Dildoes and pocket pussies
Fax machines will never die no matter how they are mocked. It simply is the easiest way to send documents with private information and it’s fast. At least we have e-faxing now to receive documents.
Please don’t tell me you buy that “they can’t be hacked”. It’s pretty much on the same tier as email.
Not so much they can’t be hacked, but that nobody seems to bother to.
Well, I don’t really love that as a security philosophy. If it’s somehow not going on now it will be soon.
Radio. I still listen to radio over the airwaves, and received by an antenna, as it has been done since 1920.
Bicycles are not much different since around 1900.
Pager and satellite phone. Mostly a niche usecase for health workers and remote location settlement respectively.
Pagers.
Still in use by hospitals and emergency services
Shit works
General Aviation is still using magnetos. The typical GA airplane is hilariously primitive.
Yeah, it’s so hilarious to want an engine that will continue to run after a complete electrical system failure at 10000ft.
Fuck 100LL though.
NOOO I NEED LEADED FUEL CAUSE MY LYCOMING IS FROM THE 60s 😭😭
If you buy a brand new Skyhawk here in the space year 2025, it will come with a newly made Lycoming IO-360 that requires 100LL. I think they’re still working on eliminating leaded avgas, I think because the Trump regime hasn’t noticed it yet.
Trigonometry is still used to take measures all around the world.
Welcome to “That’s not surprising at all!”
The IRS still use COBOL.
So does pretty much the whole banking and credit industry. When you take money out of an ATM there’s usually some COBOL code involved.
True, we stack old technologies on top of older technologies, and somewhere at the bottom, there is z/OS with COBOL running. A young person right now learning COBOL has a secure future with big paychecks.
Depends on your tolerance for code spelunking. Back in the 90s I was encouraged to do Y2K prep because I had some COBOL experience, but I really hated pawing through old code. To be fair, COBOL was designed to be self documenting and English-like. But I’m glad I got into web dev instead back then. It was right at the dawn of “dynamic HTML” when web pages started actually doing things. Very cool time. Right now I’d be more inclined to go into helping companies recover from failed AI projects.
That’s not even a government thing. It’s a finance/banking thing, as most major banks are still using mainframes and legacy COBOL code for most of their business logic.
The sewing machine. Like we got 3d printers than can give me whatever I want in 20 hrs but I still got to fight with a sewing machine to stitch an outfit. Like why no polyester clothes printer?
We have knitting machines, and automated looms (weaving machines,) we even have sergers for fancy sewing. Its just plain easier to make the finished product as a custom job since humans aren’t uniform in size, and it’s way easier to weave a rectangular piece of cloth than any other shape.
For one, polyester fabric and clothes are just terrible
Two, technically you can 3d print a chainmail shirt, but it’d suck to wear normally
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.
After first contact
A: These are our mini neutron star fusion reactors. The most advanced technology to have ever existed. We basically take a chunk of neutron star matter and divide it into two. We neutralize the negative effect and extreme gravity with our space-time bending gravity manipulation technology. We let the two mini neutro spheres accelerate and collide. This generates enough energy to power atleast 3 planets for 1000 cycles. Not onl–
H: Wait a minute. I have a question.
A: Please feel free to ask any questions.
H: How do you convert the raw energy generated into a usable form at that scale?
A: We use utlra high intensity lasers for energy transfer to plane–
H: No. That’s not what I’m asking. How do you convert the raw energy at reactor into a usable form?
A: …
H: …
A: We boil water wi–
H: Motherf-- enrages and loses sanity
Stolen from reddit.
We made steampunk a reality by developing the technology to transfer steam power efficiently over long distances through metal wires.
Fax, still in official use in Germany.
It will never go away in health care and government departments in Canada.
It’s considered a secure method of document transfer over email, despite email being able to be secured and fax can be hacked with like a length of wire and a knife. Fucking irks me.
Because how many attackers are actually interested in attacking fax? Like… have you ever heard of hackers hacking physical mail? It’s to old for people to care, and “people not caring” is implicitely secure by ignorance.
Yeah for sure, but security through obscurity only works until it’s actually important or exploitable for monetary gain. I wouldn’t even mind that, but e-mail can do so much better and it’s treated like a giant security risk.
How does one hack fax in that fashion?
Fax operates as data over phone line, similar to dialup. If you can get a wiretap on a phone line, you essentially can get everything that passes over it. Technically you could encrypt it, but it’s usually not required you do legally.
Very common in the US medical field as well
Burning things for heat or energy.
Marriage.
Candy.
Social tribes.
War.
What old technology
lists fire as technology
Everybody itt:
fire is not technology wahhh
I give you fire and even cookies. But the other 3 are definitely not technology.
Hahahaha! Marriage, social tribalism, and war are left, then. There are many reasons they are other things that are different from technology. But, can you give me an argument why they are specifically not technology? Or would you rather me try to give my reasoning why they are technology, first?
You go ahead, I’m currently grocery shopping.
Okay.
So I see technology as something that is developed to be explicitly used to solve a problem or impart change, that is identifiable as its own thing, and so can be used but then also may be eventually made obsolete. Right? Like clay usage or refrigeration. It’s all just a means to an end.
So an animal comes along, and doesn’t have scrape-two-rocks-together to make fire, and then later does, that would be a technology.
Another way to think of it, which is… Admittedly, kind of embarrassing, but I do think makes sense, is if you could “develop it” or even theoretically see it being developed in a strategy game like Age of Empires or Civilization or something.
So, humans have not always had, and eventually developed marriage (I’m not talking about love, as that is a VERY different thing and not my words or choice of topic, for now, as that’s even more of a stretch, and I’m not surprised that we still use it) in its current form at some point. Somebody in history thought it would be a good idea, and it got popular and caught on (another indication that it could be technology).
Similarly, tribalism and war also evolved in similar ways.
Tribalism did not exist, somebody thought it was a good idea, it got popular, and now we have moved on, with some vestigial brain habits, because current society does not really need it to survive, but because how society is now is only like 200 years old (and because almost all humans still practice some form of it, including those excluded), evolution hasn’t yet removed our expectations of it. It is a biological need, like somebody else said, but I’m arguing that it, itself, is a developed technology as a means to an end that we will/may evolve past our already decreased need for - we just had this very social behavior for such a long time that it became ingrained into our biological expectations and reliances. I’m not a sociopath or psychopath, but some say that those could be attempts at evolving past tribalism or social behavior reliance. In some ways, if they are, they are VERY successful, as they absolutely do not rely on tribalism, but rather massively exploit it, to their own enormous success (business executives like CEOs have a high prevalence of sociopathy).
War, too, did not exist for a very long time. Especially formalized war. It still exists absolutely, and may soon come to be used again. But, regiments of soldiers standing in rows on a battlefield, waiting to try to kill each other is the tool of nations to exert power. Small, informal war is the tool of smaller communities, and so on and so forth… But, war of any kind still needs to be defined abstractly, too. So maybe we could call it: committed violent conflict towards an other entity. Right? Because one has to either outwardly or inwardly “declare war” on something or someone - a country on a different country, a people against another people, a people on a country, a country on a people, or, metaphorically, a toddler on a parent, a company on another company, a neighbor on another neighbor, or the HOA against a resident, whatever. In the literal examples though, they are all committed declarations of violence against an other something. War then, may have evolved from the emergence of peace, I don’t know. But war as a thing can not have always existed (enter intrusive thought of the animal kingdom being hell and constant war and thousand-eyed staring crabs and epic music) and at some point evolved into the tool we have known for thousands of years.
John Lennon imagined a world without war, as if to ironically imply it was a dark constant of living… But he still imagined it - he still imagined a world where we have evolved past the need for it - past the need for that technology to solve problems.
The important distinction here I think may be less about which of these specific things are or aren’t technology, but seeing humanity’s accomplishments, as dark as they are, as the technologies that we have developed, and therefore will eventually supersede the need for. Fire, marriage, cookies/candy, tribalism, war, pagers, fax machines, paint, or cars. I’m personally invested in the need to get past marriage, as where I live, it’s only limited to abrahamic religions’ formats, mainly Christianity, and therefore only one other person, and if the more core of them had their way, between only a cishet man and a cishet woman, for the sole purposes of rearing offspring and spreading the religions (technology) and cultures (also technology and subset technologies) more.
Damn, you really thought about that a lot.
I was really just going to argue the dictionary definition:
the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.
machinery and equipment developed from the application of scientific knowledge.
the branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences.
And i don’t think the remaing 3 really fall under that definition. They are terms that describe a general concept, not a specific application of knowledge.
Also I have to disagree on this one:
Tribalism did not exist, somebody thought it was a good idea, it got popular
Tribalism existed (and still does) in nature long before we invented anything. All kinds of animals of the same species form groups and compete over territory which each other … which also is like a kind of primitive version of war, as well. And I feel marriage also falls into that kind of area, where at least with the larger mammals there is a need to care for immature offspring, which makes it an evolutionary advantage for parents to stay together.
But yeah, I think in the end it’s just about the semantics of the word 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.
Burning random stuff for heat requires cheap, abundant oxygen, though.
Very good point, but oxygen is very abundant and you’ll more than likely already have oxygen generators with a level of redundancy, or be in an atmosphere with oxygen.
Also for load balancing you could constantly be splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then react them back into water when you need a large amount of energy at once as an alternative to electrical batteries which degrades less over time, if heat is all you want at least.
All I’m saying is there’s so many applications that we’re never going to get to a level of 0.
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.
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)
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
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.
I mean, that’s 20th century, or (IIRC) just before depending on the level of tech maturity you require. The 19th century ran on pistons.
Steam engines? Plenty of those ran the Industrial Revolution factories.
Like those damn nuclear reactors!
