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.
The internet?
Web 1.0 and even before was way cooler than this corpo bullshit web we have now.
Even the corp pages back in the day where cooler. I remember going to the Warnerbrother webpage to play some Daffy duck game they had. Same with cartoon network’s page and probably a bunch others I can’t remember. It was more passion than profit.
You could try Gemini or gopher web, it reminds me a lot of web 1.0, both style and community feel.
I feel like you don’t actually remember what web 1.0 was like. Or even bbs’s. They… kind of sucked. I mean they were great for the time, but compared to the internet of today, pathetic.
The funny part of this comment is that when I was a teenager, I started and ran one of the largest RBBS systems in Canada with about 40 USR modems, and helped out on a couple more big ones like Rusty and Edie’s in the US. I also set up one of the first Echomail and Fidonet nodes in the country, and was a very early adopter getting usenet links working via RBBS. I loved that time, it was exciting and new , and western as hell.
So I’m pretty sure I know exactly what I’m talking about.
For real. It certainly wouldn’t hit the same these days - there are reasons these things fell to the wayside - but back in the day? God damn that shit was cool.