Ask Lemmy

Slide open phones with a QWERTY keyboard. Those were the bomb.

I wish someone would being those back

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.

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?!

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.

The internet

I guess, in a very liberal definition of the term, "cloud gaming". Specifically the old LodgeNet systems in hotels where you could rent Nintendo games by the hour to be streamed to your room from a physical console somewhere behind the front desk. Every room had a special controller with oodles of extra buttons on it hardwired to the television that also functioned as television remotes.

The service was objectively awful, of course, when factoring in how much the hotel charged compared to what little you got for it. But I've always found it fascinating.

Portable music players.

They were the coolest when they used minidiscs.

The Gameboy.

The switch is neat, but it's too large.

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 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

Horsehide bomber jackets of the sort worn in WW2.

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.

The phones with the internal hidden camera, I was sure it would be the future

https://www.91mobiles.com/list-of-phones/pop-up-camera-phones

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.

Video games. Way back then there was imagination involved, and companies took risks. Nowadays every game seems to iterate on the same tired formula. The only recent entry I can think of that bucked this trend in the past few decades was maybe Portal, but there have been few to no other recent games that come to mind. Fight me.

I used to be pretty into machine learning and AI generation circa 2018-ish. It used to be fun and surreal. Sites like artbreeder were a great novelty, and also a pretty good learning tool. Now that it's "good" I feel that not only has a lot of the charm been lost, it's become much easier for malicious actors to use it.