Was there any particular piece of technology that downgraded throughout the years and was at a higher level lets say in...

User interfaces used to look much better in the 90s.

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I forget what that panel in Mac OS 9 was called, but it was indispensible. Much better than the current Dock or the Taskbar.

Real time systems.
Not exactly in performance but in security.

Good old CRT monitors had much better color reproduction than any LCD, and they were 4:3, a better ratio for work than widescreen. At least LCDs got better with time, and now they are... tolerable.

The control strip. Super handy indeed.

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Laptops; but I guess we're all partial to the 'industrial' design they used to have - and it wasn't just PowerBooks and IBM ThinkPads either.

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???

This

Buckling Spring used membrane, user.

But they had a much more solid feel, and not all of them were rubber-domed.

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keyboards.

Bought a Leopold just to swap out the gritty newfaggot cherries for some Kailh orange box switches.

none of them were rubber dome, the fuck are you talking about?

actually, anything that now has IoT, like fucking light bulbs.

Technology itself has consistently evolved throughout the 20th century.

What DID take a nosedive was the build quality of these electronics. Back in the 1950s was probably the peak of consumer electronic build quality when most of it was produced in the United States and Europe. If you have any piece of electronics from this era you would certainly know what I mean. In the 1970s shit started to be made in Japan, and Japan had awesome build quality of all their stuff. Then by the 1980s it started to be made in Korea and Taiwan, that's when shit took a nosedive in the consumer department. By the late 1990s everything started to be made in China as the United States Department of Commerce was quickly pushing for the post-industrial meme.

The highest quality products are still made in America/Europe/Japan, but such consumer products are rare these days and are more expensive than cheap Chinese shit. And there's a good reason for that, because the Chinese Government incentivizes their workers to work for significantly less to keep their products cheap to foreign markets.

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That user is right. Buckling spring switches are not true mechanical switches because they still had a membrane underneath. It was basically a keycap on top of a spring that was designed to "buckle" under force and press against a membrane. There are even later non-buckling spring Model M variants. They still feel a lot better than standard membrane boards.

Then you had keyboards like that of the Commodore 64, where each keycap had a spring and pressing the key down would simply complete a circuit on the main board, but that spring didn't buckle Those aren't true mechanical switches either, but they are probably my favorite type of switches, only because they're not overengineered like true mechanical keyboards or even buckling springsm but they still feel a lot nicer than pure membrane keyboards.

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i also notice old portable radios are better than new radios,they function in a much more smood way

Yes, I know (I have an Unicomp). What matters is that it's a spring mechanism hitting the membrane, not my fingers directly, so it doesn't feel like a shit membrane keyboard a la ZX81.

But that's correct: some variants of the Model M did use rubber domes rather than buckling springs.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard#Features_by_part_number

I had a chance to get an old portable tube radio from 1946, I still hate myself for not taking up that offer. Everything in those things are serviceable. Even the electrical sockets could be unscrewed and repaired. And its easier to tune than people realize. They were all of course AM-only but they were also all built for AM so it doesn't sound as bad.

Agreed 100%. Personally I think mechanical keytboards are overhyped. Membranes are cheap and often poorly-constructed, but aren't inherently a broken system. I've used a lot of cheap mechanical keyboards (see "gaming" keyboards) and I've been disgusted to find that they feel worse and cost more than some old Logitech membranes I've owned, including ones with rubber domes.

But nothing has touched the quality of late 90's keyboards for feel. If I ever change keyboards again, I'm probably going to aim for something on par with MX Clears. I like needing a lot of force to actuate and even my current Blues are just too soft. Too bad; my keyboard was limited-run and Browns/Greens/Clears were an option.

At this point I think my only option for a modern keyboard with decent feel and lots of keys is a Wey Tec MK06... but good luck getting one of those.

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Lag. Computers and everything else have indeed (on average, give and take) gotten cheaper, faster, more featureful, easier to use, and more elegantly designed, but the one metric in which they have almost uniformly degenerated is latency.

Computers are laggy, monitors and TVs are laggy, keyboards/mice/joysticks are laggy, drives are laggy, audio receivers are laggy, musical instruments are laggy, telephones are laggy, networks are laggy, individual "non-passive" serial cables are laggy, OSs are laggy, libraries are laggy, programs are laggy, game engines are laggy. And all of these laggy things, chained together, cumulatively produce absolutely massive amounts of end-to-end lag for complete systems, in the realm of a half second or more, which are deemed "acceptable" by designers.

Have an extremely depressing article:
danluu.com/input-lag/

I would modulate that last complaint slightly. Choosing sucky speakers and deck stack components is merely a matter of people having shit taste, rather than any downgrade in product offerings. What HAS gone downhill is realtime PC sound spatialization, first with Creative's killing off superior competitors like Aureal's A3D, then with the entire PC industry collectively murder-suiciding Creative.

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yeah dude,i always enjoyed radios.
I found out modern radios tend to be complete shit and dare i say even break down easily.

While old radios(hell not even that old,like from the 2000s) are much more durable/last longer,have better more smood transmissions,better sound quality and are just much better

Thinking of what Creative has done, it's good to see them fall into irrelevance.

what did they do

They drove Aureal bankrupt with frivolous lawsuits.

The secret that made those DEs better wasn't prettiness (let's be fair, they were quite drab looking), but the promulgation of a Human Interface Guideline document. One based on laboratory end-user studies, one that remained highly stable for years at a time, and one that both the 1st-party OS vendor and 3rd-party devs followed religiously.

When it comes to human factors engineering, sheer consistency usually trumps perfection for user friendly design.

But at what cost? Even the onrushing bullet train of VR hasn't been enough to make AAA gamedevs fix their shit and get realtime 3D sound back to the level of sophistication Aureal had in nineteen-ninety-fucking-eight.

Not just Aureal, they fucked over every other PC audio dev, like Ad Lib, Gravis, Ensoniq, Turtle Beach, Sensaura, etc.

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Early TFTs was incredibly shitty
bad colors, bad viewing angles, ghosting.
Didnt matter IT WAS FLAT so corps bought them in bulk.

Keyboards and mouse
todays 100$ premium used to be standard

It's easier and cheaper than ever to have a kick ass audio system now, but its not culturally emphasized as much anymore.
Mostly sentimental imo.

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They bought and canned soundstorm
a integrated audio chip that was better then their 150$+ cards
apart from those nice mp3 players creative has always been a cancer company.

Webpages.
Browsers became better, but websites became worse.
Look at the source of Facebook. There is a depth of 20 child elements just for the default homepage heading.
T W E N T Y.
It's a blue rectangle with a picture and a form in it.

People are always saying this, but these people also don't realize 90 percent of website bloat is completely optional. You can browse a lot of websites in less bloated forms with older browsers. The problem is security issue. We need a browser that lets you target different feature sets in a more in-depth way than just user agents

Have you tried ...?
a lot of pages simply refuse because outdated browser and outdated security certificates

Monitors. LCD and LED is shit. I want high refresh rates at high resolution like good CRT monitors in the 90s.

youtu.be/0wDtxYeJdzg

I'm not sure which is worse - the "water savings" crap that means I need to wash twice to save 10% of the water, or the soy soap that can't clean anything. And, if you don't want everything to look like a spotted mess, you need (((Jet Dry)))

Why in the world would anybody want to browse bloated google amazon botnet website on an old browser without uMatrix?

are they drop in replacements? I have a Leopold board that's in need of some replacement switches.

Going to have to disagree here:
JS botnet mobileshit layouts
Morass of plugins and noncompliant CSS
Spacer GIFs and static invisible tables
Proprietary crap like IFrames
Naked CSS-less HTML that's more bloated, uglier, and less functional than preexisting formats, except for its hyperlink feature

While web browsers did improve to the point where it became possible to write decent site when CSS gelled in the Netscape 3 era, 99.999% of sites have ALWAYS been utter trash in period browsers on period hardware.

Wrong, Browsers are at fault for enabling javascript by default in the first place.

GIMMIE THAT JET DRY

And (((they))) also made sure to not add certain features to html so that everyone relies on (((JScript)))

...

...

Buy gaymer monitors. They go up to 144Hz these days.

As long as they're IPS, old TN has shit color quality.

Some are IPS. Then again, modern TN panels ain't that bad anymore.

How do you even live with yourself?

So what, the human eye can only see 30 fps.

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Almost every kitchen appliance except maybe the fridge and freezer.

I just did maintaince on my parent's air conditioner units. They have an older model and a new model. The older cooled the downstairs and the newer model cleaned the upstairs.

Consumer fridges might be arguably better, but they are bordering impossible to do matainance on. They are now "sealed units" where it trys to trap freon leaks.

I believe IPS panels don't go faster than 144Hz today. Faster ones are all peasant TNs.

Bullshit. I remember reading about US Navy doing experiments with that. They concluded that humans improve their motion estimation up to at least 600Hz, and that cutoff was only because they didn't have equipment to try higher refresh rates.

Where'd you find an SED prototype in this day and age?

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bullshit it was something like 120-150 fps in that test

The problem, I have discovered, is that sety at large have grown an intensive adversion to things older than 5 to 10 years, and the more stupid people in society get aggressive and judge people based on your choices.

I bought a series of stereo equipment, and was mocked for buying it component by component rather than a self-contained unit like you'd see in the thrift stores.In fact, I was violently mocked and judged. Apparently, to metion a "Wired" network results not only in comfusion but commentary that you are "stuck in 1912", and to watch television older than 10 years is also met with violent reaction and judging. In fact, to write things down such as even notes is a primary example of being a fuddy-duddy.

Modern people can't afford electric bills (which they let reach $800), but decide to buy a $900 4K tv because 1) It's black friday and 2) their 1080pi TV has a lose wire which disables the blacklight. They choose to pay $12.50 for netflix and hulu, and yell when you put an antenna in their television, accusing you of planning to break it or put "wires in my tv".

If you don't own a cell phone, you are beyond a lost cause. Also, to them the internet is only Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and everything else is something they can not explain. Communication apps aren't the Internet, but a mode of Cellular (such as something called "Marco Polo", which is the stupidest thing I have ever seen).

To collect something from a bygone era such as Audio Cassette or records, and to actually listen to music through it, shows YOUR incredible arrogance and ignorance to the modern worl. You will be eincouraged to in-fact burn your collection, and will be yelled at repeatedly and verbally berated for oering to share the collection with your peers.

This is the new normal. I have been victim to these normalfags, and I never knew it to be so bad before this. This is where Society is.

120-150fps was the threshold at which people stopped noticing a difference. However, they still improved their performance at the test task when framerates were raised above that.

Passenger airliners
We used to have the concorde, we used to fly people at Mach 2. Today the fastest airplane reaches Mach 0.86, less than half the speed of the concorde

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Supersonic flights were expensive though, even when fuel was cheaper back then.

Moon missions.

That's because the Concorde was ridiculously expensive to operate and was flying at a loss for its entire time.

It's not worth it. Even if you do ignore the sound pollution problems and the general logistics of operating it, it still would never have survived the early 2000s downturn of the aviation industry.

That crash in 2000 was bad, and there was only 12 or 11 of them after that.

toilets, dishwashers, MIDI (usb midi is shit), turn tables, 90s tape decks were the best decks, vehicle ignition switches, consumer video interconnects (component > HDMI & DRM), AT&T dual-ringer home phone was a tank, multi-sync monitors.

Also, in general, digital electronics is overused. It's used to build cheap, shittiy, just-good-enough circuits for functions that used to be analog. So now we get 32 or 255 quantized steps instead of smooth analog transitions: dimming and volume control etc. It's not better. It's cheaper and "good enough".

Turned out people hated sonic booms even when they do not literally shatter windows. Also ridiculous operating costs due to huge fuel consumption - inherent problem of going fast - and poor return due to very thin body with very little room for cargo and passengers, to allow that speeds in the first place. So it was only allowed to fly supersonic over the ocean and even then the tickets were so ridiculously expensive that not even wealthy were standing in line for them. Subsonic airliners are inherently superior in that they're greatly more fuel efficient as well as space efficient, making them more economically viable by several orders of magnitude, for both airlines and the passengers.

Lag is a function of overuse of digital electronics and "smart" circuits.

Those fucking power buttons on monitors that don't work the 1st or 2nd time you press them. Noticeable lag in new digital circuits that used to be analog controls. It's not better. It's cheaper with digital. So we get digital.

Aircraft in general.

Fug, now I am reminded of my early 2000s childhood were the cool, totally white advertisers explicitly told us wee children that anything older than 1 year sucked total balls d00d compared to the hip new current thing, so why aren't you buying it you want to walk among the cool kids right?
Oddly enough I barely see any automobiles from the 2000-2007 period these days even though 90s shitboxes are seemingly just as common now as they were then.
I-is it a coincidence?

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We need a company to do for airplanes what Tesla did for vehicles. The aviation industry is stagnant as fuck right now. I hear Boeing is going to look into supersonic transport again and there are a few all-electric experimental airplanes in development though, so we'll have to see.

The last truly innovative airplane as far as the private sector goes was probably the Cirrus Vision released in the early 2000s. Its currently the fastest selling small aircraft of all time and is expected to surpass the previous record holder, the Cessna 172. Part of the reason for its success is its built-in parachute or Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (the entire fucking plane has a parachute that deploys when the engines fail making this plane exceptionally safe to fly). In addition to the fact its a modern design with a modern jet engine and overall superior fuel economy.

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meant to say early 2010s. But looking it up the plane was introduced in 2016 so even that;s a misnomer.

I thought the "console peasant" pic would make it clear enough...

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don't forget survivor bias
electronics used to draw so much power, even when not in use, because everything was dumb and big and power supplies were mostly kludge designs, but this meant that the basic electronic components usually lasted longer, as they were overbuilt and underutilized
microprocessors can't handle voltage ripple or voltage spikes without frying, ergo, we need to use power boards on everything nowadays

User Level Computers
We had to program them to make them do shit in the 80s, now we buy them all loaded up with shit. In that way I think that they were, "Niggered-Down." We had to program in Basic and Machine Language. Oh yeah, Cobol and something else I can't remember
Ham Radios
Who owns a ham radio? a white guy whose wife is constantly on the rag
Those are the only two items that come to mind.
- - - -

My first computer was a teletype machine in 1979 - we were able to play stuff like RPG's over the phone lines after we connected to Columbia University's computer - Kept my programs on a yellow paper ribbon held together with a rubber band. Computer guys now are light years ahead of me.
I remember Radio Shack / Tandy put out the TRS-80 (We called it the Trash-80 back then.) It was basically an over priced hunk of metal. Then I remember the Commodore 64 - I had one of those, but I didn't have a printed manual, so I sucked at it.

Cars, in general. They fired all the good mechanical engineers and replaced them with pajeets. Now, if a mechanical part can be replaced with a computer-controlled component, it is. This is not a good thing.

What did he mean by this?

...

2b. - Terry Davis

bump

will watch

Ham Radios

Who owns a ham radio? a white guy whose wife is constantly on the rag

Those are the only two items that come to mind.>>911066

i wish i had a ham radio,always loved that shit.to bed i dont know how to make one and havent found anything decent

What do hams talk about in their communities?

This is basically sums up my local radio club.

Typical chatter on the repeaters:

Are you still alive?
How are the wife and kids?
Miscellaneous EE / Radio questions.
What is the furthest contact you've made this week?
Miscellaneous old fart political opinion.

its a shame all this subcultures have been lost,not its just internet and the online world instead of trading info/tech drives irl

Nice git.

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What would be their reaction to fashing it up a bit?

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You will get your license pulled if you aren't the perfect gentleman/woman. Anything which could be deemed as offensive, or any vulgarities are strictly forbidden. You must also announce your callsign, which is tied to your name and address on the FCC registry, every ten minutes while transmitting. All of the fun stuff is forbidden. Amateurs can't play music. You can't have anything resembling a radio show. You have your license to further the art of radio and spread international goodwill. This is why HAM is dead and pirate radio is so attractive.

This is also why HAMs have nothing better to do than look for pirate stations and report them to the FCC btw.

...

this. I sometimes work in an auto shop that has a lot of machinery and tools from the (maybe) 50s, definitely 60s, 70s, and 80s onwards, and made in USA. these things are all built very well. they may not have modern tolerances for fit and finish (and for modern chinkshit, any fit and finish is gone pretty fast anyway) but they are all solid. they need some basic maintenance and that's it. still using them for work 50 years later. I don't think you can say the same for most similar tools made today.

Midrange sound cards. You now either get a full on "audio interface" or just use your shitty onboard card. In a lot of cases they aren't even sold for internal use anymore.

This is true. Display lag and software bloat are a problem. We keep making bigger and faster devices only to keep what is essentially the same user experience because programs keep getting less efficient.

Definitely this. Bloat is an issue here too. I love coming across an old webpage that would have taken a minute to load in the 90s and have it load in a fraction of a second. And then I go to a more mainstream page and my load times start showing me how little things have changed. Throwing more crap onto a website does not make it better.

Browsers are their own shit show for shure, but they are decidedly better than they were a couple of decades ago.

ICOM makes some fancy ham radios. I don't know how those would be worse. Hell, software defined radio is pretty kicking in some communities. I think there is even a thread up here on making a really cheap ghettorigged one.

For user level computers you gotta look at microcontrollers.

look into software defined radio. You can get cheap chinese radios from amazon for a fairly inexpensive price too.

Which is ironic since they are helping to kill the interest of the younger generation in ham. FCC rules regarding content need a fucking rewrite.

Build quality is fucking junk now. Very true.

Got any stories about this? I'm interested in hearing.

it used to be much faster before everything was filled with Js, especially around '05. actually, all software has done that. computers have gotten more and more powerful, yet software gets slower and slower

God, why did we ever stop using translucent plastic? Shit's so cool.

quality post

this.

its the reason i dont even bother saying to people i enjoy radio(no in the car,actual radio) since i know they would make fun of me

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