What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations?
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 first iteration that could be operated without stopping was the Campagnolo Cambio Corsa.
To shift, you had to reach behind you, where there were 2 levers.
The first one loosened the rear axle so it could move freely back and forth in the dropouts.
The second one had an eyelet you could use to move the chain sideways.
You put the chain on a different cog, and the rear wheel jumped forward or back due to the changed chain tension.
Then you tightened the rear axle again.
In the near to mid future, I think an answer to this question are Internal Combustion Engines. I love electric vehicles and look forward to the tech improving. But the sheer coolness factor of moving a large machine through perfectly timed and calibrated explosions is tough to beat.
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)
I could mention toasters or pinball machines or flickering light bulbs or unusual people movers, but instead I'll save some time and just link the whole obligatory channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
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.
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.
Steam locomotives. The crazy streamlining, the size of some of those motherfuckers. 6 foot tall wheels, 100 tons moving at 125mph and all that shit accomplished 80+ years ago
Disney lost their old camera tech used to make a "yellow screen" with sodium vapor lights.
It's actually better than a green screen because the yellow light is so specific that even if you remove that particular frequency of light, everything else still looks fine. You can do all sorts of things that would normally be very difficult to pull off with any of our green screen tech (like drinking water in a clear bottle or wearing a rainbow dress).
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.
Once widely used, the number of operational lighthouses has declined due to the expense of maintenance and the advent of much cheaper, more sophisticated, and more effective electronic navigational systems.
They were quite important for a long time. We used them for thousands of years, and they're often unique in form, iconic. And they're a good subject for photos and paintings, and I think that the light effect from them is neat. Lots of books and such using them, like ones on remote rocks, to get an isolated setting ("the lone lighthouse keeper").
But the past few decades of technological advancement have probably closed the end of their era.
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 can make cheaper and lighter synthetic materials. But I like the look that leather jackets acquire with wear over time (and particularly horsehide, which is less-available today than cowhide, as we don't have many horses around any more).
They aren't gone -- it's still possible to obtain them. But in 2024, they're really limited to people going out of their way to get them.
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...
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'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.
"Steam gauges" on car/plane instrument panels. Yeah, digital displays are cheaper to manufacture and less prone to failure, but they kinda suck the fun out of it.
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.
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.
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.
Not really an "older iteration" as much as a "sideways iteration", but the Novint Falcon was the coolest controller I've ever used. It had a ton of potential, but it seemed like the company had no clue how to utilize it.
I still have mine in its original box in my closet. I wish there were modern drivers for it with custom game support; so you could mod support into your favorite games.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Recorded music distribution. Renting low-quality MP3s is nowhere near as good as owning a CD. Or as good as downloading and then being able to keep said MP3s
There was a virus back in the day that could take advantage of old monitors. It would move a turkey around the screen and if you looked at it too long it would cause eye damage.
I'm. sorry for your thread but in actual fact there is no older tech that is cooler than any modern tech - we get better tech because we get at the same tech as time goes by. Sorry, but your premise is flawed.
That's true in that absent very unusual cases, we don't lose technology, so all the past technology remains. I think that it's a valid insight.
However, I think that it's also true to say that there are technologies that -- while not gone -- fall into disuse because of a changing environment.
You're saying that a "better" technology will remain, and for certain definitions of "better", I agree. We have no reason, absent maybe a changing environment that makes what is "best" different at different points in time or changing understanding of what is "best" (e.g. maybe internal combustion vehicles going away as we understand the impact of carbon dioxide emissions) to stop using a better technology.
But OP is specific in distinguishing between "best" and "coolest":
I don't mean BETTER. That's a different conversation. I mean cooler.