Technological Nostalgia

I was in Warsaw this past week and hit up a few museums, particularly ones centred around technology. The gasworks museum was an interesting look into industrial and municipal processes and while I ducked out of the national technology museum early because I was tired and it seemed underwhelming, my partner stayed on and told me that it was much more expansive and interesting than it first looked.

We also hit up the Interaktywne Muzeum Flipperów, a.k.a. Pinball Station. It’s a fun place. Lots of pinball machines and a good few video arcade machines as well in an old railway building. All machines are set to freeplay so once the entrance fee is paid you’re covered for all the games and there’s a bar and quieter seating areas to retreat to as well if you need to get away from the noise. The noise was surprisingly not too bad, though! Everything was, mercifully, set to silent when in attract mode, which I have never experienced in an arcade before and was a welcome reprieve from the usual cacophony. It wasn’t too busy when we were there, though, and I imagine it must get louder in the evenings and on weekends.

I am not too familiar with pinball, having played more computer game pinball machines than real ones, and am also not very good at it (another reason the freeplay was very nice) and there were a few interesting machines that had features I hadn’t seen on a table before. There was an NBA basketball-themed twin table with a two-player head to head mode where the game was on a timer, and a Godzilla machine where at one point my ball got grabbed by a little magnetic roller and swung around. The way pinball machines are constructed area really interesting and I highly recommend this Technology Connections video on the subject.

What really excited me, though, was getting to play Asteroids on a real machine. I’ve played various clones and ports of Asteroids before, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to experience it will a real vector display and it is a gorgeous little thing. It is one thing to see a line drawn in pixels on a modern LCD display, or even a conventional CRT, but quite another to see the clean, smooth, glowing lines drawn by an electron beam, the intensity of the beam making your bullets really glow as the phosphor screen halos around them. It’s a shame that vector displays have fallen by the wayside so completely. I wonder if they technology had been iterated on and developed further what could have been done with them. The lines drawn on a vector display are not the idea of a line abstracted and approximated into a grid of pixels, but an actual line drawn by a beam of light being physically traced across the glass. The quality of that light and that shape is so much different compared to raster displays.

Similarly the neon museum showcased a lighting technology that, while it’s much less of a dying one, is quite a retro throwback at this point, largely superceded by cheaper light-up displays and, more recently, OLED signage. I actually quite dislike OLED advertising signs; they’re far too bright when it’s dark out and a few particularly large and bright panels near home have really been nasty to walk past at night when I’m dealing with migraines. Neon signs, while they are also a form of garish advertising, at least tend to be less blinding (though some of them have quite a loud, unpleasant buzz when one is right next to them on the museum floor) and have more intentional and considered artistry behind them. They are less ephemeral than whatever ad is being displayed on a video screen; they become part of the landscape. A good part of the story being told in the neon museum is that of “neonisation” being pursued in Warsaw as a deliberate act of modernisation of the city, setting a new identity for the urban space. And as it happened under the communist government, the neon signs were not strictly advertising for businesses, with landmarks, libraries and civic buildings getting lit up. And again, the light from a neon sign is just a bit different from that of other lit signs, even LED ones designed to immitate the aesthetics of neon signs, especially the true neon red signs where the glow is visibly coming from the gas within in the tube rather than phosphors on the glass.

Pinball, vector displays, big neon signs. There are reasons these technologies have fallen by the wayside and become much more niche. They are specialised, constrained. Everything they can do can be done by cheaper, more general purpose technologies that can also fill many other roles. But in their specialisation, their deliberate construction and especially in their physicality they have a beautiful elegance that is easy to love.