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.

Cars used to be cool. Every car company had some kind of sporty car, a couple cheap cars, a big luxury sedan and, a while ago, a station wagon.

Now every car is an SUV or CUV. Sedans are getting phased out. Cool sports cars don’t make money so they don’t make them. People don’t buy station wagons so they don’t make them. And they’re pushing big, angry trucks on everyone.

I was thinking the other day how much cooler flap displays at stations and airports were compared to modern displays.

Such a nice interface between computer control and a purely mechanical display. Watching them update, flipping through all the variables to land on the right one, and then clearing was so cool.

I miss the noise they made too. Haven’t seen one for like 20 years now.

I’m biased because I’m building up a small collection, but radios were cooler when they were made of Bakelite.

My modest collection:

Also, I realize that digital tuning is more accurate, but there’s something I find very pleasant about turning a knob and the station suddenly comes in clearly. Just that little “aha” serotonin hit.

The internet when it wasn’t overtaken by a few major corporations.

Oh man…I have an entire ten page paper on the go about this topic and it just keeps growing. One day I’ll publish it in a blog or something, but for now it’s just me vomiting up my thoughts about mass market manufacturing and the loss of zeitgeist.

The examples that I always use are a) Camera Lenses, b) Typewriters, and c) watches.

Mechanical things age individually, developing a sort of Kami, or personality of their own. Camera lenses wear out differently, develop lens bokehs that are unique. Their apertures breath differently as they age No two old mechanical camera lenses are quite the same. Similarly to typewriters; usage creates individual characteristics, so much so that law enforcement can pinpoint a particular typewriter used in a ransom note.

It’s something that we’ve lost in a mass produced world. And to me, that’s a loss of unimaginable proportions.

Consider a pocket watch from the civil war, passed down from generation to generation because it was special both in craftsmanship and in connotation. Who the hell is passing their Apple Watch down from generation to generation? No one…because it’s just plastic and metal junk in two years. Or buying a table from Ikea versus buying one made bespoke by your neighbour down the street who wood works in his garage. Which of those is worthy of being an heirloom?

If our things are in part what informs the future of our role in the zeitgeist, what do we have except for mounds of plastic scrap.

The internet

Toasters. Specifically the Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster, with the tag line “Automatic Beyond Belief!”. There is a fan site (https://automaticbeyondbelief.org/, excellent url). Like, what other appliance line has a fan site? Surely no modern day toaster!

But of course I first heard about it from Technology Connections video.

Pop up headlights! Way cooler that way. I’ve heard a couple reasons given for why they stopped being a thing, but one of them is that they were considered too unsafe for pedestrians-

Which is a fucking crazy though when you consider what we now blindly accept in automotive design with respect to pedestrian safety 😅

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

I wish someone would being those back

The internet?

Web 1.0 and even before was way cooler than this corpo bullshit web we have now.

The original tv remote didn’t use batteries. It used sound. Giant clunky devices with large tactile buttons. Never runs out of batteries and still works if your kid tries to block the screen to keep you from turning it off

I MISS CLEAR COMPUTERS >:(

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.

Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)

Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.

Ooh, rotary phone switches. This YouTube channel (THIS MUSEUM IS NOT OBSOLETE) has a bunch of videos on them. I can only imagine how a massive exchange full of them must have sounded. They’re so satisfyingly mechanical.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKnS0AB2CTN_eu8k8rgaOW0PWFH2Qv9Ui