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.
CD players/walkmans. Wearing your headphones and jamming out music on your CD player makes you 10X cooler in my eyes.
Electromechanical stuff. Like old jukeboxes, pinball machines or anything else that required programming before the widespread use of microcontrollers.
Some people have already mentioned stuff akin to this, like the mechanical govenor, or the post abt THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE, but it really deserves its own thread.
Technology Connections on YouTube has made some great videos about devices like that.
Pneumatic tubes were way, way cooler than email.
Of course, you could only use them to send a message to someone in the same office building, so the comparison isn’t perfect… but you know what I mean.
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.
Tom Scott does a youtube video about one in Canada (IIRC) where they send radioactive medicine from the lab a down the road to a hospital due to the half life of the medication making traditional transport (ie vehicles) impractical.
Edit: bothered to look it up
I know of a hospital where the local university sends tracers with F-18 for PET scans in much the same way. Half-life of 110 minutes.
Electric guitars. They sounded better. Newer ones just sound louder.
They also feel…worse? Jumbo frets, thick coats of polyurethane, cheap pickguards, plastic pickup covers, etc — yuck.
I’ve been buying weirdo vintage guitars (
teisco, musima) and they feel way better in my hands. The pickups are usually pretty low output, yeah, but the cleans sound so so good.Looks awesome! I’m guessing the body is about 1" thick?
Well that one is a baritone (26.5" or 27" scale) but still pretty thin (about as thick as the typical strat) and ergonomic.
My other guitar, a 1960s teisco, is one of the lightest guitars I’ve ever owned:
I’m gonna modify this one though and put a tuneomatic on here, the intonation is quite terrible.
That bridge looks like it’s just a flat metal bar, yeah that’s gonna cause problems.
