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I'm what's known by my fellow humankind as being 'older than dirt'. I have also been keeping aquariums since electricity was invented. Well, that's slight exaggeration, but I am from the classical period before regular water changes were found to be beneficial, before Java Fern and Moss were imported. I still have my dog-eared copy of William T. Innes's Exotic Aquarium Fishes and J.J. Hoedeman's A Naturalist's Guide to Freshwater Aquarium Fishes. There's a lot of folklore and good basic aquarium keeping knowledge in those old tomes, also a lot of downright anecdotal goofiness and obsolete knowledge. What strikes me is that there are some old tech items from the past I would think, especially now with the popularity of small and nano aquariums, that would be useful today. My 10 gallon tanks from the 1960's~70's all had Metaframe SlimJim outside box filters that were airpump powered. These little filters were sort of lame in some aspects, fed by a J-tube siphon into glass wool, activated charcoal filter media and were extremely narrow in depth, so not much internal volume. The siphon J-tube would often times get clogged or if the tank water level dropped, lose it's siphon and attempt to empty themselves. The beauty of this is with the air-powered J-tube return, nothing burned up and since the media was exposed to air while the filter did it's job of pumping water out, you didn't kill your denitrifying bacteria colony. Refill tank, clean the J-tube strainer, restart the siphon, boom, nothing bad happened. These new dual sponge filters are pretty great, I'm not knocking these in light of the past tech. But they do take some space in the tank, and if you're wanting a less cluttered interior and (or) aquascaping your tank, the sponge filter just doesn't cut it for visual appeal. The new tiny HOB's like the Azoo Palm 50 are nice, but all require their own 110 volt outlet and they don't always oxygenate as well as an air-powered filter. Some things lost, some things gained.