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.
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.
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!
Home stereo systems. As a kid I remained enthralled by the metal face and the heavily tactile buttons and switches and knobs. You felt a delicious variety of feedbacks for every action you took. I honestly think we really lost something special when tactility left technology. It was so satisfying to just use.
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
My hifi does that, (a very cheap second hand Teac system) it makes me giddy every time it does it!
