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.

  • Albbi
    13·
    16 hours ago

    I love that Replaceable Parts is a technology you can research in Civilization. The first time I saw it I thought it was kinda stupid until I thought “Oh wait, does that mean that there was a time when replacement parts just wasn’t a thing?”

    • CommissarVulpin@lemmy.world
      3·
      7 hours ago

      The concept of having interchangeable, standardized parts is actually kind of a new idea from the Industrial Revolution. Before then, everything was custom-made to fit. The example that comes to mind is firearms. All of the muskets and rifles used in the revolutionary war, for example, were hand-made and hand-fitted. The lock from one rifle wouldn’t necessarily fit on another. If your stock broke, you couldn’t just go get a new stock and slap it on - you had to bust out the woodworking tools and make a new one.

    • over_clox@lemmy.world
      5·
      16 hours ago

      Used to be where Mongoose, Huffy, Schwinn, etc bearings and stuff were interchangeable. Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard. I happen to own older things on both ends of that compatible spectrum.

      Used to be where an Idle Air Control Valve from a Chevy would fit an Isuzu…

      • Davel23@fedia.io
        9·
        15 hours ago

        Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard.

        They still can.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        7·
        15 hours ago

        Used to be where NVidia GPUs could run in an AMD motherboard. I happen to own older things on both ends of that compatible spectrum.

        I don’t know what you mean by that. The protocol for communication of computer parts is open source. Desktop computers are a great example of interchangeable parts. An Nvidia GPU that can’t run in an AMD motherboard is either not from the same era (so an equivalent AMD GPU wouldn’t work either) or a different form factor (e.g. trying to plug a laptop GPU on a Desktop)

        • over_clox@lemmy.world
          13·
          14 hours ago

          The protocol of communication of computer parts is open source? Since when?

          What the fuck is USB? And why is that proprietary?

          Regardless, AMD vs nVidia might work together, but not optimally these days.

          • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
            6·
            9 hours ago

            The protocol of communication of computer parts is open source? Since when?

            Since forever, which protocol do you think it’s not? For a few examples here’s PCI and DDR5

            What the fuck is USB? And why is that proprietary?

            USB is a standardized connector, with again an open source protocol. Here’s the specification in case you’re interested https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-20-specification

            Regardless, AMD vs nVidia might work together, but not optimally these days.

            I would need a source for that, I’ve had AMD +Nvidia up until very recently and it worked as expected.

            • over_clox@lemmy.world
              13·
              5 hours ago

              USB is absolutely not a standardized connector, otherwise it would only be one type of connector, not the dozen or so they’ve made over the decades. There’s nothing universal about it.

              And if it was open source, then why doesn’t VirtualBox release the source code for their USB extension package?