Terribly Outdated Technology that we Still Use...

[@FindecanorNotGmail]

A proper old-fashioned fax machine is still preferable to a "modern" HP machine that won't _scan_ your document if it is out of ink

[@LaughingOrange]

Scanning documents without having ink? Outrageous! /s

[@nobody4y]

Fax

[@amazing7633]

@@LaughingOrange That's why I threw that HP junk away.

[@robot336]

I would rather use a FAX machine because I have a better chance at finding a fax after a year than a file amongst thousand's of file's on my pc all with cryptic names that were not cryptic when I named them🤔🤔

[@playman350]

HP printers are a cancer masquerading as office equipment

[@Skraeling1000]

I used to work at a nuclear power plant (Sellafield UK if anyone is interested) and I always remember my wife's reaction when I explained how it worked. "All it does is boil water??" She had imagined some magical way that the energy could be stripped right out of the atoms or something. Her surprised Pikachu face was epic!

[@jnawk83]

rather sneaky to equate the steam turbine with steam piston engines imo.

[@PlumberWRX]

​@jnawk83 so making the water warm

[@dx1450]

I thought everybody knew that nuclear power plants (as well as coal fired power plants) used steam to produce electricity. That's what cause the 3 Mile Island accident, it was a stuck steam valve.

[@krisl3314]

Admittedly, I've never really thought much about it but I also had ZERO idea that steam was involved. Another surprised Pikachu face over here!

[@kougamecs3876]

​​@@krisl3314at least you realized nuclear power is good.

[@ajm5007]

As an attorney (non-practicing now), let me tell you that it's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE to run a law firm without a fax machine. Too many courts still consider them the ONLY appropriate way to transmit important documents . . . except when they demand an actual, physical person deliver said documents on paper.

[@0raj0]

In my country, faxed documents never had legal power. Companies might have used them in business simply because they agreed to do so (as they are now using email in exactly the same way), but no court or government office would accept a faxed document, only original paper ones. As for courts, this didn't change until now; while most government offices accept documents sent (and signed) electronically via the official governmental web platform, courts are the only exception where still the original paper documents must be delivered; no other method.

[@roberttanguay8532]

Not to mention that most fax machines are still analog and can not be hacked

[@0raj0]

@@roberttanguay8532 It depends on what do you mean "hacked". It's trivial to intercept the contents of a telephone (= fax) connection, which is sent in clear without any encryption, compared to eg. SSL-encrypted Internet email.

[@otaviofrn_adv]

I don't know where you're from, but as an attorney myself in other nation, this surprises me. In Brazil, justice demands have started transitioning to digital systems some 17 years ago, the process was completed 5 or so years ago. I interned at my local courthouse back when the digitalization was being done. It was a good satisfaction knowing that I would save tons of money with printer maintenance and would not have ashtma attacks while working

[@jamespulver3890]

@@roberttanguay8532 But they are potentially trivial to tap. Granted, it's harder from across the world, but a LOT of POTS (what a FAX machine "needs" to plug in to) is actually faked now by IP telephony, i.e. it's actually carried over the Internet, and there's all those opportunities to get to the underlying "fake phone cable". Whether you tap the phone physically in the building, or tap the IP transmission, the FAX data is all plain text - no encryption, and no digital signature. So it's actually trivial to extract that data once tapped, and trivial to man in the middle it. At this point, it's probably a coin flip or more likely for an e-mail especially *within* a given system like Microsoft 365 / Outlook or a companies own server to be more secure than a fax with less places you could tap it. This is because almost ALL e-mail is now encrypted in transit via SSL and/or SMIME so while the "wires" have the same risk, the encryption and PKI gives strong protection that FAX lacks.

[@tho_tho]

As an electronics engineer that's into old technology a ton, I just love how so much old tech still has so many niches, there's ones you didn't even bring up. In Japan for example, Pomeras are still heavily used, even though they are literally just text-writer laptops that can't do anything else, simply because of their reliability, since they can't do other stuff, they end up having massive battery spans of over 20 hours so they are extremely vital to anyone who handles a lot of documents, from offices to writers. Another example is CRT monitors, that while they have massive downsides, have the benefit of instantly drawing the screen instead of having a delay, so they are good in cases where every frame matters, although that niche mostly died off with 1ms monitors.

[@johnmichaelrichards]

I'm still using my King Jim Pomera DM30. I originally used a Sharp Font Writer 760 word processor but found it too cumbersome to be truly portable. My Pomera screen is akin to a Kindle but has a trifold keyboard. It starts lightning-fast without any boot time. It takes a couple of AA batteries so even if they did run flat I could buy them just about anywhere on this planet. I use high-capacity rechargeable Eneloop batteries which run for over 30 hours. Plus it also works as a label printer. Try doing that with a laptop.

[@dinkarfowkar999]

Not to mention CRT'S are great for retro gaming and games having such aesthetic

[@aiodensghost8645]

CRTs are great for retro gaming

[@MelodyGoad]

Bruh competitive Super Smash Bros Melee players STILL use CRTs at tournaments lol

[@tho_tho]

@@MelodyGoad Like I said, CRTs have uses where each frame matters, because they draw the screen instantly, rather than with a delay, that's why competitive retro uses them along some laser technologies. If a game was made for CRTs, even a 1ms monitor will have delay, and considering almost all old games work with framerules, that delay is massive when trying to optimize.

[@MrMockingbird1313]

Hey Simon, I saw a company, with a single owner, do machining jobs with Windows XP. The owner created an interface between old refurbished office computers and large mills. Then he would custom write software for the mill to follow. An example was the large fuel hose collars on F-15 aircraft. The collar had 20 or so steps to process. A semi-trained worker cuts a two inch piece of round aluminum bar stock. Then the billet was loaded into a mill table. The WinXP application is called to slowly mill the inside of the small billet into a collar profile. There were 10 computer mills in the shop. One worker went and cut a second billet and loaded it into the next mill. The process was simple. After a production run was rough cut, the next small program cut application loaded into the mill. Long story short, old Bridgeport mills are repurposed. Old office desktop computers are repurposed. Old XP software was repurposed. 2-3 workers did the output of 20-30 workers. The finished work was very high quality.

[@My1xT]

As long as they don't go into the internet, sure

[@caeserromero3013]

My Dad was still using MS-DOS and Ani-cam and RS232 serial connection to program Lathes and Mills up to 2016 when he retired. He was a CNC programmer/Setter/Operator all his life. He worked on everything from parts for Nuclear reactors to Gearbox parts for Benneton F1 cars.

[@cladinshadow]

I run my CNC plasma table on XP. Still my favorite OS. Windows 7 comes in second.

[@4450krank]

i dont know if we still have windows xp machines at the machining factory i work in, but i know we had some a few years ago, now most run windows 7 embedded :)

[@onmyworkbench7000]

I have small table top CNC mill that uses an XP desk top running G-code, I have several XP machines that I keep for backup computers for the mill. One day I am going to build a LASER engraver to run on the same computer as the mill.

[@billmiller4800]

Pagers were so reliable because they were built like small plastic tanks, so that they were almost unkillable. Couple that with running off basic long wave FM radio frequencies, and the signals went through almost anything, meaning it was rare to be somewhere in a building where your pager wouldn't work. In many cases, getting to a phone line was a more difficult task than receiving the page itself. Those long wavelength signals also travel a really long distance, compared to a cell signal, so they worked well in remote locations too.

[@billmiller4800]

@@retiredbore378 Sorry, I forgot the proper definitions. Been a while for me. I was thinking "a lot longer than the frequencies currently in use for phones"

[@imdaprophet]

Takes me back to my selling days and pay phones. I think the codes were 111 for coke and 333 for weed. That must of been in the 90s

[@imdaprophet]

Takes me back to my selling days and pay phones. I think the codes were 111 for coke and 333 for weed. That must of been in the 90s

[@teddybruscie]

Pagers were the Nokia of the 80's. Lol

[@dennisp8520]

Yeah but we have low band frequencies that can go quite a distance now with cellular networks the only limiting factor being the power that they are allowed to operate at due to interference with other frequencies. Anyway tldr if your only goal is to send a text it’s not that hard to do but people’s demands have come a long way from a simple SMS message

[@asmo1313]

I operate a laserwelding robot, the old one that got replaced last year ran on ancient version of windows mobile. That was not a bad thing. the sofware was really really stable because almost al bugs have been patched out. Plus, it required just a tiny amount of memory to run , which is critical if your robot is dependent on a stream of real time data to know where it is or is supposed to be going next. old does not always equal bad or obsolete

[@writerpatrick]

With floor cleaning robots common now, the broom could be considered obsolete but it's still the best tool for the job regardless of how ancient it is.

[@FloozieOne]

I've never seen a floor-cleaning robot. I have a vacuum cleaner but it pretty much stays in the closet as I don't have any rugs and a broom works better anyway as well as being able to get into smaller spaces than a vacuum head.

[@MrOiram46]

@@FloozieOneVacuum crevice tool: *Allow us to introduce ourselves.*

[@johntracy72]

And the broom doesn't need a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection in order to be used.

[@Aro666pl]

The reason why broom is still used is because we have not made anything better And lets not forget that brooms also went throught upgrades, a broom today is more than hay or bundled twigs wrapped around one end of it The stick can be a polymer or metal rod even if wood is still great in that role, but twigs and hay got replaced by synthetic materials that last pretty much forever

[@caeserromero3013]

I work in IT and knew a guy who was MASSIVELY into trains. He went to Australia in 2001 and visited a small regional railway which at that point was still using a Commodore 64 to run the timetable. And a few years later (CIRCA 2004), I was asked to help reorganise and clear out the old server room and found that our legacy POP3 customer mail server was a 1992 Compaq Deskpro PC running on DOS 5.0...

[@ronald3836]

Until recently, my company still ran mission-critical software on an emulated mainframe.

[@tbelding]

@@ronald3836 - Revelations? I still have a customer that does a little bit left on it.

[@theairstig9164]

There is a story about the platform information system (PIMS) and how each monitor was run by a Commodore 64. For me that story started in 1986. The video chip was the only one that could smoothly scroll text horizontally. Nothing else could, for a very long time

[@calcutt4]

In 2001 there was a railway in Australia that ran steam hauled passenger services, even years later parts of Melbourne's suburban system used semaphore signalling and manually operated level crossings, and today there are still large numbers of first generation diesel locomotives dating as far back as 1952 used to haul grain, freight and infrastructure maintenance trains

[@cassiuscartland]

in singapore once I remember all the platform time tables showed the Windows 95 logon screen

[@tylerrowland6332]

I work in anesthesia and I have to say it was really embarrassing when I had to be taught how to use a pager. Went from not knowing they were still around to using them every week, he is right they are the most reliable piece of equipment I have ever used

[@ablemagawitch]

And it keeps you off of Tik Tok when you device should only be used for work.... Plus Cellphones are more fragile pagers(never forgetting the old size differences were insane....), Seriously old pagers could be used as hockey pucks and hockey sticks came out worse for wear after a game.

[@evilwelshman]

Plus they're nigh indestructible. The only mobile phone remotely comparable are those old Nokias. 😁😁

[@PrograError]

IIRC there's new pagers that's open source but work on the modern networks ( IIRC the older networks are all getting the pastures in many countries)

[@donsuchoski]

pagers were outdated by my time and I barely made the payphone era

[@pietersleijpen3662]

@@evilwelshman In all fairness, you can buy tablets and phones specifically designed to be robust. I have worked with for example tablets that would survive a forklift truck driving over them. Although I suspect those are a lot more expensive than pagers.

[@Arkticsnowman]

Your fax vs email example is understated. An email is putting your document in a paper bag and handing it to the first person heading in the right direction. It keeps getting handed off to different people until it finally reaches the destination. A fax encrypts your document, gives it to a courier, who takes it straight to the recipient and decrypts it when they handshake correctly. This is why sensitive information is faxed instead of emailed.

[@mikearisbrocken8507]

*in the US. And yet the American health care system does not have the best record in keeping medical information secret. (It has a good record still though)

[@mrofinUtortxoF]

Lmao can't believe this is the excuse

[@dsandoval9396]

Not in the offices I've been in. There's a few fax machines, one to a department. When someone faxes a document it comes out on the other side but atop and/or below the rest of the fax's coming in at the time. (Workers comp company) Guess what each one had in their own offices though. A PC to receive emails.

[@NerdUndStolzDarauf]

E-mail is end-to-end encrypted and properly authenticates the sender and recipient, as long as both party's use a proper provider/mail server. Fax is sometimes encrypted and authenticated, in case of T.37 simply by converting the fax into an email or with T.38 (the standard in the US health care sector) with a special protocol. But outside US healtcare it is often very dodgy how secure the transmission of your fax is. So in the end, both means rely on both parties using a secure implementation, but with e-mail this is nowadays nearly a given, but with fax it is the exception.

[@robertsteinbach7325]

@@mrofinUtortxoF Blame it on Federal Privacy laws, which impacts healthcare and the legal sector heavily. Healthcare use pagers because of their extremely high reliability, with guaranteed Service Level Agreements. The technology is more robust than cell service. Pagers are essentially a dedicated low bandwidth, high coverage, and near 100% reliable communication system....if the people remember to recharge the pager's battery once or twice a week.

[@trevorbrown6654]

Windows XP is very much still in use for a lot of stand alone off-grid systems that require a basic O/S that doesn't need updates. One such example is in both large and small air conditioning units where it is unnecessary to need to update the software as the software doesn't need to be complicated, it just needs to be reliable as the hardware is designed to last decades so all it needs to do is to make that hardware function reliably. This is exactly the same reason that DOS was in use for decades as well, as it was a simple but tried and tested operating system. I gather when the Space Shuttle program was retired in 2011 it was still using an O/S written in the early 1980s to control certain basic functions as there was never a need to change it. And interestingly BBC Basic programming language can still be found in use both as an educational tool for those wanting to learn the basics of coding but also, as you say, for those using vintage synthesisers in the music business.

[@wingracer1614]

It goes back even further. There are still a lot of gas stations for instance that the cash register/pump control system is Apple II based running Apple DOS I still have a Windows 95 laptop. It gets broken out maybe twice a year just to run this one old piece of test equipment that has had no drivers since 95 and unfortunately, nothing better has been made since.

[@PhilOsGarage]

A large number of ATM’ use XP, too!

[@darrelfischer465]

I still run a laptop using XP on a daily basis. It is connected to the internet and I use it to stream audio while I work with my other computers. I can boot all my other machines up and down and never interrupt the audio. Plus, it has a calculator, dictionary, and a spreadsheet running at all times. It has limited web browsing capabilities using K-Meleon.

[@squirlmy]

Although, for most off-grid systems, it's cheaper and legally safer to run Linux, and increasing numbers do. It's also very possible that linux distros can still optionally be updated, or at least updated enough to be hardened against malware. It's a little silly to argue for XP, unless specific equipment made with specific drivers, when linux and even other Open Source OSes will run on anything designed for XP. You might go back to old DOS-based Windows drivers never implemented in Linux, but that's stuff several decades old now.

[@squirlmy]

@@wingracer1614 I have my doubts about this, because Apple DOS (and Apple ProDOS for IIe and IIgs) is still covered by copyright. I could see Apple, of all companies in particular, trying to claim special rights over how such things were repaired or updated. Electronic component companies, especially Chinese companies, long ago discovered Linux to be a much legally safer alternative. There were several versions of non-Microsoft DOS, and even for these, they too can usually run FOSS FreeDOS. It is more likely CP/M, which was everywhere before the IBM PC came out, and ran on nearly every 8-bit microprocessor of the time, there was even a CP/M Card for the Apple II's.

[@nobodycares85]

Mentioning Windows XP reminded me of a video I watched of a guy checking what information was being sent out by various OS versions. Windows XP contacted update servers for security, newer OS versions contacted a huge variety of commercial URLs essentially selling information about the user. Most of us are forced to use the latest OS version thanks to forced obsolescence and, while there are some nice features in newer things, they're not as good as they claim to be.

[@josephoberlander]

Most notable was the change with Windows 7. You could no longer cleanly image and clone drives. Microsoft went from a role of trusting businesses and their licenses to more and more locking you in and distrusting everything the end user does. Basically Apple and Microsoft swapped ideologies, and it persists today. Such that IT departments are now finding it easier to keep a fleet of Macs running than Windows boxes. Apple? Here - the OS is free - drop it on whatever will run it. Windows? Sorry, your motherboard or peripherals changed a bit too much, you must be a pirate - shutting down. Cloning? As if - maybe you can get half of your personal data copied off - but none of your settings. Oh, and we control the updates and so sorry if it bricks your OS. When the most common advice is "just reinstall" on their forums, you know something is wrong.

[@nobodycares85]

@@josephoberlander Yup, Bugger Microsoft with a cactus

[@jacksimpson-rogers1069]

You might try Linux.

[@josephoberlander]

@@jacksimpson-rogers1069 I have, but of the businesses that I have consulted with or worked for, none have adopted it. IT management is stuck in its ways concerning Windows 90% of the time, and the other 10% are making Apple stuff work for them. I feel for the poor techs who need years of arcane knowledge and constantly fight with supporting these archaic networks of barely stable boxes. Having Windows brick itself three times in a year as an IT professional myself due to a patch or something just getting corrupted that I can't fix is too much. Recovery mode does nothing, jumping into Lunix won't show me where it blew up as there are no log or crash files (despite the setting being turned on). Nope, recover the user directory and reinstall. Again. Not risking a 4th time.

[@nobodycares85]

@@jacksimpson-rogers1069 As it happens, I use it on a few of my machines. It's pretty solid and getting better all the time. But thankyou for your comment.

[@Jamesofur]

Another big piece of the pager for Hospitals (and a couple other industries) is because the technology is so understood/stable that pager companies are willing to provide SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that guarantee delivery within a couple minutes or they have to pay potentially large fines. Cell phones for example refuse to do that for either phone calls or text messages they both don't want to guarantee delivery at all and explicitly say that messages can take days to be delivered. In a crisis situation that's obviously unacceptable and the SLA guarantee is worth millions of dollars to some hospitals.

[@javabeanz8549]

A recent example for you. I got a text from my cell company telling me that my March payment went through and that my service was good into April, text arrived in mid December. An older example, I had sent my niece a text on Valentine's Day, she got it and replied around Thanksgiving. That one made the news in 2019, as many thousands of messages were stuck in a server and it delivered them all when it was rebooted.

[@WizzardJC]

I’m not even 30, but I was born in a farming community so old and rural, we didn’t even have a house number, it was just called by our neighbours “the old dalton place on the hill” And we used a fax till my grandfather died about 3 years ago, and I still use a VHS and old CRT television ran on a generator in the rest shed we have on the edge of our farthest fields, as there is no point travelling the whole way back to the farmhouse when it’s lambing season, especially at night, we also have an old military cot & a camping stove with a decent amount of canned food, as I’m homeless even though it’s not lambing atm I stay in the shack and keep an eye out for my family, and tbh I’m genuinely happy, it helps I can charge my phone with the gen & power banks I have as well lol

[@piobmhor8529]

I used to fly in and out of some remote islands on Canada’s East Coast. Sable Island has a cellular antenna, however between the buildings on the island they are connected with old fashioned crank phones. There is no switchboard, they are all on one party line. If you want to reach another building, you pick up the receiver and crank the ring for whoever you want to reach. A half rotation of the crank produced a short ring, one complete rotation gave a long ring. To call the main building, that would be one short and one long ring. Rotate the crank halfway, stop and then one complete crank. All the phones on the line would ring, but the guy in the main building would pick up because he would know the call was for him. It all worked on a 4.5 volt DC system which was powered by an AC transformer, and more importantly a battery backup. The reason why they still used it was because it worked, regardless of the weather. It’s hard to get a repairman way out there in any reasonable time frame, so dependability is much more important. I think the system was initially installed in 1902 and is probably still in use today. I haven’t been to Sable Island in 20 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if it is.

[@nuuukethewhales]

Another still common use of floppy disks is for theatre lighting technicians, for a lot of now-vintage lighting consoles (such as those made by ETC) which are still in widespead use. It's often the only way to save your show data, or bring it with you from one venue to another while on tour.

[@senseisecurityschool9337]

Yep. Something to be aware of - as I understand it, the last manufacturer of floppies has stopped making them. But there is a company that found a ton of old ones, which they sell.

[@BreakdancePeach]

What I don't understand is why they don't use a floppy disk emulator. It plugs in and emulates the floppy disk interface. This way you could use modern bigger storage like SD cards or flash drives without the extra hassle of finding your local floppy dealer.

[@senseisecurityschool9337]

@@BreakdancePeach "extra hassle of finding your local floppy dealer" - You just hit up your dealer on his pager. Same as we always did.

[@BreakdancePeach]

@@senseisecurityschool9337 But he lives an hour away, so you take your local steam train to his place

[@smilingpolitely12345]

OMG I remember 1997 haveing 10 floppy disk , I have went to by buddy and copied on those Tomb Raider , and as game weight some 100mb , I needed to make 10 trips , and as my friend lived on other side of my home city Poznan , I done that over a week , but funnies was I had 486 dx , 66mhz +8 mb ram + vga gpu , so game worked in 15-20 fps , and my hhd at the time had 200mb = 50% of hhd , but DAMN I had fun playing that game :))) (BTW yes that was pirate game , but I was living in Poland then and Piracy was not illigal :))

[@caynidar6295]

As a computer networking major back in the late 2000s, I had a fellow student who worked for the IT department of the county government, and she said that they still used Windows 95 for many of the same reasons that were listed here for still using Windows XP. It was relatively dependable, everyone was already trained on it, by staying on it they didn't need to upgrade the hardware to accommodate a newer OS, and there were fewer new viruses and such being created targeting it vs. the current operating systems.

[@fastinradfordable]

Except 95 has the blue screen of death 💀

[@cunty666]

@@fastinradfordableto be fair, so has every version of Windows since.

[@ITSecurityNerd]

You can run Win 95 on an abacus. I loved that OS because it just worked well for me.

[@Skoopyghost]

You are talking about windows 95, but windows xp is the best. I never owned a car. I get around on a skateboard, and a normal bicycle.

[@niconugishd9150]

I in the other hand loved Windows 7 and extended using it for long as possible. I really did not like Windows 10 as much

[@VincentvanFlow]

Another use for floppy disks is that at many universities, some old equipment, particularly oscilloscopes in my degree, still use floppy disks to record data. Floppy disks being around usually comes down to "why fix what isn't broken?"

[@erosore]

im the daughter of a healthcare worker who's been in the field for 23 years. they used pagers for the whole time she worked there up until this most recent year where they started using a texting service over their phones. she's expressed her deep hatred towards it, and that many other dislike it too. texting in the hospital is unreliable, and with pagers, people tend to send out only what's important. she's a nurse practitioner, so she gets questions from nurses all the time, and through the texting service, nurses (and doctors, but mostly nurses) would ask very simple questions, which blew up her phone and that wasn't good when she was talking to a patient. there's also no-service/no wifi areas in the hospital, which don't affect pagers but do affect texting services. overall, pagers are def better and still very useful

[@oslaskid]

I still use a computerised weighing scales for mixing inks at the company I work for. It runs on windows 98 and has never been connected to the internet, so has never had an update. This is probably why it still works as it did on day one.

[@josephwilliams7995]

Yup at my shop we have a paint mixing room where all the auto tints are on a machine that shakes them to keep them uniform and the computer is hooked up to the scale and the color mix program give you a weight that decreases as you add the tint until all the tints are down to zero then your paint us ready to spray

[@johanmetreus1268]

The regional laundry service here (serving hospitals, hotels an industry) still have a 386 running Windows 3.1 for the sorting chute counters. Sure, it takes a few minutes to boot and have the program running, but that's what the first arriver does every morning before beginning to check the order lists to see what needs to be prioritized. A Pi or Ardino board have enough computing power, but someone would have to make the software which is why it's not being replaced until it actually dies.

[@BilisNegra]

A very important additional reason is that only one and the same piece of software has been used all this time, and the hardware is the exact same, too. Windows 98 is NOT a stable OS by any means, if you installed and uninstalled software, used a variety of hardware cards and peripherals with their respective drivers and later on you replaced some of them... Bluescreeens or other kinds of instability were not exactly uncommon, noticeably more than on a more modern system like an NT-based Windows version, and it was not just because of viruses or updates.

[@jamesanderson2176]

One piece of "outdated" equipment that can be critical in emergencies is the shortwave radio. Able to communicate over long distances without the need for infrastructure such as cell towers or phone lines, these can mean life or death in natural disasters, etc.

[@angelg3986]

Don't fix it if it ain't broken

[@adamJKpunk]

I will never forget waking up one day and finding that my windows machine had been updated from XP to Windows 10 with all of those terrifying tiles. I remember the sense of horror and dread to this day.

[@wulf2121]

A funny part about still using fax machines is that a lot of phone lines have nowdays been switched to voice over IP. And that IP connection might in turn be over DSL using a phone line. So, there is used an old technology designed to transmit images encoded as sound on top of a newer technology designed to transmit sound over a data network on top of a not that new technolgy designed to transmit network data over a phone line on top of a very old technology designed to transmit sound as analog electric signals. Yet, incredibly this stack of technologies from different eras still works somehow.

[@semperfi-1918]

Go one step further.... records are making a comeback. And many of the older record players exspecially from the height of the 50's-70's are in coming to high demand. Some of them can compete like my magnavox systems dollar for dollar does its job.

[@jaymemeulemans7482]

I retired as a volunteer fire fighter more than 10 years ago and to this day I can still hear the pager going off at random times in my head.

[@user-nb9wh9mj2w]

That's just the wife

[@Blue10AEMia]

Two tone is forever burned into my memory

[@marguskiis7711]

firefighting anyway is in 1950s totally.

[@Justin.Martyr]

*I have been Diagnosed as ANTI SociaL BeHavior!!!!* *Wut's Wrong with that???? since 96% of PeoPLe are just ROTTEN Skuum!!!!*

[@wensdyy6466]

I remember how last year our old librarian announced in an article she wrote in local newspaper that finally whole library catalouge is avalible on floppy disc and she has spend around two decades to work on it. Important thing to note is that for the last few years there is an online cataluge avalible 😄

[@cauegouveia]

I'm a theater light designer and had to use a Floppy disk several times last month: I was working on a theater that had this very popular lighting console that uses floppy disks to save show's information.

[@trev8591]

I used to work for the NHS in IT, left there about 7 years ago. I was specifically employed because I was "old school" IT (I was about 48 at the time). A lot of my jobs were keeping Windows XP machines working (off the 'net) that ran x-ray machines etc. Elastic bands, blu-tac, cable ties, replacement fans and re-pasting processors. Whatever it took to keep bespoke machines running.

[@davideyres955]

Yep pre Google generation when you used to have to know how to do stuff not just tap in to Google and if the answer isn’t in the first link then throw it up to third line.

[@jwenting]

used to work for an organisation that had a panic attack when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Their entire IT infrastructure relied on SPARC servers and workstations and support for all that ancient hardware would be discontinued practically overnight. They ended up buying the entire stockpile they could get their hands on to keep their infrastructure running hopefully for another 10 years at least.

[@Ikbenjounietsukkel]

@@davideyres955 The good old days of the library

[@paulfrayne6519]

​@@Jason-fm4myputting new thermal paste for heat management on the cpu

[@Axeiaa]

@@Jason-fm4my There's a layer of thermal paste between the CPU and the Heatsink to fill in microscopic gaps. This paste can turn into a solid over the years from drying out - this may lead to overheating and the system shutting down to protect itself, or running extremely slow. Re-pasting simply means taking the heatsink off the CPU, giving both sides a good clean and reapplying fresh thermal paste. The thermal paste can actually dry out to a point where it cracks and then cooling is pretty terrible. PS: There's graphite pads nowadays that will last basically forever and can fulfill the role of thermal paste.

[@TheJeffMiller]

The moral of this story is that things that work, work. Just because something new comes along, that doesn't mean the previous generation stops working. Quite the opposite. Some of those systems are incredibly complicated, and their reliability is the result of decades of refinement. Trying to "upgrade" to the newer stuff inevitably ends up introducing errors no one thought of, and then you're stuck, since the last guy who really understood the internals retired in 2004.

[@djt8518]

Change isn't always good and new isn't always better if it's not broke don't try to fix it

[@emu314159]

That's why you need the sort of Rube Goldberg mind that will think of the most complicated, inconvenient way of doing something simple, but will think of errors and mistakes you'd never come up with in a hundred years of Sundays.

[@frederickclause2694]

But if you don't upgrade how are the vendors supposed to sell you a subscription to use what you purchase?

[@Aro666pl]

Still its important to look at new stuff and ask yourself "is the upgrade worth it?" by staying blindly to tradition you put yourself at disadvantage, balance is important

[@Aro666pl]

​@@frederickclause2694they dont need to, they just overcharge you for old parts to keep your machine running

[@Mechanical_Turk]

Bicycles, keys, gas lighters, campfires, trolleys, radios, spectacles, cardboard, rowboats, paintings... You could come up with an endless number of examples for "outdated" technology still in use. When you use any tool, you want the right tool for the purpose, and sophistication is actually a fairly low-priority attribute among all the factors that determine what the right tool will be.

[@vulcanfeline]

not to mention analog stoves / ovens. preheat to 350f on analog = twist a dial for about a second. on digital = push and hold button for way too long before it speeds up, then zip past your intended target at which time you repeat the process with a different button

[@Aro666pl]

From pov of casual observer, yes they are obsolete, but on deeper look almost everything evolved a lot over the years, better designs, more modern materials, new features

[@GuttersMN]

I worked with a former Navy steam boiler engineer. He spent most of his service on nuclear subs and nuclear aircraft carriers. Coincidentally, we worked at a company that made extensive use of fax machines!

[@mastpg]

The relief brought on from upgrading from Windows NT was palpable. FYI, if you have a McLaren F1, a car which sells for $10-20million, remote diagnostics are performed via an old school dial up modem and technicians will hook into it directly with a 25yr old Compaq computer which holds and transfers updates on...you guessed it...floppy disks.

[@cascadianrangers728]

Plus side of that is it would be a lot harder for bad actors hacking in, sabotaging the computer or planting spyware or anything else. Using obsolete equipment no longer in common use by anyone else is a legitimate security measure

[@Pugjamin]

They will most likely be working on an alternative to that as U.K. PSTN services close down in 2024, so dial up will no longer work.

[@mastpg]

@@Pugjamin ...but...what will they do, these people who can spend $10-20million on a wildly impractical car? What will become of them?

[@Pugjamin]

@@mastpg I would assume that they’ll run the software on a VM and then use a GSM dial in connection rather than PSTN. If the car doesn’t already have one fitted, I assume they will fit a GSM modem into them.

[@EmeraldEyesEsoteric]

Windows NT? Never heard of it. I think it was 95, 98, XP, ME, 7, 8, 10, and 11. Out of all them 7 is the center, the Apex, and the best OS Windows ever made.

[@kaptnkarl01]

I had a Windows XP Pro box and it was BULLETPROOF! It was by far the best computer I ever owned. I bought it when XP first came out and I used it for years. I only upgraded from XP after it got to the point that it would not run the software I needed for some classes I was taking. Super fast and super reliable. I still miss it today.

[@smilingpolitely12345]

I stll have Win XP original version , but I stoped to use it 2012 , when I changed it for 7 , and I have used Win 7 to 2022 = in 20 years I used 2 OS :)

[@DickWalz]

i still use XP mode when i can.

[@hakasonma8588]

Windows XP is why Microsoft is known today... I don’t think they would’ve lasted with the trash these days 😂 Ironically everything modern these days was was created back when XP, KZbin, Facebook, Amazon, Reddit, IPhones etc and backbone tech/software was also created / enjoyed around the same timeline.... I will remember XP until I die including those green hills... mesmerized as a child using such a machine!

[@ostlandr]

Kept the XP box as a second PC until the hard drive finally died. Worked fine for my Lady Wife to surf the 'net on, pay bills, etc., and there were some classic games I still played that would only run on a native XP box. So I moved the "old" Windows 10 box to her side of the computer desk, built the "most bang for the buck" gaming rig that I use today, and cloned the Win10 box over to it with PCmover. My wife had gotten her Fire tablet by then, so her PC just gathers dust now.

[@whohan779]

You can actually partially enhance/extend the Kernel's capabilities and spoof Windows Vista/7 to varying success (⇒"Extended XP"). That way you may even be able to run a semi-recent browser; otherwise something like MyPal as a starting point is recommended nowadays.

[@chestermarcol3831]

XP still stands alone, as the greatest OS MIcrosoft ever produced.

[@dr.robertjohnson6953]

I retired from the USAF in 2001. I was an Aircraft Weapons Technician. I took care of the weapons systems on five different fighter jets. Everything that was directly tied to weapons systems. Bombs, missiles, Guns, Chaff/Flare (yes those Phoenix Lights in the 1990's were flares. I saw them myself). But I digress... I retired in 2001. I did work in several tech industries in the next several years. From selling electronics, to phone center at a big Cable Company (you called me, when your internet went out, and I'd be the one to tell you, "Have you tried turning it off and on again?". Indeed, thats usually the fix with all tech. I eventually gravitated to Xerox, in 2007, and my new carer as copier Tech had begun.Yes, the closest thing I could use my Air Force training in the civilian world. At least I had some electronics troubleshooting background. As none of the Major Air Carriers I know of don't use weapons systems. One of the first things I noticed was, in the age of the internet, people were still using fax machines. Yes, I repaired those as well. Mostly they were incorporated into the multi function printers. But the were many that were stand alone Fax machines, connected to a dedicated fax line. These were usually hospitals. They would often fax complete medical records to each other. I mean like 200+ pages in a single fax! These devices were never meant to handle that much use. And they worked them to death. The Police dept used them. The Fire Dept used them. Lawyers used them. And many educational institutes still used them as late as 2020, when I left the industry. Everyone that uses a fax should know, even though it has the confirmation page, that is used for proof of transmission. It doesn't always work. It assumes that you have a completely functional fax machine at both ends. That nether one has any issues. That the sending optics are clean, not gooped up with liquid whiteout, a very common problem. It also assumes the receiving machine has ink in it. It is very possible to send a fax, receive the confirmation page, and the fax printed out a blank page. It could be out of toner/ink. There could be issues with the xerographic process in the case of a laser printer type of fax. The fuser could be bad, or the drum could be bad, or the laser could be bad, or it could have ground issues. And yet, you can still receive a message that the fax was received. Do not trust them. But, one that you probably can trust, the most expensive fax to use, is the one that uses a printer cartrige, that contains what looks like a 200 foot long carbon paper. Very expensive to use.

[@MrPuch82]

What do they all have in common? A certain elegance of design. Simple, robust and reliable.

[@Ozzianman]

​@@binladen-ci7jmI would not use XP today for obvious reasons, but I absolutely dig just how readable the UI is. It is why I am running a XP theme using Curtains.

[@MatthewCobalt]

​​@@binladen-ci7jmLow hardware requirements since release, the most minimum of bloated features an OS still being actively used, actively being patched by Microsoft (for a nominal fee) for the military...

[@damenwhelan3236]

​@@binladen-ci7jm 8:06 Simon said it.

[@NinjaRunningWild]

@@binladen-ci7jmBecause people are still using it & it still works. You’re conflating older with functional.

[@NinjaRunningWild]

@@binladen-ci7jmAt the time is not now. Your arguments are weak.

[@jfwfreo]

One big reason fax is still a thing is because in many jurisdictions a document that is signed and then sent by fax is considered just as legally binding as if the document had been signed and sent through the post.

[@millbean13]

My company uses pagers for working in classified areas. Since you can’t bring anything inside like cell phones, smart watches, anything with Bluetooth, we get these pagers if someone needs to reach us while we’re working in there.

[@LittleMarin]

I work in the Healthcare industry. I use a fax machine for sensitive information all of the time. We also have a few XP computers for some very specialized and expensive programs and equipment. These computers are not hooked up to the internet, and their only purpose is to run these programs. Our tech team is always wanting to get rid of them, and we have to explain why they can't each time.

[@Slane583]

My father used to use a pager when I was a kid in school as he is a private fuel hauler. Of course back then cell phones weren't really a thing so he needed a way for a customer to contact him while he was driving. I think he still might have one as a backup for when his cell phone has no reception. Sometimes things that are simple and outdated are still better than something that's new and complex. :)

[@tonyburzio4107]

Locomotive engineers have pagers as a backup for the same reason.

[@Slane583]

@@tonyburzio4107 If it works I see no point in changing it. Especially if the new thing made to replace it doesn't work in the middle of nowhere. There's no point in trying to reinvent the wheel like most of these people do. :)

[@goreobsessed2308]

For that purpose the Paget is better it found a niche

[@crowe668]

I'd rather have a pager....

[@eliseleonard3477]

Until very recently in my job as a Federal physician we were assigned Motorola pagers. What a reliable beast of a device! You could hurl it across a room in frustration and it would fly apart in a most rewarding way, and then it could be reassembled in seconds and work fine. They did not however do well when they fell into the toilet 🤣

[@jonnunn4196]

One of my pagers did not survive being in a car crash. My work ended up writing that one off and issuing me a new one.

[@gaiaiulia]

Same with those old Nokia 330 (?) phones. I tossed the bed once and tossed the phone with it. Phone hit the wall and fell apart. I picked up the pieces, put them together and the phone still worked.

[@TheDawnofVanlife]

They are also just great because you know if someone pages you it's urgent. It's nice to have one and be able to turn off all the non-urgent distracting noise of a cellphone. The constant access people expect because of cellphones is kind of annoying.

[@robertnewell5057]

'fell' you claim?

[@gaiaiulia]

@@robertnewell5057 if it's me you're asking. Yes, after I shook the duvet and tossed the phone up, it fell. Gravity, you know.😜 Lol!

[@cnocspeireag]

I remember the fax machine as cutting edge technology in terms of the legal aspects of buying property in Scotland in the late 1980s. English law hadn't begun to catch up. I lived in England, and was able to complete a Scottish purchase, release money, and confirm a mortgage agreement remotely: it seemed too good to be true. It all worked smoothly via the lawyer (a Writer to the Signet, no less). The only hangover was the request to visit the lawyer's offices, initial the faxed pages, and add the rubric 'accepted as holograph' before the papers were filed away. As L P Hartley wrote, 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'.

[@zburnham]

There are valid reasons to keep old tech in place, and there are invalid ones. Unfortunately the primary enemy of technological innovation and improved productivity is "That's The Way We've Always Done It." Companies will spend millions and waste thousands of man-hours trying incredibly hard to NOT update their IT systems.

[@empressmarowynn]

I really miss XP. It was so easy to customize and when you needed to find something it was right there, not buried in a sub-sub-sub-subfolder. When I would get a new computer that automatically came with a more recent OS I would wipe it and install XP. I was very upset when a lot of the PC games no longer ran on XP and I was forced to "upgrade."

[@RCAvhstape]

I still play some old PC games from the 1990s, many of which surprisingly still run on modern versions of Windows.

[@hakasonma8588]

Same with iOS, nothing like the iPhone 3G/4 style but now you can’t even use banking apps without being forced to update... Windows 10? My PC just random crashes now because it just updates when it feels like without choosing what it updates... XP, KZbin, Limewire, MySpace etc nothing like surfing the web 1999-2008

[@MrOrgeston]

I was reluctant to upgrade to 7 from XP, but had to because of the 64 bit requirements of software I wanted to use. Now 7 is being left behind. I tried installing 10, and was shocked and appalled at what a terrible user experience it is. Back to 7. If Steam is going to stop working on Windows 7, then so be it. There are other things to do in life.

[@NNokia-jz6jb]

Windows XP rant... LoL

[@NNokia-jz6jb]

😊

[@christopherlatham4254]

I'm a bit of a connoisseur of very old technologies which we still use today. My favorite is the humble shoe string which in one form or another dates back at least 5000 years based on Otzi, the iceman found in the Alps in 1991.

[@3DLasers]

That hiker Ozi ? He's been missing since 1910... 🤣

[@joannesmith2484]

I worked in a cash accounting office about 15 years ago. During a slow period, I cleaned the office and got rid of lots of old files & assorted junk. When I cleaned out the safe, there were hand-written double-entry ledgers in there. The tall, brown, binded kind with the green, columned pages. I had never even seen one in person before then. The weird thing is they weren't as old as you'd think. IIRC they were only about 10-15 years old.

[@debjoy12]

forget XP, at my old job there was a machine whose software was compatible with nothing newer than Windows 2000! as a bonus, that PC was never allowed to be turned off because the account that was logged in was so old that no one knew the password.

[@69Hurst442]

Printer ink the most expensive commodity in the world.😂

[@mikenco]

I own (and ride) a 93 year old motorbike. Old doesn't always mean obsolete. I work in finance in the UK, many banks and lenders still insist on faxes. I'm also an ex-Navy Submariner. I bet many people would be shocked to find out that Nuclear Submarines are moved using steam. Albeit steam produced by water in the secondary water loops in the reactor.

[@ssaraccoii]

Took a lot of guts to be in nuke sub. The concept of a sodium-cooled reactor operating in the ocean is not a pleasant one. Sodium and water, especially sea water is not a happy outcome if they come in contact with each other.

[@mikenco]

@@ssaraccoii I was young and stupid, and they paid extra. I didn't really consider any risk back then.

[@solsfan-v3l]

Unless he served on a sub before 66' it wasn't a liquid sodium reactor. The UK has been using PWR reactors from Rolls Royce since the mid sixties. He would have to be at least 80 years old to have even been around a liquid metal reactor of that type. Maybe he is, but he still works and drives a motorcycle so chances aren't looking too good for that.

[@G-Mastah-Fash]

You're probably the same kind of guy that would say bolt action rifles aren't obsolete for combat duty. Like c'mon your bike probably neither has an electric starter nor an electric oil pump and it for sure has no ABS. That's the definition of obsolete.

[@mikenco]

​@@G-Mastah-Fash Electric power doesn't mean anything. Most sniper rifles still in active service are bolt action. The 1890s Maxim gun is still in service in Ukraine today. The water cooled barrel is ultra reliable. Many ancient guns are still in use, including the infamous AK47. My bike has a manual kick start much like many modern smaller bore off roaders, and mechanical oil pump. You fact you're not sure about either makes it obvious you don't know what you're talking about.

[@infoscholar5221]

I work in the medical field, so I see fax machines everyday. Also, I grew up in a military family. My eldest brother served in the navy - he retired, serving a long career, mostly on carriers. He explained to me that every ship in the navy, diesel or nuke, was actually still a steam ship. Only the means of _ heating_ the steam differed.

[@grant9214]

Yeah, they're kinda important.

[@Carewolf]

Diesel steam? Seems a bit unnecessary.

[@mississaugaicedogs]

@@Carewolf it ends up being reliable. as it doesn't require total redesign of a working system

[@mikes-wv3em]

diesel powers electric traction motors on ships. it does not create steam. @@Carewolf

[@Carewolf]

@@mikes-wv3em exactly! It is either directly driving the screw, or it diesel-electric, and have an electric engine drive the screw. In neither case is any steam involved.

[@tootsienootan3806]

The networking phrase we used to use in the days of floppies was "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks"

[@Aro666pl]

This is kinda true to this day, a truck full of SSD's can move whole datacenters faster than internet

[@BarrettSmithBB]

Besides windows, XP being used a lot even after it's sunset day. The more interesting thing is that a similar version of windows called windows CE is used in 90% of industrial machine interfaces and is not being supported anymore.

[@trickygoose2]

In my experience, if you are not well organised, the achilles heel of the fax machine was the paper tray. About 20 years ago, the office I worked at went from having one fax to having one on each floor. However, nobody realised that you probably needed to have someone on each floor who was responsible for ensuring that they didn't run out of paper. Occasionally, someone who was expecting a fax, having given a customer the number, would, after wondering why it hadn't arrived, check the paper tray and find it was empty. They would refill it, and several other faxes would print before the one they were expecting.

[@emu314159]

This is still a problem today with POS and other sorts of simple printers, if you run out of paper, when you refill have fun waiting for the entire spool to run, and hope it doesn't use all the paper again.

[@fukkitful]

You would think it would beep or something to let you know its out of paper. Also a larger paper tray would help if its was intended for office use. We had a fax machine when i was very young. I always thought they were amazing. That was before we had internet though.

[@tspawn35]

@@fukkitful Some Blink, beep and run a message saying the printer is out of paper. Some people are oblivious to all the notifications. Hardly, anyone has a straight fax machine anymore. It's an all in one printer in more office settings. With fax and scanning built in. So, you also run into the other issue of waiting for a fax and hoping no one prints anything to that printer before the fax comes in.

[@skintslots]

@@tspawn35 Maybe if they had a pager attached they would never run out of paper!😄

[@danidavis7912]

In 1988, I started my post-military career with a worldwide industrial technology corporation. That year all of the branches went to a system called "Eclipse". A couple years later I left the company. In 2019, when I came back to the company, I was shocked to learn they were still using it! The reason? Our aerospace division had certain security protocols that had to be met and the old system was not easily hackable because there were few people left that understood it.

[@LarsV62]

Data General's Eclipse computer system? Heard about that and used a Nova 2 system in last year of high school back in the early 1980s. That school was the only one that had this level of advanced equipment of all offering computer education at this level; even few universities had better machines. Also a couple air traffic control stations used those..

[@danidavis7912]

Honestly have no idea. Probably knew at one time. I do remember the company making all the trade journals at the time when the deal was made. @@LarsV62

[@ostlandr]

That was the advantage of the old 100% mechanical lever voting machines. You had to be Charles Babbage to hack them, and he passed away in 1871. Tech would put a lead & wire seal on the machine after it was set up for the vote, which had to be intact. Had both a per-election counter (which had to match the number of voters signed in to the polling place) and a non-resettable permanent counter to check that against. After the voting was over and the results were tallied, you cranked the machine down into itself and put a HUGE padlock on it. They could be recanvassed (recounted) over and over again, giving the exact same numbers, until reset for the next election. So, of course, they had to go.

[@Binarynova]

Windows XP is still my favorite version of Windows. As you said, it was the last gasp of Windows operating systems that existed to let users own their computers rather than the other way around.

[@yuglooc_coolguy]

Pagers are also used in high-security areas where only receiving data is acceptable. A device that allows sending data may be too vulnerable to security concerns.

[@dgurevich1]

The fun thing about windows XP is its source code is now publicly available. I long for the day it comes back with community backed updates.

[@Jeffrey314159]

I use a Dell Deminsion tower that uses WinXP but it is so out of date I cannot get back online

[@robinsebelova7103]

Not officially. MS never released source code to the public. There was just a case, when it leaked to the internet

[@pathfinderlight]

For people who don't know, equipment drivers and custom software often need to be rewritten when switching over to new operating systems. This is fine for most commercial products because companies want to maintain a wide variety of compatibility at any given time, but niche applications such as military, medical, and industrial uses often need custom solutions. Often, that solution boils down to "just keep the operating system as is till something breaks it".

[@stephenpowstinger733]

I’m all too aware of the personal price you pay for a new operating system. I’m also aware that the government has huge legacy problems with the VA and the pentagon.

[@wilfredarasaratnam]

Yeah I went to the opthalmologiat and a piece of kit he used has xp software on it. I think there were 20 of these devices in the country so I guess a software upgrade would be costly.

[@xungnham1388]

I think a much more common situation is trying to find printer drivers for new operating systems, especially when the manufacturer has left the printer business. A 20-30 year old printer is really good enough for a lot of printing needs. I don't know why Microsoft doesn't do more to try to maintain backwards compatibility with drivers.

[@YeahNo]

Same applies to retail. While we sold the latest Windows 10 machines on the sales floor, the retail software used for the international company still ran on XP and paperwork was faxed between stores. I expect they still do.

[@JABoyle3875]

Yes, it is hopelessly outdated now, but Windows XP will always be my favorite Windows operating system for how good it was even in beta form, when it was the current system.

[@hizaleus]

It doesn't help that Vista was so terrible 😂

[@53kenner]

As President of the Steam Automobile Club of America, and an employee of General Motors Powertrain, I have to dispute the idea that steam automobiles can use fuel more efficiently than internal combustion. The problem is the latent heat of vaporization. It takes 974 BTU to convert a pound of water at 212 F (100C), and atmospheric pressure, into a pound of steam at 212F. Thermodynamically, this is an "irreversible" process -- which essentially means that we can't extract work converting that steam back into water. All the power we get from the steam is by raising it to elevated temperatures and pressures. Powerplants can condense steam to near vacuum due to a large cooling water supply , whereas automobiles are necessarily air cooled and thus lucky to drop the exhaust steam down to ambient pressure. Also, large steam plants can employ all sorts of heat exchangers that simply won't scale down to fit under the hood of a car. The idea of steam-powered automobiles to battle pollution came about in the late 60's and early 70's ... but died a fast death when OPEC cut oil deliveries and governments instituted CAFE (fuel economy) standards. Today, catalytic converters, fuel injection, and electronic engine controls arguably make a gasoline engine at least as clean, if not cleaner, across the entire driving cycle than a steam engine is likely to manage. This is because you need to expend a lot of fuel just to raise steam whereas the ICE is ready to go after burning very little fuel.

[@m__42]

Another fun fact on floppy disk: A Floppy Disk is still the most commonly used (and recognized) icon for a "Save" action in many applications.

[@AdhamOhm]

Kind of like how the call and hangup icons in cell phones still look like old style telephone handsets.

[@thelastperfectman4139]

Your list should I think have included the vinyl record player. One of the earliest commercial music reproduction technologies which has not only survived against all odds but experienced a renaissance in the 21st century.

[@user-ro4mb3jm1q]

There is a good technical reason for this to, you see, digital storage is what we call discrete in time, meaning that it operates in the amounts of points of data that is capable of recording per second, the more advance the system, the more data per second you have and the clearer the sound is, however this is never perfect and even if you can store millions of points per second, is never a continuous "perfect" thing. Vinyl records are fully analogic, they are continuous on time, so they store everything in every moment, so no matter how advance your digital system is, a vinyl record is always going to be able to store more "information" and they are the closest thing right now to "perfect" audio recording.

[@jolandh]

​@@user-ro4mb3jm1qI'm sorry, but that is not correct. Please take the time to watch the excellent video from Technology Connections in which it is explained in detail how digital sound works and why it is exactly the same as analog sound. I love vinyl for many reasons and I own multiple record players, I love the way they sound, Ilove buying and handling records, but they are not better than lossless digital.

[@moose_the_eagle1315]

@@user-ro4mb3jm1q This is, of course, false. There's very reliable math which demonstrates this (Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem). Digital signals can perfectly record and reproduce every sound within your hearing range with a finite number of samples. Above a certain sampling threshold (about 40 khertz), a human ear cannot differentiate. Also, as a technical matter, vinyl is LESS accurate at replicating sound than digital mediums like CDs, which is why it is associated with a distinctive warm and fuzzy sound. The revival of vinyl probably relates more to personal preferences (nostalgia, physical ownership, etc.) than to technical reproduction of sound.

[@JM-ft5ip]

To this day, XP was the ONLY Windows OS that I actually liked! It amazes me that newer systems were touted simply because you could snap two windows open or offered touch screen interface to millions of people who never had or would have a touch screen.

[@tomland9293]

Actually, Natural Gas fired power plants do not use steam, instead they use turbines directly, like a jet engine (turbofan) or as the engine(s) for a turboprop plane. This allows much quicker adjustment in the power output which cannot be efficiently done with steam. Because steam power output is not easily adjusted, this is why coal-fired, oil-fired, geothermal, and nuclear power plants are known as "base load" plants. In other words, their power output stays relatively constant throughout the day.

[@tempest411]

I've got myself convinced that the only reason why operating systems became more complicated than XP was so that advertisers could run more ads, and more annoying ads at that. For anything I've ever used a computer for, XP was plenty good enough. In fact I still have a laptop with it for automotive diagnostic use (BMW INPA/NCS Expert, etc..).

[@PRH123]

I'm not sure he's correct about XP, it was windows NT that was used by the military and banks... it was not DOS based like XP and was very secure....

[@bobjoe2827]

Windows XP was an NT based operating system. The last Microsoft operating system to be based on dos was Windows ME.@@PRH123

[@genstarmkg5321]

@@PRH123 Uh, XP is NT based (And the first one designed specifically for home consumers, previous NT systems such as NT4 and Win2000 where mostly made for enterprises and previous home consumer Windows OSes such as 95, 98 and Me were DOS based)

[@cgi2002]

​@@genstarmkg5321now now, we do not refer to ME as an OS, it was a virus with a GUI ontop.

[@ronheil6558]

I've done those navigation database updates on 737s using 3.5" disks, and not all that long ago. That airline replaced their old data loaders with ones that had a USB port, but they retained the 3.5" disk capability as well. It was really irritating having disk 3 of 4 turn out to be corrupted. Sad trombone sound....

[@jeposton]

I had to dig out my floppy collection to update a CRJ 200 just to find out 1 in 3 of my floppy's were still good. For some reason the cannon plug is different for the floppy data loader vs the usb data loader on that AC. Personally I feel they should all convert to some form of serial connection.

[@JonMartinYXD]

Yeah the reliability of floppies is WAAAAY overstated in the video.

[@billmullins6833]

@jeposton do you have any idea just how mind-bogglingly expensive, time consuming and labor intensive it is to get even a minor upgrade to an aircraft's avionics suite approved by the FAA? Remember how truly old many commercial aircraft are today.

[@jeposton]

@@billmullins6833 Yes. I do. An older aircraft, it does not make any economical sense to swap it over. However the data loader would probably be easier to modify to pretend to be a floppy drive when in reality it takes a magic USB drive. Of course that all has to be approved by the engineers and the FAA which is prohibitively expensive and they will only approve it per aircraft and not for every one just like it.

[@Term-0]

dont a lot of commercial airliners still use integrated analog computers?

[@RandomTorok]

Back in the early 80s my sister had to be hospitalized after a nasty auto accident. On one visit I went down to the cafeteria to have some lunch. There was about 200 people in the cafeteria and at one point a pager or beeper went off. And in unison, everyone in that room looked down at the thier belt line to check thier device.

[@cmw3737]

If you think Windows XP is outdated, try asking the COBOL programmers still working into what would be their retirements. Banking infrastructure that is seen as too risky to update is still stuck in the 80s.

[@CluelessRanchHand]

Can definitely attest to the pagers reliability. We had a tornado hit our town back in June. Cell phone service was wiped out but we could still page out emergency calls!!!

[@ZMacZ]

10:15 Older production lines can still have floppy drives as the input for their respective operating systems. I think even parts of launch codes is kept on floppies in the silos. They'd need to combine those with a written key and confirmation code from the pentagon as well. After that the software in teh missiles would become accessible for targetting and such, after which the launch keys can be operated. Without this, either the keys don't work or can't be turned on. And retro gaming, ofc.

[@johntreherne4611]

We still use pagers at work as there are issues with Wi-Fi and mobile phone signal and it allows for a dependable means of notification plus there are land lines situated everywhere on the site.

[@brunodherrera]

0:29 Fax Machine 3:38 Steam Machine 7:02 Windows XP 10:00 Floppy Disks 13:12 Pagers/Beepers

[@Novusod]

Where is the phonograph? Aka vinyl records. Not only are they not dying. The market for them is actually growing. The music industry is pushing vinyl records as the ultimate defense against music piracy and the gold standard in copyright protection.

[@ablemagawitch]

Thank you for that hero comment we all need and want, but few will bother to make

[@tracylarson1935]

And railroads to send train paperwork.

[@dianapennepacker6854]

​@@NovusodSo is making swords by hands. If we were adding hobbies then they come and go daily. I think this topic is more about what is absolutely still used, and incredibly important. Not much would happen if tomorrow all vinyls disappeared outside of history being lost. If these inventions did? Including windowsXP would be chaos. The steam engine? We would be back in the dark ages!

[@Novusod]

@@dianapennepacker6854 Obviously some inventions are worth more than others. However, If beepers and fax machines suddenly disappeared the world NOT descend into chaos. People would change their habits in a day or two and the world move on.

[@donwyoming1936]

We found out vibrations from jet engines often caused mechanical hard drives & optical drives to fail. But floppy disks and tapes (8mm) worked fine.

[@ronald3836]

You might have a use a for modern SSD :)

[@gamefanatics5113]

I think around 2005 I took all my old floppy discs and backed them up to a USB flash drive. At that point they were about 15-25 years old and only half of them were un-corrupted. I found out magnetic storage devices had a time limit before they became de-magnetized.

[@kitpong1777]

In my workplace, there is a programmable machine which loads in new or modified files using a Floppy Disk -not even a diskette. It was a state-of-the-art machine in the late 1980s. The machine is used on a what is now a side process, and still does it's job function reliably - management has never been able to justify replacing it with a newer machine.

[@TheLithp]

I was tutoring AP Environmental Science last year & found myself saying "all power generation is just the steam engine with extra steps" a lot.

[@Stryqwills]

Except wind power turns the dynamos directly and solar panels release electrons when struck by light. You are referring specifically to thermodynamic, hydroelectric, which uses a current, not steam, and nuclear.

[@agailparsons]

The nuclear power plant my husband worked at still uses pagers. Getting cell signal in much of the plant is nearly impossible and dependable communication is obviously critical.

[@SleepyKyju]

Can't wait for the collab between Simon and the technology connections guy

[@cannedmusic]

This video is making the mynah bird flying from my desk intercom box to the relay pole outside my office glare at me.

[@Craznar]

As a point of sale developer - I can tell you XP is deeply embedded in retail for years to come.

[@filanfyretracker]

our self checkout systems finally upgraded to Win7. but the normal registers are something else, IBM 4690. okay technically now its Toshiba as IBM sold off its point of sale systems. When I worked for a chain called Stop & Shop the registers were running OS/2 Warp.

[@housellama]

With the new chip-cards and the advent of tablets, that is changing fast. However, having worked for NCR in the past, there are some systems that will change only when the equipment itself falls apart. Considering how old cash registers are built like tanks, they should be fine for another decade or two.

[@epender]

​​@@housellama Chip cards were already industry standard for most of the world by the time Windows XP was replaced in 2007, I'm interested to know where you come from.

[@uliwehner]

@@epender yeah, coming from germany where smart cards were a thing in the 90s, it took a surprisingly long time for Point of Sales systems and ATMs to finally start reading chip cards here in the US....

[@johnbridger5629]

It's tempting to write off technology that works well just because it is out of fashion. I continue to use all my old technology simply because it does work and does what I need. Remember one of the oldest bits of technology is the wheel which still works just fine despite attempts to come up with 'modern' alternatives like maglevs.

[@kellywilson137]

A hammer is pretty good too. Perfect...really.

[@jed-henrywitkowski6470]

A big thank you to the caveman who came up with it!

[@lancestrahm2362]

It's kind of a good thing to understand and work with old technologies for if and when shit hits the fan

[@tomobedlam297]

Funny we still use the term "write off" given writing probably predates the invention of the wheel!

[@tomobedlam297]

Funny how we "turn” on or off appliances by pressing a button!

[@AssassinsFear]

Fun fact, i did an internship at a national lab and took a tour of their super computer. For any data thay was being kept for long term storage they actually were stored on these film drives. I believe each of the drives had 500gb-5tb of storage on them. The reason they used it was because it was data that was accessed so infrequently, the film was more reliable and chealee because it didnt take power to store. Since its an analog medium, the data persisted without the need to keep it powered. Heres the cool part, if you wanted to access the data there was a robotic arm designated the "operator" which grabs the drive and inserts it into the system to be accessed.

[@Tonybaloney6969]

To add onto the XP portion, most of the time, the version of Windows XP inside of certain machines, like the ones noted in this video, run on Windows XP embedded. If not running on Windows XP embedded, then it’ll be a regular version of Windows XP, but the facility will usually pay to have Windows XP updated through a support contract with Microsoft themselves. The places that do have contracts generally pay a pretty penny for these support contracts (the last I’ve heard was 6-7 figures) and is patched constantly, so its not as insecure as it sounds, although I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these systems are air-gapped

[@imyerf5382]

I had to buy a floppy disk drive for a university lab when I worked in IT purchasing, I tried to show them how much data a usb thumb drive could hold in comparison and got shot down because their specific laboratory equipment used floppy disks… blew my mind as a young IT guy in 2010

[@razzle1964]

I remember being a young wannabe IT guy in our central bank in the late 80s - I accompanied some bank bigwigs on a walkaround our new computer suite, with bomb-proof windows, a super air con system & even a halon fire management system to cater for the (then quite expensive) £4m fault tolerant hardware that was going to support the UKs gilts payment systems. I was told to keep my mouth shut but couldn’t help saying “it’s a shame they dumped it on a carpeted floor with fibres that the air-con is gonna circulate into the h/w & fuck it all up within a week”. It took about 10 grand & a whole weekend to move all the shit out, rip up the carpet & put it all back in place before we could go live. Never have I felt so smug.

[@agactual2]

I was going to say that I work in a clinic and sending documents by fax is by far the easiest way to do it. But then Simon addressed that point immediately after so I guess well done as usual, no notes

[@LickTheShaft]

Companies like RightFax are a thing. Sure, we still have 'fax lines' - but they're 100% digital now. Zero paper.

[@appleid3151]

Is email not much easier?

[@meandgpt]

Not only were you going to but you actually did

[@YourMomsFavoriteCommenter]

​@@appleid3151You can't email documents that need to be physically signed by someone. Also, fax is much more secure than email.

[@Sniperboy5551]

@appleid3151 Email requires digitizing the image file, downloading it to your computer, opening an email client, typing in the recipient and then uploading it. Fax is just punch in a number and scan. Email is easier for digital documents, but fax is superior for physical ones.

[@straftanz7512]

The fax machine's security relies on an point to point connection as in old school landline telephone networks. Problem is, that in more and more, in my area most places, the fax machines signal as all other calls will travel through internet protocol gateways. The security advantage therefore doesn't exist anymore. There is not way to tell if there was a man in the middle attack, it is even impossible to tell for a sender, if the remote fax machine is a virtual device that will send the message to an email account. The only reason why this device still enjoyed some popularity in Germany was that the above fact wasn't well understood by many users and offices. After a german court rule Fax is not a replacement for snail mail or digitally signed documents anymore and is now finally vanishing. - I feel this problem of modern phone networks often running on the internet, sending the emutlated analogue beep boops tones of virtual fax machines as audio in IP packages should have been a talking point here.

[@Gohka]

I still consider Windows XP to be the absolute pinnacle of operating systems. I was still using it up until about 2015/16 for my personal computer. Plus that PC still works fine, I only got a new PC and Windows 10 because a game I was playing at the time was no longer going to be able to run on XP. If it hadn't been for that I may still be using XP now.

[@joelb8653]

When I bought my curret house i was told i hsd to fax some documents in, no alternatives. I told them we didn't have fax machines where I was. They asked where I was and I said 2021.

[@TheBassMeister1]

I love how the reasons each of these technologies still exist can essentially be boiled down to "we haven't been able to come up with anything better." No one expects to skip to the top of the tech tree in the 1970s.

[@jordanwardle11]

Or not worth the cost

[@jacksimpson-rogers1069]

I disdain the term "Information Iechnology". I've been using the machines since the days when we accurately and modestly called the process "Electronic Data Processing". I have a device called a "Cell Phone" that has a camera capable of turning any scene into a flat image represented by electronic or magnetic data. But every living organism uses a _biochemical information technology_ to live and reproduce, and the weirdest part of it is that they ALL use the same arbitrary three-codon words for the set of amino acids that by sequence define proteins. Half of human DNA base code exactly matches what you'll find in saccharomyces, the fungus that we call "yeast".

[@kindlin]

@@jacksimpson-rogers1069 I think you're getting caught up on the word _technology._ Sure, biology does many things better than any computer system has so far, but the computer can store and transmit massive amounts of _information_ very fast and reliably, starting a whole new era of knowledge and understanding (*cough*) for the human race.

[@circleinforthecube5170]

@@jacksimpson-rogers1069 people do shit weirdly because its easy, you may know all that but a lot of people (a scarily large amount) will look at your comment and go "a eletrobiosaccho-what now?", also the acronym EDP has kinda been ruined by a creepy youtuber and IT is well established now.

[@mangotail6808]

Items from the past where indeed more reliable. Modern technology relies heavily on the internet and are built to last 5 years, more of youre lucky.

[@JacobP81]

Another advantage of floppy disks is if you want to encode a boot program, it is very easy and convenient to do on a floppy. So if you want to create a simple bootable program floppy disk is the easiest way to do it. One example was I made a simple boot program to display the information of the Interupt Vector Table before it was modified by the OS.

[@frequentlycynical642]

Add one more "Gone but not forgotten." WordPerfect. I started using the famous 5.1with DOS 5 when Word wasn't even a glimmer in Bill Gates' eyes. I still use it. In fact taking delivery today of an updated....although not latest....version. I've spent time with Libre Office and Word and always came back to the simplicity of WP. WP was the favorite word processor in the legal profession for many years, and Corel still makes a version for law offices and state legislatures. Not updated since 2021, so not sure if it has hit EOL. No worries about opening wpd files for a long time, Libre Office will, although it will only save in other formats. WP has had the ability to save in many dozens of formats, mostly archaic and long gone. Plus PDF conversion built in for many years when Word users had to own Adobe Acrobat.

[@timjameson1095]

Great video. So many of those examples come down to 'It still works'. I have personally seen not only Windows XP, but also MSDOS 6 in use - in appliance controls, and medical devices.

[@petermainwaringsx]

I loved my pager which I used up until about 2005. I still use 3.5" floppy's in some old IBM compatible 286 machines which run 1990's programming software for Motorola radio comms equipment which are still in spec.

[@CraigRodmellMusic]

I still have a landline. I've heard prophesies that these were obsolete for the last 30 years or so. But I still have and use one. I also have a laptop that runs XP. I use that primarily as a backup MIDI sequencer, and also to run software for my synthesizers that would no longer work after Windows 7. It's not a question of using more modern software - as far as I know, it doesn't exist. So I keep an old XP laptop so I can run such software as and when I need to. And before anyone says, no, I don't use that machine on the Internet, it's strictly offline.

[@vulcanfeline]

wow! i finally meet another person with a landline. btw, i ONLY have a landline

[@RHaenJarr]

A friend recently told me some hospitals still use pneumatic tubes to send small items like samples around the building

[@0raj0]

That reminds me - don't know why - of so called paternoster lifts (look them up in Wikipedia). There are a few places in the world where these are still used.

[@Selisu1]

Another point about XP. It sort of shows the stagnation of software. For years now, we keep getting the same thing, but dressed up differently. There have been a few technological leaps, such as cloud technology or better networking, but those don't change the basic needs of computing. Whether you run Word locally or in the cloud doesn't really matter. Whether you access a file on your computer or over the network doesn't really matter. Even AI is mostly just dressed up Excel functions. Are the upgrades since Windows XP just ... well, window dressing?

[@andriaduncan5032]

In some regards, yes. But Windows now, and for the last couple versions, supports 64-bit computing, which makes those machines FAST AS HELL. A 32-bit processor really can't compete with that -- it's kinda like the diff between 2.4 and 5 gigahertz for wi-fi.

[@jonnunn4196]

Local vs the cloud can matter; if you forget to renew your license you could lose access to your cloud data. But you'll still have access to what is on the local computer.

[@ronald3836]

@@andriaduncan5032 Don't forget SSDs. Mechanichal HDDs were the one component of computers that just could not be made to go much faster (and effectively became slower because of larger programs and larger data). SSDs solved this problem.

[@tylerboone6584]

What you call "cloud technology" we old timers call "client/server". And it's been around for decades. There's nothing new about using an off site computer to do your work.

[@jimmygranqvist7684]

I remember the swearing tirade I had after realizing the xp service pack3 only purpuse was to make xp as bad as vista or hopefully worse so that people would switch. They still had to remove the choice for that to happen.

[@AlbertSiegel]

I'm living in Japan. I have a FAX machine at home that I bought new at my local electronics store several years ago. They still sell them in 2023. I also have a functional internal floppy drive in my desktop that I built two years ago. That was more of 'because I could' sort of thing, but there are places where I can make use of a floppy disk even though they are neither cheap nor easy to find other than Amazon.

[@billd2635]

When a very rotund woman's pager went off in the grocery store isle, a little girl said to her father "Look out Daddy, she's backing up!

[@nichendrix]

Anyone stating that floppy discs are durable and reliable, never actually used them, or at least not enough to know how prone to failure they are. The floppy disc's drive, often damaged/scratched its surface oonger read/write operations, currupting their data and making them useless junk. Also, any other electronic device that priduces an noticeable electromagnetic field, like a cell phone, could, sometimes corrupt its data, also since they stored data by magnetizing a disk of ferromagnetic, like old K7 tapes, with time they spontaneously demagnetize, usually it starts with some small bits of the material, either degrading the data, eventually it bough for corrupting parts of it, until they finally reach a point that it essentially automatically and spontaneously erases itself.

[@darrennew8211]

Fun fact: Health care places usually don't use fax machines. They send fax files through the internet just like everyone else, completely eliminating the benefits of faxes. The point of sticking to fax was it's as secure as a phone call. But what happens instead is one side will email an image to an email-to-fax gateway, which will then fax it to another fax-to-email gateway, who will then email it to the receiver.

[@NinjaRunningWild]

Still probably better than sending PDFs.

[@glencurtis6052]

The NHS still use them

[@Elliandr]

Do these email to fax then fax to email systems at least produce proof that a real fax took place? Although even if it does it's much easier to do shady things with email to fax like taking a screenshot of someone's signature, moving it around on the page, and then faxing a document as if it was properly signed so the old idea of legitimacy is already lost there.

[@RavingKats]

Still used for prescriptions regularly in Ontario Canada

[@darrennew8211]

@@Elliandr The fax machines don't really provide proof of delivery. The fax machine on the local side prints out "Yep, I sent it." Not really similar to proof by USPS, for example. I used to program credit card terminals. I once lost a receipt for some small thing on a business trip, and the secretary wouldn't approve the reimbursement until I reminded her that my job was programming the credit card machines to print whatever receipts we wanted.