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.

  • Paradachshund
    45·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      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)