus buying one made bespoke by your neighbour down the street who wood works in his garage. Which of those is worthy of being an heirloom?
If our things are in part what informs the future of our role in the zeitgeist, what do we have except for mounds of plastic scrap.
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.
Awww shucks. Thanks. I appreciate the compliment.
Damn.
Not much to say other than – “Damn.”
You’re right, though.
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.
I have a couple of 80s Rokkors that I use with a speedbooster on my lumix g9, a 50mm and a 35mm. Despite having to do some math in terms of converting things like focal length, etc… because of the adaptor, It’s WELL worth it.
My house is decorated with either items from the antique store or from IKEA. There are reasons for both but you need to have unique and mass produced things. We have turned too much for the mass produced
The technology behind telecommunication.
Today everything happens inside your router, fast and silent. My father was a telecommunications engineer. When I was a amall boy (late 1980s) he once took me to his workplace (it was in the evening and he was supposed to troubleshoot). What today fits onto a few silicone chips inside a router took much more space back them.
I was in a room that was filled with several wardsobe-sized cabinets. Inside there were hundreds of electro-mechanical relays that were in motion, spinning and clicking, each time someone in the city dialed a number (back then rotary phones were quite common). It was quite loud. There also was a phone receptor inside one of the cabinets where one could tap into an established connection, listening into the conversation two strage people had (it was for checking if a connectiion works).
I still remeber the distinct “electrical” smell of that room (probably hazardous vapors from long forbidden cable insulation and other electrical components).
So when you dialed a number at one place with your rotary phone, you were able to move some electro-mechanical parts at another place that could be located somewhere else around the globe (hence long distance calls).
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.
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.
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.
Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I’ve heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-
Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅
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.
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.
Cars used to be cool. Every car company had some kind of sporty car, a couple cheap cars, a big luxury sedan and, a while ago, a station wagon.
Now every car is an SUV or CUV. Sedans are getting phased out. Cool sports cars don’t make money so they don’t make them. People don’t buy station wagons so they don’t make them. And they’re pushing big, angry trucks on everyone.
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.
Fuel economy is ruining the sedans and wagons that still exist. Volvos are getting really long and really wide, because CAFE standards take to the area underneath the wheelbase into account, and the bigger that is the less economical they have to be.
I’ve got a 2015 v60 and while I like the new ones they’re just too damn wide and long.
The length I figure mostly isn’t an issue aside from maybe street parking. But the width thing seems like a hassle.
I drive a (by American standards) narrow sedan, but I have to say that I keep seeing people have trouble getting out of their cars in older parking lots because there isn’t enough clearance between two wide vehicles. Lot of people just lapping over two slots or avoiding parking next to another car.
I suppose that some of that is self-solving – I mean, if there’s enough inertia, parking lot operators will reallocate space in their lots. Or maybe vehicle manufacturers will step in and minivan-style sliding doors will just become the norm (like a two “sliding door coupe”, maybe?)
I’d rather just have either (a) the protectionism go away, or (b) if that’s not possible for political reasons, at least slash the misincentives associated with it. Just outright say “if it’s an American-made vehicle, it gets a subsidy” if that’s what industrial policy actually is. All of the associated regulatory stuff is creating inefficiencies of its own.
I’ve got a house built in the 70s and a new Volvo wagon won’t fit lengthwise in it without gutting the garage.
Meanwhile my GTI can fit in front of my workbench with almost six feet to spare.
Oh, good point, hadn’t thought about the changes to garages over time. Hmm.
-
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.
The old Ford Rangers were definitely not easy on gas, and those back seats were extremely unsafe. But we could absolutely have trucks that size now that are fuel efficient and safer, and I would buy one in a heart beat. Hell, I tried to buy a Maverick but it’s been impossible every year and now they don’t even come with the hybrid drivetrain standard so I’ve lost interest.
Alternately, I’d take an El Camino.
Fuck yeah, I’d love an El Camino
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.
In the last episode of The Grand Tour Clarkson said that he’s done with cars because they’ve become appliances, and it’s no fun reviewing microwaves.
People don’t buy station wagons so they don’t make them.
Hatchbacks are just renamed station wagons. Change my mind.
I’d say a hatchback is a sedan with the trunk/boot removed, while a station wagon has the trunk/boot extended to the roofline. Hatchbacks would end up shorter than the sedan or wagon version of cars.
I do think that branding is also a factor. I remember once reading something saying that that people who get married and have kids and need a family vehicle don’t like driving what their parents drive, that it’d be boring and stodgy. So avoiding the station wagon that their parents drove, the next generation drove minivans. The next generation avoided their parents’ minivan, and drove SUVs. The next generation avoided SUVs and drove hatchback CUVs.
They all kinda fill the same role, as a large enclosed vehicle with a fair bit of cargo space accessible via a rear door.
Here’s a generation-old article from when SUVs were the hot item on the way in:
For a period starting in the early 1980s, when Chrysler couldn’t make enough Caravans and Voyagers, the minivan was a suburban status symbol. Baby Boomers claimed it as their preferred mode of family transportation, replacing the stalwart station wagon that had dominated for decades. Nearly every auto maker added a minivan to its line, and the category topped the auto sales charts throughout most of the ’90s.
Times have changed. Boomer offspring have grown up and out of their car seats and started driving their own cars. More and more moms, notably those from the older end of Generation X, are working. Sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are all the rage in suburbia, with many a maturing mom abandoning her minivan, opting for liberating style over utilitarian substance. Along the way, the minivan has developed a stigma, and now brands its owner as pragmatic and sensible – not to mention a little bit square.
“Minivans are out of favor,” says Gordon Wangers, managing partner of Automotive Marketing Consultants Inc., Vista, CA. “Many former minivan moms wouldn’t be caught dead in a minivan [now]. They want an SUV. It’s a major trend that will not go away.”
I think it also has to do with the population getting older and fatter. People aren’t able to get into and out of traditional sedans anymore, so they need something with more ride height.
That would explain why station wagons didn’t come back into fashion.
The internet?
Web 1.0 and even before was way cooler than this corpo bullshit web we have now.
I feel like you don’t actually remember what web 1.0 was like. Or even bbs’s. They… kind of sucked. I mean they were great for the time, but compared to the internet of today, pathetic.
You could try Gemini or gopher web, it reminds me a lot of web 1.0, both style and community feel.
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.
Pre LCD/LED tech for numeral displays. Nixie tubes kicked so much ass, shame they are hard and expensive to source now.
Portable consoles. They’re dead now or replaced by indie shit. No, the switch doesn’t count, if it can’t fit in my pocket isn’t portable.
Counterpoint: A modern SBC Console from China (Retroid, Anbernic, whatever) will play a library in the thousands of titles, WHILE fitting in your pocket AND having a modern screen.
Countercounterpoint: Emulation is not as cool as the real thing. Especially for the PSP because it was basically a tiny DVD player.
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
I don’t wanna deal with crappy controls or needing to install and research roms online
controls are very very good and it’s intended for use with cartridges. no roms needed - hell it’s actually a little extra effort to run rom files on it.
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.
Have you tried a Steam Deck?
I don’t think they consider that “portable”.
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.
Gpd win mini.
Fits in your pocket, puts the deck to shame and supports an external GPU.
An absolute monster.
I’d never heard of these so I checked it out. At a price point of about $1200 (over double what a steam deck costs) I certainly hope it “puts the deck to shame”.
I’m going back to video games that had multiplayer before we had network connectivity. If I wanted to play against a friend, we would have to get together in person and hang out. Game was done, you had a friend over for dinner. Or just a friend to come over and help you with the game. I miss when games were actual social events.
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.
I MISS CLEAR COMPUTERS >:(
I mean LOOK AT IT it’s so much cooler than just a box!
The SteamDeck community has been cooking with some clear cases which I would buy if I didn’t have to risk breaking my beloved $500 indie machine.
I miss plastic electronics. Oddly enough glass and metal feel more fragile.
HTC knew what was up with the HTC One series. Their polycarbonate bodies felt Nintendo 64 controller levels of durable.
I’ve got a drawer that has a stack of my old phones and devices in it. Among them is the CD MP3 player I’ve had since high school. It’s 24 years old, made entirely of plastic, it followed me all the way through high school and part of the way through college, and it’s in perfect working condition and bears only light scuffs. It might be my midlife crisis coming on but I’m tempted to start using the thing again instead of my smart phone. My PC tower has a 5 1/4" bay, I’m tempted to install an optical drive in it.
I still move a 5.25" Blu Ray writer drive between machines. Just in case I want to rip or watch an old bluray.
Without it, we have to sit.and wait for the dusty Xbox One to update just so it let’s us play a bluray.
The Xbox One is so fantastically bad, the only reason it’s not in the garbage is because it’s not mine and the SO wants to save it
YOOOOO that purple one! I wonder how hard it would be to do this to mine… time to add this to the Christmas list lol
best of luck! the one in the photo is from the company JSAUX but I don’t know much about it, just thought it looked pretty
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.
Ships’ sails. I mean, I know some small vessels still use them, but look at any paintings from 1500s-1800s and tell me those huge white pieces of cloth don’t look cool.
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.
I love that about CRTs, man.
How the fuck could we invent a tiny pocket sized particle accelerator electron beam gun that magnetically aimed its fire with such precision as to hit every individual phosphor, with the appropriate charge to make the right color, across an entire fucking screen, and do that 30+ times a second (for TV, or 60+ for a monitor)…
Yet the LCD is the high tech fancy monitor when its just a little grid of globs being electronically fired? How did the CRT get invented before the LCD?!
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.
LCD isn’t LED.
But, confusingly, an LED TV is an LCD TV. An LED TV is just an LCD TV that uses an LED array for the backlight instead of florescent lights. Quantum dot or QLED displays are also just LCDs with a fancy backlight. OLED displays are the ones that actually have glowing subpixels.
Trains and railways are cooler and better than cars and highways. Imagine making everyone get their own personal vehicle, engine, tires, fuel, service, license, and insurance, just to watch them all crash into each other and die constantly.
Yes although I would argue cars and highways are just evolutions of horse carts on dirt roads, a way older technology than trains.
Trains aren’t old tech though. Just tech that got pushed out by auto-maker lobbying. In places (like Japan, or China, or parts of Europe) where they kept evolving they only got better.
