Living Fossils: Old Tech That Just Won't Die

jfruh writes "You might think that flat files, VAXen, and punch card readers are things of the past — and you're right, for the most part. But here and there, these fossilized technologies have found places where they can survive in production use."

Comments

Technology

[girlintraining]

I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better. We may mostly be on high speed internet connections running through cable, or xDSL, wireless, or other technologies, but that doesn't mean the forerunner to those technologies are without purpose anymore. Modems are still used in ATMs because landlines are incredibly cheap to install and not a lot of data needs to be exchanged. Same thing with fax machines; Despite scanners and e-mail, many courthouses won't accept scanned documents -- but they will accept faxed documents. Amusingly, most of those fax machines are paired to document management systems that convert them back into digital files (ie, PDFs) for processing. The reason for this is not immediately obvious: Many jurisdictions have laws stating a faxed copy of a document is legally the same as the original, but lack similar laws saying a digitally signed or submitted document is valid.

The list goes on. So don't just assume a technology should be sunset because of technical reasons -- there are often human factors to consider as well.

Re:Technology

[TWX]

I used to work on an Alphanumeric paging system. We used 2400 baud because the time necessary to negotiate a higher-speed connection was far longer than the time to negotiate and then transmit ~240 characters at 2400 baud.

Fast forward to 2001 or so, and the general decline of paging. We were attempting to migrate from physical serial port expanders connected to physical modems, connected to a breakout cable from a T1 CSU/DSU, and we tried Equinox digital modem emulators- that integrated a single connection to a T1 CSU/DSU without all of the physical. The problem was the the Equinox gear wouldn't reliably negotiate that slow, and often would lock up the virtual serial port, rendering it useless until the card was reinitialized through a cold reboot. Equinox was more interested in giving us our money back than they were in fixing their hardware, but we did finally manage to convince them, after much effort, to put work into fixing it.

Re:Technology

[NotBorg]

I'll take stainless steel and cast iron over teflon any day for my cooking needs. I mow my lawn without gas or electricity. I think that puppets in '80s movies feel more real than the most advanced computer animated crap of today. I'll be damned if I purchase music that isn't on a CD. DVDs are just fine for movies (I migrated from tape for good reason but blue ray simply isn't worth the hoopla). I still don't give a flying fuck about 3D... in fact I prefer movies that are not be in 3D. I look for yard sales in senior communities because I know that that those 50-year-old cooking utensils are still going to out last that stuff at Walmart.

Yada yada get off my lawn, but I'll be damned if I'll run anything less than the most recent kernel and gcc.