Ask Slashdot: What Old Technology Can't You Give Up?

An anonymous reader writes: It's the year 2014, and I still have a floppy drive installed on my computer. I don't know why; I don't own any floppy disks, and I haven't used one in probably a decade. But every time I put together a PC, it feels incomplete if I don't have one. I also have a Laserdisc player collecting dust at the bottom of my entertainment center, and I still use IRC to talk to a few friends. Software, hardware, or otherwise, what technology have you had a hard time letting go? (I don't want to put a hard limit on age, so you folks using flip-phones or playing on Dreamcasts or still inexplicably coding in Perl 4, feel free to contribute.)

Comments

Local storage

[jenningsthecat]

They'll pry that from my cold dead fingers.

I use POP3, so I can have local copies of all emails. I keep messages on the server too, so it's easy to sync up several machines - that way I can have them on both my notebook and my desktop. All my music is local, and I keep local copies of any videos, documents, etc. that I care about. Occasionally I even save Web pages as HTML so I can have access to the content even after it changes in or disappears from the wild.

As far as I'm concerned The Cloud is a sometimes-convenient augmentation to local storage, not a replacement for it.

Re:Simple

[peragrin]

I never did like vi. to damn complicated to remember all the shortcuts. Pico worked well when i needed to save or change something it was always obvious what key needed to be pressed and it allowed me to stop and think to avoid needlessly long run on sentences that users of vi tended to devote long hours to perfecting the stream of thought typing ignoring the simple fact that puncheon is important too.

Yes that was done on purpose.

Email

[Kris_J]

I would have thought plain old email is the number one pick in this list. We're all stuck on it even though it's been around for, what, 30 years?