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Ask Slashdot: Old Technology Coexisting With New?
New submitter thereitis writes "Looking over my home computing setup, I see equipment ranging from 20 years old to several months old. What sorts of old and new equipment have you seen coexisting, and in what type of environment?" I regularly use keyboards from the mid 1980s, sometimes with stacked adapters to go from ATX to PS/2, and PS/2 to USB, and I'm sure that's not too unusual.
Today's telephone networks are a random mix of old and new technology. The modern phone backbone is fiberoptic digital, but when wired to your house, it's made to emulate good old Bell. You can plug in an 80 year old phone rotary phone, and when someone calls you, it'll ring, and you can answer it! You can have one of these ancient devices right next to your DSL modem on opposite ends of that filter the phone/internet company gives you. In some area, pulse dialing will still work! And touch-tone phones is also an old technology. When you call on your cellphone, the numbers you dial don't get sent as tones. But in a call, when you call up one of those annoying phone robots, your cell phone will send tones, emulating the old signaling technology of the 70's or 80's or whenever the tones were invented. Plus, add in VOIP and the IP phones I use at work, and it becomes apparent that the modern telephone network is a continuum of technological anachronisms.
Please let me know what bucking spring or cherry switch keyboard you can get for $8. If you mean mushy plastic dome garbage, that is why we keep old keyboards.