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.
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.
After first contact
A: These are our mini neutron star fusion reactors. The most advanced technology to have ever existed. We basically take a chunk of neutron star matter and divide it into two. We neutralize the negative effect and extreme gravity with our space-time bending gravity manipulation technology. We let the two mini neutro spheres accelerate and collide. This generates enough energy to power atleast 3 planets for 1000 cycles. Not onl–
H: Wait a minute. I have a question.
A: Please feel free to ask any questions.
H: How do you convert the raw energy generated into a usable form at that scale?
A: We use utlra high intensity lasers for energy transfer to plane–
H: No. That’s not what I’m asking. How do you convert the raw energy at reactor into a usable form?
A: …
H: …
A: We boil water wi–
H: Motherf-- enrages and loses sanity
Stolen from reddit.
We made steampunk a reality by developing the technology to transfer steam power efficiently over long distances through metal wires.
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.
Pager and satellite phone. Mostly a niche usecase for health workers and remote location settlement respectively.
Pagers.
Still in use by hospitals and emergency services
Shit works
Fax, still in official use in Germany.
It will never go away in health care and government departments in Canada.
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.
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.
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.
The IRS still use COBOL.
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.
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.
Dildoes and pocket pussies
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.
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.
And it’s WAY older than people think. The first patent for a fax like machine was granted in 1843.
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.
I ❤️ IPv4
There’s no place like 127.0.0.1
There’s no place like
::1
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
SS7, part of the old ass 2g and 3g networks
Burning things for heat or energy.
Marriage.
Candy.
Social tribes.
War.
What old technology
lists fire as technology
Everybody itt:
fire is not technology wahhh
I give you fire and even cookies. But the other 3 are definitely not technology.
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.
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.
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.
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)
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
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:
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.
Yeah, these days I just call them 3.5mm audio plug, or quarter inch audio plug.
Trigonometry is still used to take measures all around the world.
Well, if that counts, addition also remains very popular.
