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.
Disregarding the safety comments (which should not be disregarded) purely for the purposes of this conversation, in older cars the vacuum tubes that operated the lights would frequently fail, meaning that the lights wouldn’t deploy even when desired.
That was revised in slightly newer cars, where the vacuum lines from the engine were required to hold the headlights closed. So when the mechanism inevitably failed, you had permanently deployed headlights until/if it was repaired.
Huh, never knew. My sole exposure to this was one quite classic car. Thanks for the information!