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What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations? (pawb.social)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

479 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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?!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Turns out manufacturing individual, low-power-draw, micron-sized lights is not easy. Even if it's conceptually not as cool, it requires much better manufacturing processes and materials.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

LCD isn't LED.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

But, confusingly, an LED TV is an LCD TV. An LED TV is just an LCD TV that uses an LED array for the backlight instead of florescent lights. Quantum dot or QLED displays are also just LCDs with a fancy backlight. OLED displays are the ones that actually have glowing subpixels.