Terribly Outdated Technology that we Still Use...

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

I grew up on and still farm using very old technology. My oldest tractor is a 1937 Oliver Hart Parr 70. My newest, a 1966 John Deere 4020. It's capable of operating modern equipment on it's horsepower range. I pick my corn with a corn picker, not a combine. They stopped making them in 1984. I store my corn in cribs to dry on the ear. If I need to shell some I run it through a sheller built in the 1940s. They stopped making them in 1975. It shells corn cleaner than a new combine does. Same with the combine I have, built in the 1950s. It make grain much cleaner than a new one. None of my equipment has any type of computer system on it. I don't have software problems. The most interesting thing I have is my square hay baler which uses a mechanical knotter which was introduced on grain and corn binders over 120 years ago and are almost identical to the knotter on a brand new baler.

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.