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 Subaru Outback.
Razors. Back in the day you could buy a razor and expect to shave with it every day for the rest of your life. I still have my first razor, a Gillette Slim Adjustable and it still shaves as well as it did the first day I brought it home. The heft and balance are something those new plastic razors and multi bladed monsters can never match.
Thankfully, internet shopping allows me to buy blades from around the world and now I can enjoy my old razor again.
This may not apply, (as I know I’m simply saying a commercial product got worse as it had revisions) but Jawbone’s first earbud/headset used a small rubber conductor to evaluate skull vibration for noise canceling ( and likely there was some ANC using incoming mic audio from external sources). They continued to include a rubber bumper but I think the device leaned more on incoming audio from mics rather than from the rubber bumper. The oldest device presented the best noise canceling even after 3 product changes. I used every version until they stopped making headsets. I miss my Jawbone. I still have my OG.
Any mechanical regulation process that used to be handled by actual machine parts. Think of the centrifugal governor, this beautiful and elegant mechanical device just for regulating the speed of a steam engine. Sure, a computer chip could do it a lot better today, and we’re not even building steam engines quite like those anymore. But still, mechanically controlled things are just genuinely a lot cooler.
Or hell, even for computing, take a look at the elaborate mechanical computers that were used to calculate firing solutions on old battleships. Again, silicon computers perform objectively better in nearly every way, but there’s something objectively cool about solving an set of equations on an elaborate arrangement of clockwork.
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…)
I was under the impression that all wind-up turntables (I.e.: from the shellac records and steel needles and mechanical reproducers era) were using mechanical governors
Maybe I’m wrong though.
Oh I know little to nothing about turntables, so you’re probably right :-)
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)
I didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks! I’m honestly surprised some MBA bean counter hasn’t replaced those with a chip of some sort by now. Really cool!
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.
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!
The idea of punch card programming blows my mind.
He’s not talking about punch card programming, that’s way more advanced and requires a Turing machine, what he’s talking about is computers as the term was using before what you would think as a computer existed.
The example in the video is for the computer on a cannon in a battleship. If there wasn’t a computer you would need to adjust the angle and height of the cannon, but that’s not something a human can know, what humans can know is angle to the ship and the distance to it, so instead you put two inputs where a human inputs that and you translate that into angle/height. Now those two would be very straightforward, essentially you just rename the height crank to distance. But this computer is a lot more complex, because wind, speed, etc can affect the shoot, so you have cranks for all of that, and internally they combine into a final output of angle/height to the cannon.
That’s cool, but punch card programming blows my mind.
Interchangeable automotive/bicycle parts.
Or for that matter, interchangeable anything parts.
Both cooler and better at the same time. Interchangeable parts made it easier to both customize and repair your own stuff…
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?”
Used to be where Mongoose, Huffy, Schwinn, etc bearings and stuff were interchangeable. Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard. I happen to own older things on both ends of that compatible spectrum.
Used to be where an Idle Air Control Valve from a Chevy would fit an Isuzu…
Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard. I happen to own older things on both ends of that compatible spectrum.
I don’t know what you mean by that. The protocol for communication of computer parts is open source. Desktop computers are a great example of interchangeable parts. An Nvidia GPU that can’t run in an AMD motherboard is either not from the same era (so an equivalent AMD GPU wouldn’t work either) or a different form factor (e.g. trying to plug a laptop GPU on a Desktop)
The protocol of communication of computer parts is open source? Since when?
What the fuck is USB? And why is that proprietary?
Regardless, AMD vs nVidia might work together, but not optimally these days.
Regardless, AMD vs nVidia might work together, but not optimally these days.
And yet most of the time in the past 2 year the best choice for a gaming PC would be a 3D cache Ryzen with an Nvidia GPU. Is there something particular you have in mind that supposedly doesn’t work with an AMD chipset and an Nvidia GPU?
PCI-Express is not an open standard but both AMD and Nvidia are members and it’s what both use for their GPUs and AMD for it’s chipsets (as well as Intel). It’s certainly not a secret cabal.
It’s all in the same family, literally…
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/05/tech/nvidia-amd-ceos-taiwan-intl-hnk/index.html
This supports your claim of AMD vs Nvidia not working optimally together how?
The protocol of communication of computer parts is open source? Since when?
Since forever, which protocol do you think it’s not? For a few examples here’s PCI and DDR5
What the fuck is USB? And why is that proprietary?
USB is a standardized connector, with again an open source protocol. Here’s the specification in case you’re interested https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-20-specification
Regardless, AMD vs nVidia might work together, but not optimally these days.
I would need a source for that, I’ve had AMD +Nvidia up until very recently and it worked as expected.
USB is absolutely not a standardized connector, otherwise it would only be one type of connector, not the dozen or so they’ve made over the decades. There’s nothing universal about it.
And if it was open source, then why doesn’t VirtualBox release the source code for their USB extension package?
USB is absolutely not a standardized connector,
USB is absolutely standardized, I even sent you the 2.0 spec, you can get the spec for the other versions on the same website.
otherwise it would only be one type of connector, not the dozen or so they’ve made over the decades.
Different versions/connectors have different specs, all of them open, otherwise different manufacturers wouldn’t be able to create devices that use it.
There’s nothing universal about it.
That’s ridiculous, first of all the name relates to the fact that it can be used for any data transfer as long as it’s serial. Secondly the sheer amount of different devices from different manufacturers that can be plugged via USB should give you a hint of just how universal and open the standard is.
And if it was open source, then why doesn’t VirtualBox release the source code for their USB extension package?
The standard is open, implementations of it are not, it’s like OpenGL or Vulkan.
Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard.
They still can.
Probably not as well as used to be though.
No, they work fine.
Oof, wait. I mean when AMD processors were actually compatible with nVidia motherboards.
A8N-SLI Deluxe
But that’s not a thing for intel CPUs either, at least not anymore.
I’m not sure why, but Nvidia hasn’t been making chipsets/motherboard sfor quite a while. Or was there a point in time when it only made chipsets for intel CPUs?
Being able to build something with off the shelf parts is an art.
The concept of having interchangeable, standardized parts is actually kind of a new idea from the Industrial Revolution. Before then, everything was custom-made to fit. The example that comes to mind is firearms. All of the muskets and rifles used in the revolutionary war, for example, were hand-made and hand-fitted. The lock from one rifle wouldn’t necessarily fit on another. If your stock broke, you couldn’t just go get a new stock and slap it on - you had to bust out the woodworking tools and make a new one.
Railway signalling and interlocking systems. Sure ETCS and other digital systems are far safer, but some dude at a junction used to manually reset the points and crossovers using a giant lever. Now everything’s just a digital system overseen by someone with 8+ monitors in a control room removed from the actual network.
Also, not a technology, but rally cars used to be fully unhinged. I could watch old Group B videos for hours and never get bored.
Come to Germany, we still use parts from emperors time😂
Older forms of computer RAM.
Before integrated circuits, we had core memory which was a grid of wires and at each intersection was a little magnetic donut that held a single 1 or 0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory
Before that they had delay line memory, where they used vibrations traveling down a long tube of mercury, and more bits meant a longer tube to store a longer wave train.
They use to have weaving grannies for the magnetic core memory production.
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.
A lot of older tech had a way more interesting silhouette. You can see this clearly in how many objects live on in icon form. We still often use handset phones, magnifying glasses, gears, or the infamous floppy disk save icon. I think the staying power of these really comes from how ephemeral and formless digital tech can be.
Reminds me of the device icons in Microsoft Intune.
Android is represented by a rounded rectangle. Linux is a rounded rectangle, but yellow. iOS is, you guessed it, a rounded rectangle, but black.
Windows, however, is a nice flat-screen monitor (read: a rounded rectangle on a stick)
Carburetors are pretty fuckin cool.
The concept seems simple: utilize the vacuum from the engine to pull in fuel. But they’re extremely complicated with all the tiny orifices and passageways to perfect the amount of fuel going into the engine at different points.Unrelated sidenote: i got deja vu writing this comment. Interesting.
A fuel injector is measurably better in basically every way.
I might still rather have a carburetor…
I still think ZIP drives are pretty cool. Or using cassette tapes of any kind for data other than video/audio. Hella wish I had a DAT drive still.
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.
I’m a sucker for Nixie Tubes
I have a broken Nixie clock, at home, it looked great when it was working
I like the look of vacuum-fluorescent displays (VFDs) – a high-contrast display with a black background, solid color areas. Enough brightness to cause some haloing spilling over into the blackness if you were looking at it. Led to a particular design style adapted to the technology, was very “high-tech” in maybe the 1980s.
OLEDs have high contrast, and I suppose you could probably replicate the look, but I doubt that the style will come back.
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 toNewer, 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.
Not sure if you mean VFDs or amber LCDs, but Matrix Orbital sells both sorts in small quantities that you’d use in a project and can interface to a microcontroller – I was interested in them myself when looking for small VFDs, years back. They’re going to be seven-segment or grid displays, though, not things with physical custom display elements like those car dash things, but that’s kinda part and parcel of small-run stuff.
https://www.matrixorbital.com/
https://www.matrixorbital.com/blc2021
Just choose the “amber” option if it’s an amber LCD you want.
Can also get their displays via Mouser or Digikey.
That’s exactly the kind of display I’m talking about. Nice to see they’re still around.
The ones I have are all just grids, higher resolution than these but still comfortingly blocky. I’ve actually replaced the dash display recently since the original one got deep fried under the sun and lost all contrast when the weather was above 20°C.
Ah, good to hear it. They do (or did, and I assume still do) also have higher res displays.
Going back to an earlier bit in the conversation, where you were concerned about light sources in the car, I think that auto-dimming might also help (not just with VFDs, but the brightness of any in-car display). My car dash has the option to automatically set brightness based on ambient light levels (something that I wish my desktop computer monitor could do…part of “dark mode”'s benefit is a mitigation for devices that don’t do this). I don’t know if that was a thing back in the 1980s or so, when these display designs were popular.
I also kind of wonder if eye-tracking, which has come a long way, could be made reliable-enough and responsive-enough to toggle off displays if the car can detect that a user is looking somewhere away from them. Maybe be conservative, not with some critical displays, but stuff like the radio or clock or something. Eye tracking systems normally use the near-infrared, as I understand it, not visible light, so I’d think that you could theoretically do it in a darkened car without problems.
As a kid, I had this tabletop video game called “Dracula” that featured a multicolor VFD display. I loved that game.
Many receivers and amplifiers still have VFD displays 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.
As someone who also likes VFDs, I’ve fully expected that they’d be extinct in new products by now thanks to cheap LCDs and OLED. But I find it awesome that they’re still hanging in there.
VFDs are the shit!
My kid’s car is like this. I’ve been calling it retro-futuristic, which I think is a pretty apt description.
Oh what kind of car? I’d love for this style to come back for a bit.
Suzuki Aerio SX. I can’t find a picture that shows the whole dash, but here’s part of it:
A nixie tube is a bunch of tiny lightbulbs shaped into numbers in a single pack with different pins each turning on a number.
Clearly the modern number display is better in many ways, but you were asking for coolness.
I think Nixie tubes are actually a kind of neon lamp rather than incandescent bulbs; but yes they are very mid-20th century.
They’re fluorescent tubes, yes. I wasn’t specific about what kind of lightbulbs.
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.
Cell phones, when they had personality. The 2000s was such a good time for them, you had so many designs. Slide out keyboard, panels that can slide, sleek designs, some had actual buttons .etc
But we’re now relegated to just a varying series of rectangles and squares. Yay…
When the Vengabus has poorly shielded speakers.
Pictures under glass: literally the only affordance anyone has now for device interaction
Micheal Fisher’s kbin account.
Mine folds in half, so that’s kinda cool
I got one that slid up to reveal the keyboard after watching The Matrix, and I thought it was the coolest phone ever. I still have it, and I still think it is pretty cool.
Edit: it’s not an actual keyboard though, it’s a phone keypad for dialing or sending texts with t9 input.
It was the Samsung A737.
It looks like this closed
And here it is open
I fell in love with slide phones after watching Densha Otoko!
I still have my Sony Eriksson W580i, also thought it was the coolest thing.
Still works and holds a charge, pulled photos off of the memory card recently, cameras have gotten a lot better… Had the red one, have had some very brightly colored phones, my favourite being the bright yellow Nokia Lumia 1020
Had an amazing camera on it.Those are cool phones too, especially the red one! Yeah, the old digital cameras used to be junk. I have some old digital photos that look like they were taken on a potato.
I think my favourite thing about those old Lumias was the dedicated camera shutter. The 1020 even had a battery grip case so you could hold it more like a digital camera.
Automatic watches and grandfather clocks. The way they kept track of time using only mechanical principles is crazy. How does my automatic watch recharge itself using only the movement from wearing it and keep accurate track of time. Grandfather clocks are cool because they’re so power efficient.
They are very cool indeed. And the fact that you can have a century old watch on your wrist and it’s just as useful as a modern one. In fact I’m wearing a watch from the 50s right now!
