Usually when people reminisce about old technology, they're not thinking of things like ten-minute-long boot times, scratched LPs, and frequent bad sectors on floppy disks. Instead, they're remembering the good side: the beautiful craftsmanship of gadgets before economies of scale pushed manufacturing to the lowest bidders, for example.
Case in point: brass analog gauges, like the kind you'd find on old plumbing, or on a steam-powered cruise ship. With this design in mind, an enterprising software hacker-turned-tinkerer by the name of Skytee has designed a bandwidth meter—as in something that measures your Internet performance—in similar fashion.
(http://i55.tinypic.com/ouy4ax.jpg)
Skytee actually built two of them. The first model (pictured, above) was based on a typical voltmeter. Skytee employed a switching transistor, plus the PWM output pin of an ever-useful Arduino board to drive it, according to his blog.
It's the second version, TorrentMeter Mk. 2 (http://blog.skytee.com/2010/11/torrentmeter-a-steampunk-bandwidth-meter/), that we're most interested in. To build this model, Skytee sourced an 8-inch, 1908 voltmeter in a brass housing. He employed a switching amplifier to compensate for the older voltmeter's higher internal resistance. Skytee kindly posted the schematics for both versions.
(http://i56.tinypic.com/znypf.jpg)
As for the cosmetics, clearly the gauge needed a new scale to measure bandwidth. Skytee stained a white piece of paper using a baking tray filled with black tea to get the appropriate vintage look, and then drew the scale with Inkscape, according to the blog post.
The result: a bandwidth meter fashioned from a 100-year-old brass voltmeter. And something that looks a thousand times better than a little green gauge sitting in a Windows 7 taskbar.