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.
I mean LOOK AT IT it's so much cooler than just a box!
The SteamDeck community has been cooking with some clear cases which I would buy if I didn't have to risk breaking my beloved $500 indie machine.
I've got a drawer that has a stack of my old phones and devices in it. Among them is the CD MP3 player I've had since high school. It's 24 years old, made entirely of plastic, it followed me all the way through high school and part of the way through college, and it's in perfect working condition and bears only light scuffs. It might be my midlife crisis coming on but I'm tempted to start using the thing again instead of my smart phone. My PC tower has a 5 1/4" bay, I'm tempted to install an optical drive in it.
One of my dream projects would be to get a dead iMac G3 and make a modern-day sleeper build inside it. It was honestly the COOLEST a computer has EVER looked.
I broke the screen on mine doing the transplant. Was able to get a new screen to fix it but it made it a 100 dollar project instead of a 20 dollar project.