5 ms·

Ask HN: Old Technology That Still Feels Magical?

16 points by devstein 4y ago

mooreds 4y ago
Telephones? The fact I can talk on the phone to someone thousands of miles away feels pretty magical to me when I think about all that goes into it. Other tech that feels magical to me: * The browser: wait, I can publish something and it is visible and interactive to anyone with an internet connection? And all I need is a text editor? * Steel: we can build huge structures hundreds of feet high, drill thousands of feet under the earth, all with metals we refine from rocks? * Matches: I can, for a very little amount of money, get a box of matches which will let me start a fire with close to zero effort?
- mrandish 4y ago
  > The fact I can talk on the phone to someone thousands of miles away feels pretty magical to me when I think about all that goes into it. I was a kid in the mid-70s and remember being on a family Summer vacation visiting Europe and my dad needed to have an important phone meeting. The satellite call had to be coordinated via Telexes delivered to our vacation home by messengers. At the appointed time Dad was waiting by the phone (with me hovering nearby). The first call was just an operator who had to coordinate the link by reaching an operator on the other side of the sat link. The operator verified my Dad was present and had a good connection. Then the operator called back a couple minutes later once the other side had verified the same. Then the two operators simultaneously patched the call. The operator must have stayed on the call because my Dad spoke with her at the end to say they were done. I seem to recall this being because the calls were hard to arrange, very expensive and could get dropped frequently in mid-conversation. The event was discussed for days after and the memory still has a magical feeling to me because it was "talking to someone on the other side of the planet!"
- FrenchAmerican 4y ago
  Steel is amazing, but nowadays I find even more amazing that we can replace it by wood in many circumstances. Skyscrapers in wood? Checked. And wood can often replace concrete. Building using wood sequesters carbon from the atmosphere and, as an ever bigger importance, avoid the CO2 emissions due to drilling, melting, refining etc, e.g. all operations needed to produce steel and concrete. However, we need to "grow" wood in a truly sustainable way. Plantations of tree for timber are not forests from an ecological point of view: monoculture (and even cloning of a single tree), many pesticides, home to very little biodiversity and far less carbon sequestered in the soil (only 25% AFAIK).
jgrahamc 4y ago
Sunscreen. Basically witchcraft.
- mooreds 4y ago
  Agreed! "I can rub this stuff on my skin, it goes away, but protects me from damage? How on earth!?"
PaulHoule 4y ago
What do you mean by old? A friend of mine invited me to an art installation made by her and 20+ of her friends which was basically a low-budget version of an attraction at Disney. (You go into a "time machine" and visit different places and times by opening the door it tells you to open) One of many fun features was a sand table that had a first-generation Kinect and a projector that projected contour lines on the sand that shift when you change the surface. It seemed pretty magical, like AR turned inside out. It got me thinking a lot about things you can do with projectors, which Disney has been doing a long time. (For instance, Disney puts a Star Wars theme and other themes on Space Mountain by mostly changing audio and video so they can retheme it for special occasions such as when a Star Wars movie comes out.)
Finnucane 4y ago
Chemical photography. You stick a blank piece of paper into a liquid and a picture appears.
h2odragon 4y ago
Pulleys. Visible, physical, simple math... and magical when scrawny little me can lift Big Thing. Hydraulics / Pneumatics are not as old and aren't as open to inspection while operating, usually; so the magic seems stronger there. Today's digital systems are still built atop quantization of analog effects; the edge cases and errors (and the techniques used to avoid and correct those errors) might actually be magic, if you want to get into metaphysical wanking about definitions. The lovely maths of signalling systems even resemble those of pulleys, some ways: it's the same magic.
- newbamboo 4y ago
  I want to generalize and say things that are round. Circles, whether the wheel or the phonograph, or a pulley, or lipid nano particles— circles are true magic.
Dracophoenix 4y ago
* Older operating systems and software from the 80s and 90s. What programmers were able to accomplish with so little memory and space is still impressive. Even loading a whole OS with games and software over a single floppy disk. * Hardware Video Editors (Genlocks, Toasters, Non-Linear Editing Consoles) * 3D graphics from Evans and Sutherland to the golden days of SGI days, long before there were any standards one could build upon. * The Nintendo 64. Enough Said.
- jjice 4y ago
  > The Nintendo 64. Enough Said. My dad has been playing Majora's Mask recently and talking to me about it and I'm constantly amazed what they could do on that hardware. That game requires the N64 expansion RAM I believe, which doubled the RAM from 4 to 8 megabytes. I'd struggle to find anything I can do with 8 megabytes today... Sometimes I feel like they were just more impressive programmers back then. I also believe that some of our extra resource usage is worth it for creating applications faster and easier with better structure. It's still incredible that games like Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask all were made with C and assembly on limited hardware, and have very few game breaking bugs that occur during regular gameplay.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    > Sometimes I feel like they were just more impressive programmers back then. I feel that way often. I definitely stand on the shoulders of giants to do my silly web app job. But then again no one has ever hired me to do anything wild like fitting a game into 8mb on a hardware cartridge. I've never been in a group of other smart people trying to accomplish it, or mentored towards accomplishing something like that. Maybe I could if I had to. I have the education for it, in theory. I often wonder what line of work I would be in if I hadn't grown up with computers though. Would I have still tried to go into it as a profession because I'm good at math? Or would I be off working as an electrician or something else.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    I purchased Jack Jazzrabit from GOG some time ago and it is as fun as I remember it, but it is also clear that they cut a lot of stuff out. There was a place where I would consistently get killed by a murder bee, so I shot some bullets into where it would come out, but it still came out and killed me. I realized that they despawn the bullets as soon as they are out of range and don't spawn the enemies before they are inside visual range. Both I think would qualify as bugs today.
McLaren_Ferrari 4y ago
The ability to have a nuclear propelled submarine which could in theory stay underwater for decades (if not for the necessities of the crew) is pretty impressive and it has been around since the 70s
dpeck 4y ago
Roller Coaster Tycoon, single person, written almost entirely in assembly according to legend. https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-sawyer https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-saw...
- leakbang 4y ago
  Wow, this is amazing. I'm shocked I didn't know of this earlier.
neonnoodle 4y ago
ViewMaster.
FrenchAmerican 4y ago
Old light technologies: lenses, glasses, telescopes, prisms, Fresnel lenses for lighthouses, ... laser may be too recent to be considered as "old". Despite being worked on for centuries, optics are still a super active field for fundamental research, R&D, and new products. LEDs are incredible for example. Extraordinary efficiency.
notRobot 4y ago
Windows 7. Every version of the OS since then has been such a great disappointment. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to use a Window 7 machine for a couple days. I nearly cried. I'd forgotten what it used to be like to experience joy (and not endless frustration) when computing.
- vmoore 4y ago
  Well Windows 8/8.1 doesn't have as much telemetry and data grabbing as Windows 10/11 and you can always block Windows phoning home either using the `hosts` file or using various privacy powertools. Windows 10/11 is not your computer anymore, so I avoid it at all costs. I have a Windows 8 virtual machine for things like Photoshop and other softwares, but I don't connect it to the public Internet. Since most software is targeting Windows these days, it's useful to have a VM where you can try out different software.
- johnny_castaway 4y ago
  Windows 7 was also the last one to natively support the "classic" theme [1], which IMHO was the peak of its UI design [1] https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Classic https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Classic
pmdulaney 4y ago
In the 50 years or so since I first saw a 747 landing at LAX I'm still amazed that those things actually stay up in the air.

16 points by devstein 4y ago

Telephones? The fact I can talk on the phone to someone thousands of miles away feels pretty magical to me when I think about all that goes into it. Other tech that feels magical to me: * The browser: wait, I can publish something and it is visible and interactive to anyone with an internet connection? And all I need is a text editor? * Steel: we can build huge structures hundreds of feet high, drill thousands of feet under the earth, all with metals we refine from rocks? * Matches: I can, for a very little amount of money, get a box of matches which will let me start a fire with close to zero effort?

mrandish 4y ago
> The fact I can talk on the phone to someone thousands of miles away feels pretty magical to me when I think about all that goes into it. I was a kid in the mid-70s and remember being on a family Summer vacation visiting Europe and my dad needed to have an important phone meeting. The satellite call had to be coordinated via Telexes delivered to our vacation home by messengers. At the appointed time Dad was waiting by the phone (with me hovering nearby). The first call was just an operator who had to coordinate the link by reaching an operator on the other side of the sat link. The operator verified my Dad was present and had a good connection. Then the operator called back a couple minutes later once the other side had verified the same. Then the two operators simultaneously patched the call. The operator must have stayed on the call because my Dad spoke with her at the end to say they were done. I seem to recall this being because the calls were hard to arrange, very expensive and could get dropped frequently in mid-conversation. The event was discussed for days after and the memory still has a magical feeling to me because it was "talking to someone on the other side of the planet!"
FrenchAmerican 4y ago
Steel is amazing, but nowadays I find even more amazing that we can replace it by wood in many circumstances. Skyscrapers in wood? Checked. And wood can often replace concrete. Building using wood sequesters carbon from the atmosphere and, as an ever bigger importance, avoid the CO2 emissions due to drilling, melting, refining etc, e.g. all operations needed to produce steel and concrete. However, we need to "grow" wood in a truly sustainable way. Plantations of tree for timber are not forests from an ecological point of view: monoculture (and even cloning of a single tree), many pesticides, home to very little biodiversity and far less carbon sequestered in the soil (only 25% AFAIK).

jgrahamc 4y ago

Sunscreen. Basically witchcraft.

mooreds 4y ago
Agreed! "I can rub this stuff on my skin, it goes away, but protects me from damage? How on earth!?"

PaulHoule 4y ago

What do you mean by old? A friend of mine invited me to an art installation made by her and 20+ of her friends which was basically a low-budget version of an attraction at Disney. (You go into a "time machine" and visit different places and times by opening the door it tells you to open) One of many fun features was a sand table that had a first-generation Kinect and a projector that projected contour lines on the sand that shift when you change the surface. It seemed pretty magical, like AR turned inside out. It got me thinking a lot about things you can do with projectors, which Disney has been doing a long time. (For instance, Disney puts a Star Wars theme and other themes on Space Mountain by mostly changing audio and video so they can retheme it for special occasions such as when a Star Wars movie comes out.)

Finnucane 4y ago

Chemical photography. You stick a blank piece of paper into a liquid and a picture appears.

h2odragon 4y ago

Pulleys. Visible, physical, simple math... and magical when scrawny little me can lift Big Thing. Hydraulics / Pneumatics are not as old and aren't as open to inspection while operating, usually; so the magic seems stronger there. Today's digital systems are still built atop quantization of analog effects; the edge cases and errors (and the techniques used to avoid and correct those errors) might actually be magic, if you want to get into metaphysical wanking about definitions. The lovely maths of signalling systems even resemble those of pulleys, some ways: it's the same magic.

newbamboo 4y ago
I want to generalize and say things that are round. Circles, whether the wheel or the phonograph, or a pulley, or lipid nano particles— circles are true magic.

Dracophoenix 4y ago

* Older operating systems and software from the 80s and 90s. What programmers were able to accomplish with so little memory and space is still impressive. Even loading a whole OS with games and software over a single floppy disk. * Hardware Video Editors (Genlocks, Toasters, Non-Linear Editing Consoles) * 3D graphics from Evans and Sutherland to the golden days of SGI days, long before there were any standards one could build upon. * The Nintendo 64. Enough Said.

jjice 4y ago
> The Nintendo 64. Enough Said. My dad has been playing Majora's Mask recently and talking to me about it and I'm constantly amazed what they could do on that hardware. That game requires the N64 expansion RAM I believe, which doubled the RAM from 4 to 8 megabytes. I'd struggle to find anything I can do with 8 megabytes today... Sometimes I feel like they were just more impressive programmers back then. I also believe that some of our extra resource usage is worth it for creating applications faster and easier with better structure. It's still incredible that games like Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask all were made with C and assembly on limited hardware, and have very few game breaking bugs that occur during regular gameplay.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  > Sometimes I feel like they were just more impressive programmers back then. I feel that way often. I definitely stand on the shoulders of giants to do my silly web app job. But then again no one has ever hired me to do anything wild like fitting a game into 8mb on a hardware cartridge. I've never been in a group of other smart people trying to accomplish it, or mentored towards accomplishing something like that. Maybe I could if I had to. I have the education for it, in theory. I often wonder what line of work I would be in if I hadn't grown up with computers though. Would I have still tried to go into it as a profession because I'm good at math? Or would I be off working as an electrician or something else.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  I purchased Jack Jazzrabit from GOG some time ago and it is as fun as I remember it, but it is also clear that they cut a lot of stuff out. There was a place where I would consistently get killed by a murder bee, so I shot some bullets into where it would come out, but it still came out and killed me. I realized that they despawn the bullets as soon as they are out of range and don't spawn the enemies before they are inside visual range. Both I think would qualify as bugs today.

McLaren_Ferrari 4y ago

The ability to have a nuclear propelled submarine which could in theory stay underwater for decades (if not for the necessities of the crew) is pretty impressive and it has been around since the 70s

dpeck 4y ago

Roller Coaster Tycoon, single person, written almost entirely in assembly according to legend. https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-sawyer https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-saw...

leakbang 4y ago
Wow, this is amazing. I'm shocked I didn't know of this earlier.

neonnoodle 4y ago

ViewMaster.

FrenchAmerican 4y ago

Old light technologies: lenses, glasses, telescopes, prisms, Fresnel lenses for lighthouses, ... laser may be too recent to be considered as "old". Despite being worked on for centuries, optics are still a super active field for fundamental research, R&D, and new products. LEDs are incredible for example. Extraordinary efficiency.

notRobot 4y ago

Windows 7. Every version of the OS since then has been such a great disappointment. I recently found myself in a situation where I had to use a Window 7 machine for a couple days. I nearly cried. I'd forgotten what it used to be like to experience joy (and not endless frustration) when computing.

vmoore 4y ago
Well Windows 8/8.1 doesn't have as much telemetry and data grabbing as Windows 10/11 and you can always block Windows phoning home either using the `hosts` file or using various privacy powertools. Windows 10/11 is not your computer anymore, so I avoid it at all costs. I have a Windows 8 virtual machine for things like Photoshop and other softwares, but I don't connect it to the public Internet. Since most software is targeting Windows these days, it's useful to have a VM where you can try out different software.
johnny_castaway 4y ago
Windows 7 was also the last one to natively support the "classic" theme [1], which IMHO was the peak of its UI design [1] https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Classic https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Classic

pmdulaney 4y ago

In the 50 years or so since I first saw a 747 landing at LAX I'm still amazed that those things actually stay up in the air.