15 Obsolete Technologies That Are, Somehow, Still Thriving Somewhere – Cracked.com
The gags are out there.
An op-ed from 1970 sparked a years-long panic that strangers would poison kids’ Halloween candy.
it comes out of their mother, and not out the nipples.
The things that could’ve been.
Justice for the “Pigeon Lady.”
Though they may seem obsolete, there are still many uses for things like fax machines, floppy disks, pagers, and dot matrix printers. In Japan, the fax machine is still a central pillar of communication in both corporate and government environments. An effort to banish faxes from Tokyo’s bureaucratic district has been met with surprising backlash. Also, there is still a market for floppy disks in certain industries like embroidery, tool and die, aviation because some planes built decades ago can only receive or send data through them. And pagers might be old-school but according to a study from the Journal of Hospital Medicine nearly 80% of hospitals still use them because cell signals have trouble penetrating some walls in hospitals and pagers signal multiple satellites. Meanwhile, COBOL is making a comeback governments and banks are pleading for COBOL programmers due to qualities that make it well suited to business programming domains, and dot matrix printers are used at airports because they’re compatible with the reservation system, their ink is cheaper and these types of printers don’t break down as often.
Fast Company / WNYC Studios
TechRadar
LoC / A Writers Den
DW
Wired / Kotaku
NBC / Medium
Slate / NY1
The Guardian / Deskthority
On Track
ECB
Your Mileage May Vary
Stack Overflow / Spectrum
The Healthy
NY Post
ZME Science
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All the Whos were doing WHAT in Whoville?!
From awkward toasts to James Bond crashing into the cake.
Thank you, horny duck.
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