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 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.