They are fairly insecure in practice, since they are throwing the data at misdialed numbers and they are frequently placed in shared and insecure locations in the building where lots of people can access whatever comes through.
Sure. But as someone who used to work IT with a focus on cybersecurity, physical access to anything trumps everything else, and people who put fax machines in insecure locations will also put email servers or whatever in them. Also throwing data at misdialed numbers is a tiny threat because the odds of transposing a number or whatever and also getting a fax machine are pretty tiny.
Although the guy above you was just talking about how he works in the industry and they mostly do efax now, which.. Iono how that's supposed to be more secure than just email or whatever. I guess if you're sending to physical machines it's more secure on that end, but if the senders are using efax some of the receivers prolly are too, at which point we've lost the whole point of using fax machines.
As someone who directly manages faxing in the company i work for, yup! In Healthcare and we send out results to doctors and hospitals through faxing all day every day. We have mostly converted to electronic fax. We still control the servers on prem but the account is linked to a cloud solution so all the faxes are created with the servers and instead of using our own telephony solution like we used to, we send directly over internet to the provider who then sends out to the clients at the last leg. Hundreds of thousands of pages every month. From my understanding, it's still the easiest solution to get away with not having to implement some new system that will be subjected to audits. Faxes are accepted, and little is required to show for compliance.
Interesting, how is eFax any more secure than email? The advantage of fax is it's one machine to one machine, no possibility of interception without physically tapping the POTS line.
It's not. Information is secure at rest and encrypted during transfer, but once it reaches the part where it is sent over voip using a telecom provider, it has the same issues as it always did. We use it because its the best way to send this many faxes, as well as automate things using our internal applications to send faxes through it as well as other applications that we leverage its API to use the service. One advantage that makes it semi more secure is if we send a fax to another client that also uses the same service as we are then then it's actually a secure stream for the entire path.
I used to work at a retail store not even ten years ago, and we would submit delivery orders via fax. It's weird until you realize they're great for reliability and record-keeping. No batteries needed, totally existing infrastructure, kinda fun to use tbh.
I'm almost at the point where all of my connections are IPv6, but still hampered by my mobile provider (ironically, since IPv6 was generally adopted earlier on mobile in many countries).
The vast majority of our power comes from making something really hot and boiling water. Coal plant? Oil plant? Gas plant? Nuclear fission plant? Geothermal plant? The grand holy grail of energy production that would be a nuclear fusion plant? All steam engines.
Yes, unbeknownst to everyone, this is what a steampunk society realistically looks like.
Oh that's tremendous, I don't run windows to see this.
But come to think of it I have come across some ancient screens doing odbc/data connections ancient popups in excel at work!
It surprises me how many system utilities I use that are older than I am. I am currently initializing a disk on a cloud server with an application that was written when Ford was the US president.
Snot Flickerman was right, it's dd. It was in the docs I linked to show the commands. It runs on anything with storage devices and an operating system. I mainly use it on Windows servers running on AWS.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned jack plugs yet. Basically unchanged since 1877 when it was invented for phone switchboards, roughly as old as safety pins or modern hairpins (give or take a few decades)
The 1902 International Library of Technology simply uses jack for the female and plug for the male connector.[3] The 1989 Sound Reinforcement Handbook uses phone jack for the female and phone plug for the male connector.[4] Robert McLeish, who worked at the BBC, uses jack or jack socket for the female and jack plug for the male connector in his 2005 book Radio Production.[5] The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, as of 2007, says the more fixed electrical connector is the jack, while the less fixed connector is the plug, without regard to the gender of the connector contacts.[6] The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1975 also made a standard that was withdrawn in 1997.[7]
The intended application for a phone connector has also resulted in names such as audio jack, headphone jack, stereo plug, microphone jack, aux input, etc. Among audio engineers, the connector may often simply be called a quarter-inch to distinguish it from XLR, another frequently used audio connector. These naming variations are also used for the 3.5 mm connectors, which have been called mini-phone, mini-stereo, mini jack, etc.
RCA connectors are differently shaped, but confusingly are similarly named as phono plugs and phono jacks (or in the UK, phono sockets). 3.5 mm connectors are sometimes—counter to the connector manufacturers' nomenclature[8]—referred to as mini phonos.[9]
Confusion also arises because phone jack and phone plug may sometimes refer to the RJ11 and various older telephone sockets and plugs that connect wired telephones to wall outlets.
Car thermostats for the radiator. You don't want the coolant flowing when the engine first starts, because it will run like shit. So you have a cylinder filled with wax that expands with heat. That controls a valve to set the flow of coolant. Low tech, works fine, no particular reason to change it.
There's a used bookstore near me that has the oldest cash register I've ever seen. It has keys like a typewriter, and makes the most satisfying "ka-ching" sound when it opens. They always use it to add up your purchase and print a receipt, even when you're paying with a credit card. But I always try to bring cash when I'm there so that the drawer gets used. (And also, y'know, screw credit card companies taking their cut.)
I know that's not really "in widespread use" today, which is probably what the question meant, but that was the first thing that came to mind for me.
Wow. Many years ago I bought an old cash register to use as a prop in a play, sounds like the type you're talking about, and it was already way outdated then. Thing was amazingly heavy, like a refrigerator.
It's considered a secure method of document transfer over email, despite email being able to be secured and fax can be hacked with like a length of wire and a knife. Fucking irks me.
Fax operates as data over phone line, similar to dialup. If you can get a wiretap on a phone line, you essentially can get everything that passes over it. Technically you could encrypt it, but it's usually not required you do legally.
Because how many attackers are actually interested in attacking fax? Like... have you ever heard of hackers hacking physical mail? It's to old for people to care, and "people not caring" is implicitely secure by ignorance.
Yeah for sure, but security through obscurity only works until it's actually important or exploitable for monetary gain. I wouldn't even mind that, but e-mail can do so much better and it's treated like a giant security risk.
Because it doesn't have encryption by default, and encryption is not a setting in many public providers + if security works, then only within a single provider, not between them.
I mean, if all the good secret information is going over fax and everyone knows it, sure, people will hack it. Blackhats are in it for the money, not to work with the newest technology. Most of what they do is already mind-numbing grinding.
The main security there is just the security of whatever phone line it's going over. And that's assuming you never dial a wrong number...
Also there is fax spam. I get all these random advertisements faxed to me for companies for window replacement services that don't actually exist, and sometimes fortune tellers. I have no idea why.
Not all of them, most of ATC in EASA airspace is Linux based and use electronic strips instead of the plastic paper strips.
But the foundation of the ground/ground communication is still AFTN based on x400 network (Europe used to have an X.25 network for its CIDIN communications).
The latest and newest tech for international data exchange is AMHS based on X400, often it is x400 over IP ok, but still a 50 years or so tech.
The main idea behind ATC and aviation tech is reliability and compatibility with countries with less money to upgrade tech.
That's not even a government thing. It's a finance/banking thing, as most major banks are still using mainframes and legacy COBOL code for most of their business logic.
True, we stack old technologies on top of older technologies, and somewhere at the bottom, there is z/OS with COBOL running. A young person right now learning COBOL has a secure future with big paychecks.
Depends on your tolerance for code spelunking. Back in the 90s I was encouraged to do Y2K prep because I had some COBOL experience, but I really hated pawing through old code. To be fair, COBOL was designed to be self documenting and English-like. But I'm glad I got into web dev instead back then. It was right at the dawn of "dynamic HTML" when web pages started actually doing things. Very cool time. Right now I'd be more inclined to go into helping companies recover from failed AI projects.
Reminds me I have to catalogue 2 Tandem Non-stop! Systems at work… I don’t need to meddle with the cobol code atop but still, this was quite a surprise to stumble upon.
You said turbines specifically. Parsons invented those around the turn of the 20th century.
Before that, it was the chugga-chugga kind of steam engine. They're a lot simpler to design and machine, and don't require the really high RPMs to operate, but then again can break in many different ways a turbine can't.
Hospitals use pagers because the frequency band they run on is better at penetrating walls. Shorter waves carry more data, but are easily blocked by walls. Pagers don’t need a lot of data, so they use really long waves.
And hospitals are built like bunkers, to avoid the potential need to evacuate patients during an emergency. Things like fire breaks between individual rooms, earthquake protections, being strong enough to stand up during a hurricane, etc… The goal is to be able to shelter in place instead of evacuating, because a mass evacuation of bedridden patients who all need monitoring equipment would be a logistical nightmare.
But this also means hospitals are really good at blocking wireless signals, because the walls are all super thick and sturdy. So they use pagers, which use long waves and can reliably penetrate the bunker-like walls. You don’t want a doctor to miss an emergency call because they were sitting in the basement; Hospitals need a wireless connection that reliably works every time. And pagers just happen to fit that specific niche.
A decade ago, I thought phone numbers would soon die out. Instead, the most popular messaging apps use them as identifiers and adoption of those in North America is poor.
For the uninitiated, Ikarus was a Hungarian bus factory that produced buses to the Eastern block, some of those are probably still running somewhere in Mongolia. The Ikarus 256 was produced between 1974-2002, so in the best case that thing was at least 23 years old.
But even better, someone got to travel on an Ikarus 55 on the same day (1954-1974), which used to be great in their time, but definitely weren't made for 36C summers, the lack of air conditioning combined with the sunshine roof that used to increase the feel of comfort in 1958 created a living hell for the passengers packed into that rolling museum with barely openable windows.
Ah, so it’s the Hungarian version of the USPS Grumman LLV (Long Life Vehicle).
The United States Postal Service needed a vendor to produce mail trucks. They ended up signing a contract with an aerospace manufacturer named Grumman. The manufacturer retooled one of their plane factories, and started producing what they called the LLV. The company sold each truck extremely cheaply, but had an exclusive maintenance agreement to service the vehicles. Their goal was to make a profit on the service instead.
But Grumman made the vehicles too well. The LLVs were basically a thin airplane aluminum skin bolted to a pre-fabbed General Motors wheel frame, and the engines were rock solid. They skipped basically all of the modern design conveniences like AC/heating or a radio. It was basically a glorified go kart with a windshield that could do ~55MPH. It basically bankrupted Grumman, because the LLVs never needed maintenance. They spent a ton of money to retool their factory and sold a ton of LLVs basically at materials cost, then never recouped their expenses. The LLVs were produced all the way back in the 80’s and early 90’s, and the USPS is still actively trying to phase them out in favor of newer EVs. Grumman folded in the mid 90’s, after a decade of continuous losses from the LLVs.
Basically any American old enough to vote will know what a Grumman LLV looks like, even if they don’t know what it’s called:
I spend a fair bit of time on construction sites, and cameras have one huge issue compared to mirrors: They're one-way.
With a mirror, I can see the driver in the mirror. I can make eyecontact and confirm that they've seen me. With a camera, I have no idea if they've seen me. Maybe they can see more, but if they happen not to be looking, I have no way to tell.
And our stupid road regulations don't allow for both.
Kia/Hyundai uses cameras and screens instead of mirrors in South Korea but that technology is illegal here in the US so we get mirrors. Its not too different than adaptive headlights which can adjust themselves to not blind other drivers. Legal in Europe but illegal in the US.
I think those are legal where I'm at, but if you have both mirrors and cameras it should be allowed by default. Also in the case of Honda e, I wonder how much power the screens and "mirrors" are eating, in a tiny car like that it might be noticeable.
Most cameras are around 5W when in use, and it looks like the Honda e has a 35.5 kWh battery, and real world testing of the Honda e comes to around 167 Wh/km or 270 Wh/mile, so if you assume 3 cameras (2 side, 1 rearview) to replace mirrors, every hour of uninterrupted driving will have the cameras reducing your range by around 90 meters?
Thank you. I was mostly worried about running 5 screens at all times. Every mirror replacement system I've seen in pictures uses really bright screens and the E has 3 infotainment screens on top of that.
So if we count them as 5W each (12.3 main displays are probably hungrier, but camera displays are way smaller, and they're almost certainly IPS), that's ~25W, so 150 meters by your calculation? Doesn't sound that bad tbh. And on top of that the 12.3" ones can be turned off.
Really depends on the place. Most chain stores, restaurants, etc, will have tap to pay. It's mostly local businesses using old hardware from budget credit card merchants that really require you to sign anymore. Sometimes there's the odd tap and still have to sign, but it's usually done on the electronic pad.
A lot of production industry still runs on PLC from the 90s or older and uses DOS supervision systems. They would continue using it but are usually forced to upgrade once they run out of spare parts and / or staff that can maintain it.
The sewing machine.
Like we got 3d printers than can give me whatever I want in 20 hrs but I still got to fight with a sewing machine to stitch an outfit. Like why no polyester clothes printer?
We have knitting machines, and automated looms (weaving machines,) we even have sergers for fancy sewing. Its just plain easier to make the finished product as a custom job since humans aren't uniform in size, and it's way easier to weave a rectangular piece of cloth than any other shape.
If you buy a brand new Skyhawk here in the space year 2025, it will come with a newly made Lycoming IO-360 that requires 100LL. I think they're still working on eliminating leaded avgas, I think because the Trump regime hasn't noticed it yet.
Fax machines will never die no matter how they are mocked. It simply is the easiest way to send documents with private information and it's fast. At least we have e-faxing now to receive documents.
Burning things for heat is never going away as long as humans are around, there's always going to be someone "off-grid" which means you're more than likely gonna be burning something for cooking and warmth (ie heat)
I love induction hobs, electric cars & planes, xenon spacecraft and all that, but even if we get to interstellar travel, there's going to be a frontier where people are going to be using the lowest maintenance, easiest way to generate immediate heat, even if it's from solar/fusion powered hydrogen or ethanol generators. It's just a lot easier to store and release small but much larger than instantaneous generation amounts of energy as flammable substances than in batteries or pumped storage or whatever else.
If we don't get to interstellar travel, I expect we'll still have the same in remote regions on earth/our solar system.
Very good point, but oxygen is very abundant and you'll more than likely already have oxygen generators with a level of redundancy, or be in an atmosphere with oxygen.
Also for load balancing you could constantly be splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then react them back into water when you need a large amount of energy at once as an alternative to electrical batteries which degrades less over time, if heat is all you want at least.
All I'm saying is there's so many applications that we're never going to get to a level of 0.
If your water splitters are running, you should really just use the electricity they're on to generate heat. Fire is especially dangerous in enclosed spaces.
Also for load balancing you could constantly be splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then react them back into water when you need a large amount of energy at once as an alternative to electrical batteries which degrades less over time, if heat is all you want at least.
Some kind of combustion with oxidiser built in might always have an application. Chemical rocket boosters maybe? (Hydrogen specifically can also be turned back into electricity with like 80% efficiency in a fuel cell, FYI, although it's sooo hard to store)
I suppose there might be The Martian-esque edge cases as well, where more complex, controlled chemical reactions are temporarily impractical, but like in the book and movie that's highly unsustainable and you'll die if you're stuck doing it for long.
Hahahaha! Marriage, social tribalism, and war are left, then. There are many reasons they are other things that are different from technology. But, can you give me an argument why they are specifically not technology? Or would you rather me try to give my reasoning why they are technology, first?
So I see technology as something that is developed to be explicitly used to solve a problem or impart change, that is identifiable as its own thing, and so can be used but then also may be eventually made obsolete. Right? Like clay usage or refrigeration. It's all just a means to an end.
So an animal comes along, and doesn't have scrape-two-rocks-together to make fire, and then later does, that would be a technology.
Another way to think of it, which is... Admittedly, kind of embarrassing, but I do think makes sense, is if you could "develop it" or even theoretically see it being developed in a strategy game like Age of Empires or Civilization or something.
So, humans have not always had, and eventually developed marriage (I'm not talking about love, as that is a VERY different thing and not my words or choice of topic, for now, as that's even more of a stretch, and I'm not surprised that we still use it) in its current form at some point. Somebody in history thought it would be a good idea, and it got popular and caught on (another indication that it could be technology).
Similarly, tribalism and war also evolved in similar ways.
Tribalism did not exist, somebody thought it was a good idea, it got popular, and now we have moved on, with some vestigial brain habits, because current society does not really need it to survive, but because how society is now is only like 200 years old (and because almost all humans still practice some form of it, including those excluded), evolution hasn't yet removed our expectations of it. It is a biological need, like somebody else said, but I'm arguing that it, itself, is a developed technology as a means to an end that we will/may evolve past our already decreased need for - we just had this very social behavior for such a long time that it became ingrained into our biological expectations and reliances. I'm not a sociopath or psychopath, but some say that those could be attempts at evolving past tribalism or social behavior reliance. In some ways, if they are, they are VERY successful, as they absolutely do not rely on tribalism, but rather massively exploit it, to their own enormous success (business executives like CEOs have a high prevalence of sociopathy).
War, too, did not exist for a very long time. Especially formalized war. It still exists absolutely, and may soon come to be used again. But, regiments of soldiers standing in rows on a battlefield, waiting to try to kill each other is the tool of nations to exert power. Small, informal war is the tool of smaller communities, and so on and so forth... But, war of any kind still needs to be defined abstractly, too. So maybe we could call it: committed violent conflict towards an other entity. Right? Because one has to either outwardly or inwardly "declare war" on something or someone - a country on a different country, a people against another people, a people on a country, a country on a people, or, metaphorically, a toddler on a parent, a company on another company, a neighbor on another neighbor, or the HOA against a resident, whatever. In the literal examples though, they are all committed declarations of violence against an other something. War then, may have evolved from the emergence of peace, I don't know. But war as a thing can not have always existed (enter intrusive thought of the animal kingdom being hell and constant war and thousand-eyed staring crabs and epic music) and at some point evolved into the tool we have known for thousands of years.
John Lennon imagined a world without war, as if to ironically imply it was a dark constant of living... But he still imagined it - he still imagined a world where we have evolved past the need for it - past the need for that technology to solve problems.
The important distinction here I think may be less about which of these specific things are or aren't technology, but seeing humanity's accomplishments, as dark as they are, as the technologies that we have developed, and therefore will eventually supersede the need for. Fire, marriage, cookies/candy, tribalism, war, pagers, fax machines, paint, or cars. I'm personally invested in the need to get past marriage, as where I live, it's only limited to abrahamic religions' formats, mainly Christianity, and therefore only one other person, and if the more core of them had their way, between only a cishet man and a cishet woman, for the sole purposes of rearing offspring and spreading the religions (technology) and cultures (also technology and subset technologies) more.
I was really just going to argue the dictionary definition:
the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.
machinery and equipment developed from the application of scientific knowledge.
the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences.
And i don't think the remaing 3 really fall under that definition. They are terms that describe a general concept, not a specific application of knowledge.
Also I have to disagree on this one:
Tribalism did not exist, somebody thought it was a good idea, it got popular
Tribalism existed (and still does) in nature long before we invented anything. All kinds of animals of the same species form groups and compete over territory which each other ... which also is like a kind of primitive version of war, as well. And I feel marriage also falls into that kind of area, where at least with the larger mammals there is a need to care for immature offspring, which makes it an evolutionary advantage for parents to stay together.
But yeah, I think in the end it's just about the semantics of the word technology.
Is evolution not technology? Plus, a lot of this stuff is used as tools, as a means to an end, rather than just purely emotional reptilian response. A lot of it IS reptilian, but a lot of it is also vestigial, as a conscious tool, especially when used by a society, rather than a single biological person.
It's complicated, for sure. But so are the rest of the usages of old technology.
Back to the topic of biology vs technology, though, violence strictly speaking, is an abstract concept of events. We evolved it as a categorization or idea through the technology of language and conceptualization. The instinct in certain parts of our brains is biology, absolutely (and arguably also technology). But violence as a tool, as a means, I argue, is absolutely technology, in the same way that fire, or hunting, or fast food is technology.
If it is something developed, used, and can be moved past, I'd argue that it can be seen as technology. It doesn't have to be electronic or even physical to be technology. Like farming methods, social structures, government, and even language.
I'm not saying they aren't biological, that's a different subject. But those things are absolutely technologies. Just very primitive ones.... That we still use.
fax machines, both in Germany and Japan.
They're common in the US too in doctors offices and hospitals because of the security requirements of transmitting patient records and such.
Legally defined as secure, not actually secure.
They are fairly insecure in practice, since they are throwing the data at misdialed numbers and they are frequently placed in shared and insecure locations in the building where lots of people can access whatever comes through.
Sure. But as someone who used to work IT with a focus on cybersecurity, physical access to anything trumps everything else, and people who put fax machines in insecure locations will also put email servers or whatever in them. Also throwing data at misdialed numbers is a tiny threat because the odds of transposing a number or whatever and also getting a fax machine are pretty tiny.
Although the guy above you was just talking about how he works in the industry and they mostly do efax now, which.. Iono how that's supposed to be more secure than just email or whatever. I guess if you're sending to physical machines it's more secure on that end, but if the senders are using efax some of the receivers prolly are too, at which point we've lost the whole point of using fax machines.
In the US they cannot be in "insecure locations" legally. And sending HIPAA materials to the wrong number is a reportable offense.
As someone who directly manages faxing in the company i work for, yup! In Healthcare and we send out results to doctors and hospitals through faxing all day every day. We have mostly converted to electronic fax. We still control the servers on prem but the account is linked to a cloud solution so all the faxes are created with the servers and instead of using our own telephony solution like we used to, we send directly over internet to the provider who then sends out to the clients at the last leg. Hundreds of thousands of pages every month. From my understanding, it's still the easiest solution to get away with not having to implement some new system that will be subjected to audits. Faxes are accepted, and little is required to show for compliance.
Interesting, how is eFax any more secure than email? The advantage of fax is it's one machine to one machine, no possibility of interception without physically tapping the POTS line.
It's not. Information is secure at rest and encrypted during transfer, but once it reaches the part where it is sent over voip using a telecom provider, it has the same issues as it always did. We use it because its the best way to send this many faxes, as well as automate things using our internal applications to send faxes through it as well as other applications that we leverage its API to use the service. One advantage that makes it semi more secure is if we send a fax to another client that also uses the same service as we are then then it's actually a secure stream for the entire path.
I used to work at a retail store not even ten years ago, and we would submit delivery orders via fax. It's weird until you realize they're great for reliability and record-keeping. No batteries needed, totally existing infrastructure, kinda fun to use tbh.
And it's WAY older than people think. The first patent for a fax like machine was granted in 1843.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
IPv4.
IPv6 became a recognized standard by 1998.
EDIT: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption
Nearly 30 years later, and less than half of the connections to Google are via IPv6.
Fucking NAT. Never should have been allowed to escape from the lab.
Lolol, you're not wrong. NAT made IPv6 a later problem
I ❤️ IPv4
There's no place like
::1I can't understand that gibberish, speak RFC 791 like a true patriot
I'm almost at the point where all of my connections are IPv6, but still hampered by my mobile provider (ironically, since IPv6 was generally adopted earlier on mobile in many countries).
Based on how ISPs seem to not get their CGNAT setups right, it's not going away any time soon.
As a South African, I have never even seen IPv6. My university has two /16 blocks and no NATing
IPv6 is such an ugly monster.
It just isn't and I'm sick of people being scared of hexadecimals lol
You can even spell stuff with them which is way easier to remember, my router's ULA is fd13:dead:beef::1
:cafe:babe: is another common one. Or :acdc:feed: .
There was a burger joint we did IT for and we made their ULA fd14:dead:beef:cafe::1
I thought it was a bit clever
Steam engines.
The vast majority of our power comes from making something really hot and boiling water. Coal plant? Oil plant? Gas plant? Nuclear fission plant? Geothermal plant? The grand holy grail of energy production that would be a nuclear fusion plant? All steam engines.
Yes, unbeknownst to everyone, this is what a steampunk society realistically looks like.
We made steampunk a reality by developing the technology to transfer steam power efficiently over long distances through metal wires.
Microsoft Windows
If some of the stories are to be believed, some of the code dates back to 3.1/dos too
Oh you can clearly see that this is true when you launch certain programs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/o1x183/the_famous_windows_31_dialogue_is_again_in/
Oh that's tremendous, I don't run windows to see this. But come to think of it I have come across some ancient screens doing odbc/data connections ancient popups in excel at work!
UNIX
It surprises me how many system utilities I use that are older than I am. I am currently initializing a disk on a cloud server with an application that was written when Ford was the US president.
Can you say which application it is? Does it run on a mainframe? Any idea what language was used to program it?
Sorry this is just quite interesting.
I'm gonna hazard a guess at
ddhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
Snot Flickerman was right, it's dd. It was in the docs I linked to show the commands. It runs on anything with storage devices and an operating system. I mainly use it on Windows servers running on AWS.
The Wheel. We should've graduated to antigravity by now, don't you think?
Back to the Future lied to me again!
In fact, it didn't.
Hoverboards actually do exist. And for bonus points, so do speeder bikes. You probably already know about real-life jetpacks.
I wish I could live another 100 years to see better optimized versions of them.
I found a new exotic propulsion device to hang all my hopes on, so maybe we can get it soon!
we dont posess the knowlegde of how to do that, that isnt done by magnetism. maybe if aliens come to earth than maybe.
Talking to a good friend 20 years ago, very smart guy, and he was thinking we already artificial gravity.
i remember mythbuster tried to experiment with it.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned jack plugs yet. Basically unchanged since 1877 when it was invented for phone switchboards, roughly as old as safety pins or modern hairpins (give or take a few decades)
That can't be the actual name of those, is it?
I've always kinda wondered, and generally call them TRS or something (I'm audio engineering background, American, millennial), so looked it up:
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio) under the "other terms" section:
Yeah, these days I just call them 3.5mm audio plug, or quarter inch audio plug.
If it ain't broke don't fix it.
Car thermostats for the radiator. You don't want the coolant flowing when the engine first starts, because it will run like shit. So you have a cylinder filled with wax that expands with heat. That controls a valve to set the flow of coolant. Low tech, works fine, no particular reason to change it.
I thought it was just a spring that expanded with heat and opened/closed with the expansion?
Every one I've seen or replaced was just that. No idea what the wax thing is about so I looked it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_thermostatic_element
OP's right!
Is that how the covers over the radiator are operated as well
There's a used bookstore near me that has the oldest cash register I've ever seen. It has keys like a typewriter, and makes the most satisfying "ka-ching" sound when it opens. They always use it to add up your purchase and print a receipt, even when you're paying with a credit card. But I always try to bring cash when I'm there so that the drawer gets used. (And also, y'know, screw credit card companies taking their cut.)
I know that's not really "in widespread use" today, which is probably what the question meant, but that was the first thing that came to mind for me.
Wow. Many years ago I bought an old cash register to use as a prop in a play, sounds like the type you're talking about, and it was already way outdated then. Thing was amazingly heavy, like a refrigerator.
Fax, still in official use in Germany.
It's considered a secure method of document transfer over email, despite email being able to be secured and fax can be hacked with like a length of wire and a knife. Fucking irks me.
How does one hack fax in that fashion?
Fax operates as data over phone line, similar to dialup. If you can get a wiretap on a phone line, you essentially can get everything that passes over it. Technically you could encrypt it, but it's usually not required you do legally.
Because how many attackers are actually interested in attacking fax? Like... have you ever heard of hackers hacking physical mail? It's to old for people to care, and "people not caring" is implicitely secure by ignorance.
Yeah for sure, but security through obscurity only works until it's actually important or exploitable for monetary gain. I wouldn't even mind that, but e-mail can do so much better and it's treated like a giant security risk.
Because it doesn't have encryption by default, and encryption is not a setting in many public providers + if security works, then only within a single provider, not between them.
I mean, if all the good secret information is going over fax and everyone knows it, sure, people will hack it. Blackhats are in it for the money, not to work with the newest technology. Most of what they do is already mind-numbing grinding.
The main security there is just the security of whatever phone line it's going over. And that's assuming you never dial a wrong number...
Also there is fax spam. I get all these random advertisements faxed to me for companies for window replacement services that don't actually exist, and sometimes fortune tellers. I have no idea why.
Very common in the US medical field as well
Fax is too simple to completely die.
It will never go away in health care and government departments in Canada.
Air traffic control still uses floppy disks, windows 95, and a plastic board of paper tag numbers to keep track of shit instead of a computer.
To be fair I have infinity more confidence in the system you just described than whatever tech bro disruptor was going to pitch
Not all of them, most of ATC in EASA airspace is Linux based and use electronic strips instead of the plastic paper strips.
But the foundation of the ground/ground communication is still AFTN based on x400 network (Europe used to have an X.25 network for its CIDIN communications).
The latest and newest tech for international data exchange is AMHS based on X400, often it is x400 over IP ok, but still a 50 years or so tech.
The main idea behind ATC and aviation tech is reliability and compatibility with countries with less money to upgrade tech.
The IRS still use COBOL.
That's not even a government thing. It's a finance/banking thing, as most major banks are still using mainframes and legacy COBOL code for most of their business logic.
So does pretty much the whole banking and credit industry. When you get money out of an ATM there's usually some COBOL code involved.
True, we stack old technologies on top of older technologies, and somewhere at the bottom, there is z/OS with COBOL running. A young person right now learning COBOL has a secure future with big paychecks.
Depends on your tolerance for code spelunking. Back in the 90s I was encouraged to do Y2K prep because I had some COBOL experience, but I really hated pawing through old code. To be fair, COBOL was designed to be self documenting and English-like. But I'm glad I got into web dev instead back then. It was right at the dawn of "dynamic HTML" when web pages started actually doing things. Very cool time. Right now I'd be more inclined to go into helping companies recover from failed AI projects.
Reminds me I have to catalogue 2 Tandem Non-stop! Systems at work… I don’t need to meddle with the cobol code atop but still, this was quite a surprise to stumble upon.
Steam turbines.
Like those damn nuclear reactors!
I mean, that's 20th century, or (IIRC) just before depending on the level of tech maturity you require. The 19th century ran on pistons.
Steam engines? Plenty of those ran the Industrial Revolution factories.
You said turbines specifically. Parsons invented those around the turn of the 20th century.
Before that, it was the chugga-chugga kind of steam engine. They're a lot simpler to design and machine, and don't require the really high RPMs to operate, but then again can break in many different ways a turbine can't.
SS7, part of the old ass 2g and 3g networks
Kinda surprised this doesn't have more upvotes considering it seems that it continues to be a massive security vulnerability.
Yep and a family member of mine was a victim of a SS7 attack yesterday
Average person, nothing special. Got a SMS OTP code for their Uber account and changed the information (email, phone #).
It surprises me how little stick-built houses have changed in the last 50 years or so, at least in the USA.
Floppy disk.
The military loves them.
Pagers
Hospitals use pagers because the frequency band they run on is better at penetrating walls. Shorter waves carry more data, but are easily blocked by walls. Pagers don’t need a lot of data, so they use really long waves.
And hospitals are built like bunkers, to avoid the potential need to evacuate patients during an emergency. Things like fire breaks between individual rooms, earthquake protections, being strong enough to stand up during a hurricane, etc… The goal is to be able to shelter in place instead of evacuating, because a mass evacuation of bedridden patients who all need monitoring equipment would be a logistical nightmare.
But this also means hospitals are really good at blocking wireless signals, because the walls are all super thick and sturdy. So they use pagers, which use long waves and can reliably penetrate the bunker-like walls. You don’t want a doctor to miss an emergency call because they were sitting in the basement; Hospitals need a wireless connection that reliably works every time. And pagers just happen to fit that specific niche.
Seems like a good level of digital freedom actually. Be connected, but only just enough.
Didn't think I'd ever see THAT again. Damn lol
Have you used one before? If so, how did it go? What are the pros and cons?
That's a good one. Why would companies give employees special purpose gizmos that just tell them to use the phone in their pocket to call the office.
Radio. I still listen to radio over the airwaves, and received by an antenna, as it has been done since 1920.
Bicycles are not much different since around 1900.
A decade ago, I thought phone numbers would soon die out. Instead, the most popular messaging apps use them as identifiers and adoption of those in North America is poor.
Phone numbers are the new ICQ number
Mindblown
Toilet paper
Bidet gang
rise upsit down!I'm on vacation right now and our AirBnB came with a bidet. I am so stoked about it because once I got used to it at home, I can't go back.
70% of humans dont use toilet paper, so it might be a new tech instead of an old one.
A lot of those don't use water toilets either
An Ikarus 256 was used as a train replacement bus in normal traffic in Hungary yesterday
For the uninitiated, Ikarus was a Hungarian bus factory that produced buses to the Eastern block, some of those are probably still running somewhere in Mongolia. The Ikarus 256 was produced between 1974-2002, so in the best case that thing was at least 23 years old.
But even better, someone got to travel on an Ikarus 55 on the same day (1954-1974), which used to be great in their time, but definitely weren't made for 36C summers, the lack of air conditioning combined with the sunshine roof that used to increase the feel of comfort in 1958 created a living hell for the passengers packed into that rolling museum with barely openable windows.
Ah, so it’s the Hungarian version of the USPS Grumman LLV (Long Life Vehicle).
The United States Postal Service needed a vendor to produce mail trucks. They ended up signing a contract with an aerospace manufacturer named Grumman. The manufacturer retooled one of their plane factories, and started producing what they called the LLV. The company sold each truck extremely cheaply, but had an exclusive maintenance agreement to service the vehicles. Their goal was to make a profit on the service instead.
But Grumman made the vehicles too well. The LLVs were basically a thin airplane aluminum skin bolted to a pre-fabbed General Motors wheel frame, and the engines were rock solid. They skipped basically all of the modern design conveniences like AC/heating or a radio. It was basically a glorified go kart with a windshield that could do ~55MPH. It basically bankrupted Grumman, because the LLVs never needed maintenance. They spent a ton of money to retool their factory and sold a ton of LLVs basically at materials cost, then never recouped their expenses. The LLVs were produced all the way back in the 80’s and early 90’s, and the USPS is still actively trying to phase them out in favor of newer EVs. Grumman folded in the mid 90’s, after a decade of continuous losses from the LLVs.
Basically any American old enough to vote will know what a Grumman LLV looks like, even if they don’t know what it’s called:
I love the payload capacity on these. Exact in the way you expect aircraft to be.
In Germany they'd charge extra for riding historic vehicles
Pagers.
Still in use by hospitals and emergency services
Shit works
I spend a fair bit of time on construction sites, and cameras have one huge issue compared to mirrors: They're one-way.
With a mirror, I can see the driver in the mirror. I can make eyecontact and confirm that they've seen me. With a camera, I have no idea if they've seen me. Maybe they can see more, but if they happen not to be looking, I have no way to tell.
And our stupid road regulations don't allow for both.
You better take a long look in the mirror before you make a controversial statement like that.
Also:
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
Obligatory Meatloaf
They should get rid of the windows too.
Oh they're trying, hiphi Z and avatr 12 from the rear:
Both rely on mirrors and cameras to replace the lack of rear glass
Gross
Kia/Hyundai uses cameras and screens instead of mirrors in South Korea but that technology is illegal here in the US so we get mirrors. Its not too different than adaptive headlights which can adjust themselves to not blind other drivers. Legal in Europe but illegal in the US.
I think those are legal where I'm at, but if you have both mirrors and cameras it should be allowed by default. Also in the case of Honda e, I wonder how much power the screens and "mirrors" are eating, in a tiny car like that it might be noticeable.
Most cameras are around 5W when in use, and it looks like the Honda e has a 35.5 kWh battery, and real world testing of the Honda e comes to around 167 Wh/km or 270 Wh/mile, so if you assume 3 cameras (2 side, 1 rearview) to replace mirrors, every hour of uninterrupted driving will have the cameras reducing your range by around 90 meters?
Thank you. I was mostly worried about running 5 screens at all times. Every mirror replacement system I've seen in pictures uses really bright screens and the E has 3 infotainment screens on top of that.
So if we count them as 5W each (12.3 main displays are probably hungrier, but camera displays are way smaller, and they're almost certainly IPS), that's ~25W, so 150 meters by your calculation? Doesn't sound that bad tbh. And on top of that the 12.3" ones can be turned off.
there's still new passenger airliners which use old fashioned control cables over fly by wire
How did it go again?
If it is Boeing, I ain't going!
Really depends on the place. Most chain stores, restaurants, etc, will have tap to pay. It's mostly local businesses using old hardware from budget credit card merchants that really require you to sign anymore. Sometimes there's the odd tap and still have to sign, but it's usually done on the electronic pad.
A lot of production industry still runs on PLC from the 90s or older and uses DOS supervision systems. They would continue using it but are usually forced to upgrade once they run out of spare parts and / or staff that can maintain it.
Yep, my most important tool at work is controlled by DOS software running in a 386. Plenty of Windows XP’s around too.
The sewing machine. Like we got 3d printers than can give me whatever I want in 20 hrs but I still got to fight with a sewing machine to stitch an outfit. Like why no polyester clothes printer?
For one, polyester fabric and clothes are just terrible
Two, technically you can 3d print a chainmail shirt, but it'd suck to wear normally
We have knitting machines, and automated looms (weaving machines,) we even have sergers for fancy sewing. Its just plain easier to make the finished product as a custom job since humans aren't uniform in size, and it's way easier to weave a rectangular piece of cloth than any other shape.
Pager and satellite phone. Mostly a niche usecase for health workers and remote location settlement respectively.
General Aviation is still using magnetos. The typical GA airplane is hilariously primitive.
NOOO I NEED LEADED FUEL CAUSE MY LYCOMING IS FROM THE 60s 😭😭
If you buy a brand new Skyhawk here in the space year 2025, it will come with a newly made Lycoming IO-360 that requires 100LL. I think they're still working on eliminating leaded avgas, I think because the Trump regime hasn't noticed it yet.
Yeah, it's so hilarious to want an engine that will continue to run after a complete electrical system failure at 10000ft.
Fuck 100LL though.
The Rotax engines use digital CDI ignition that is independent if the airframe electrical system, and from each other. I've never seen one fail.
Welcome to "That's not surprising at all!"
Fax machines will never die no matter how they are mocked. It simply is the easiest way to send documents with private information and it's fast. At least we have e-faxing now to receive documents.
Please don't tell me you buy that "they can't be hacked". It's pretty much on the same tier as email.
Not so much they can't be hacked, but that nobody seems to bother to.
Well, I don't really love that as a security philosophy. If it's somehow not going on now it will be soon.
I've never heard of it happening in my 20 years of faxing if that helps at all.
Trigonometry is still used to take measures all around the world.
Well, if that counts, addition also remains very popular.
Dildoes and pocket pussies
Burning things for heat or energy.
Marriage.
Candy.
Social tribes.
War.
Burning things for heat is never going away as long as humans are around, there's always going to be someone "off-grid" which means you're more than likely gonna be burning something for cooking and warmth (ie heat)
You don't think humans will ever, even theoretically, reach a point where there is no need to burn things for heat?
Nope.
I love induction hobs, electric cars & planes, xenon spacecraft and all that, but even if we get to interstellar travel, there's going to be a frontier where people are going to be using the lowest maintenance, easiest way to generate immediate heat, even if it's from solar/fusion powered hydrogen or ethanol generators. It's just a lot easier to store and release small but much larger than instantaneous generation amounts of energy as flammable substances than in batteries or pumped storage or whatever else.
If we don't get to interstellar travel, I expect we'll still have the same in remote regions on earth/our solar system.
Burning random stuff for heat requires cheap, abundant oxygen, though.
Very good point, but oxygen is very abundant and you'll more than likely already have oxygen generators with a level of redundancy, or be in an atmosphere with oxygen.
Also for load balancing you could constantly be splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then react them back into water when you need a large amount of energy at once as an alternative to electrical batteries which degrades less over time, if heat is all you want at least.
All I'm saying is there's so many applications that we're never going to get to a level of 0.
If your water splitters are running, you should really just use the electricity they're on to generate heat. Fire is especially dangerous in enclosed spaces.
Some kind of combustion with oxidiser built in might always have an application. Chemical rocket boosters maybe? (Hydrogen specifically can also be turned back into electricity with like 80% efficiency in a fuel cell, FYI, although it's sooo hard to store)
I suppose there might be The Martian-esque edge cases as well, where more complex, controlled chemical reactions are temporarily impractical, but like in the book and movie that's highly unsustainable and you'll die if you're stuck doing it for long.
Everybody itt:
I give you fire and even cookies. But the other 3 are definitely not technology.
Hahahaha! Marriage, social tribalism, and war are left, then. There are many reasons they are other things that are different from technology. But, can you give me an argument why they are specifically not technology? Or would you rather me try to give my reasoning why they are technology, first?
You go ahead, I'm currently grocery shopping.
Okay.
So I see technology as something that is developed to be explicitly used to solve a problem or impart change, that is identifiable as its own thing, and so can be used but then also may be eventually made obsolete. Right? Like clay usage or refrigeration. It's all just a means to an end.
So an animal comes along, and doesn't have scrape-two-rocks-together to make fire, and then later does, that would be a technology.
Another way to think of it, which is... Admittedly, kind of embarrassing, but I do think makes sense, is if you could "develop it" or even theoretically see it being developed in a strategy game like Age of Empires or Civilization or something.
So, humans have not always had, and eventually developed marriage (I'm not talking about love, as that is a VERY different thing and not my words or choice of topic, for now, as that's even more of a stretch, and I'm not surprised that we still use it) in its current form at some point. Somebody in history thought it would be a good idea, and it got popular and caught on (another indication that it could be technology).
Similarly, tribalism and war also evolved in similar ways.
Tribalism did not exist, somebody thought it was a good idea, it got popular, and now we have moved on, with some vestigial brain habits, because current society does not really need it to survive, but because how society is now is only like 200 years old (and because almost all humans still practice some form of it, including those excluded), evolution hasn't yet removed our expectations of it. It is a biological need, like somebody else said, but I'm arguing that it, itself, is a developed technology as a means to an end that we will/may evolve past our already decreased need for - we just had this very social behavior for such a long time that it became ingrained into our biological expectations and reliances. I'm not a sociopath or psychopath, but some say that those could be attempts at evolving past tribalism or social behavior reliance. In some ways, if they are, they are VERY successful, as they absolutely do not rely on tribalism, but rather massively exploit it, to their own enormous success (business executives like CEOs have a high prevalence of sociopathy).
War, too, did not exist for a very long time. Especially formalized war. It still exists absolutely, and may soon come to be used again. But, regiments of soldiers standing in rows on a battlefield, waiting to try to kill each other is the tool of nations to exert power. Small, informal war is the tool of smaller communities, and so on and so forth... But, war of any kind still needs to be defined abstractly, too. So maybe we could call it: committed violent conflict towards an other entity. Right? Because one has to either outwardly or inwardly "declare war" on something or someone - a country on a different country, a people against another people, a people on a country, a country on a people, or, metaphorically, a toddler on a parent, a company on another company, a neighbor on another neighbor, or the HOA against a resident, whatever. In the literal examples though, they are all committed declarations of violence against an other something. War then, may have evolved from the emergence of peace, I don't know. But war as a thing can not have always existed (enter intrusive thought of the animal kingdom being hell and constant war and thousand-eyed staring crabs and epic music) and at some point evolved into the tool we have known for thousands of years.
John Lennon imagined a world without war, as if to ironically imply it was a dark constant of living... But he still imagined it - he still imagined a world where we have evolved past the need for it - past the need for that technology to solve problems.
The important distinction here I think may be less about which of these specific things are or aren't technology, but seeing humanity's accomplishments, as dark as they are, as the technologies that we have developed, and therefore will eventually supersede the need for. Fire, marriage, cookies/candy, tribalism, war, pagers, fax machines, paint, or cars. I'm personally invested in the need to get past marriage, as where I live, it's only limited to abrahamic religions' formats, mainly Christianity, and therefore only one other person, and if the more core of them had their way, between only a cishet man and a cishet woman, for the sole purposes of rearing offspring and spreading the religions (technology) and cultures (also technology and subset technologies) more.
Damn, you really thought about that a lot.
I was really just going to argue the dictionary definition:
And i don't think the remaing 3 really fall under that definition. They are terms that describe a general concept, not a specific application of knowledge.
Also I have to disagree on this one:
Tribalism existed (and still does) in nature long before we invented anything. All kinds of animals of the same species form groups and compete over territory which each other ... which also is like a kind of primitive version of war, as well. And I feel marriage also falls into that kind of area, where at least with the larger mammals there is a need to care for immature offspring, which makes it an evolutionary advantage for parents to stay together.
But yeah, I think in the end it's just about the semantics of the word technology.
(Deleted, replied to wrong comment)
Is evolution not technology? Plus, a lot of this stuff is used as tools, as a means to an end, rather than just purely emotional reptilian response. A lot of it IS reptilian, but a lot of it is also vestigial, as a conscious tool, especially when used by a society, rather than a single biological person.
It's complicated, for sure. But so are the rest of the usages of old technology.
Back to the topic of biology vs technology, though, violence strictly speaking, is an abstract concept of events. We evolved it as a categorization or idea through the technology of language and conceptualization. The instinct in certain parts of our brains is biology, absolutely (and arguably also technology). But violence as a tool, as a means, I argue, is absolutely technology, in the same way that fire, or hunting, or fast food is technology.
If it is something developed, used, and can be moved past, I'd argue that it can be seen as technology. It doesn't have to be electronic or even physical to be technology. Like farming methods, social structures, government, and even language.
I'm not saying they aren't biological, that's a different subject. But those things are absolutely technologies. Just very primitive ones.... That we still use.