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.
Fax, still in official use in Germany.
Americans signing for credit card purchases.
But maybe that died in the past few years, it’s been a while since I’ve visited. You must have tap by now, but if not… awkward
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:
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the connector contacts.[6] The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1975 also made a standard that was withdrawn in 1997.[7]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.
Steam turbines.
Like those damn nuclear reactors!
It surprises me how little stick-built houses have changed in the last 50 years or so, at least in the USA.
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!
Microsoft Windows
UNIX
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!
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.
Meshtastic > Pagers
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?
Burning things for heat or energy.
Marriage.
Candy.
Social tribes.
War.
What old 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.
Love/hate, tribalism, and violence, are not technologies lol
It’s biology, it’s encoded in DNA, the results of evolution.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And it’s WAY older than people think. The first patent for a fax like machine was granted in 1843.
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.
Is that how the covers over the radiator are operated as well
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.
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
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 127.0.0.1
There’s no place like
::1
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).
