A proper old-fashioned fax machine is still preferable to a "modern" HP machine that won't _scan_ your document if it is out of ink

I used to work at a nuclear power plant (Sellafield UK if anyone is interested) and I always remember my wife's reaction when I explained how it worked. "All it does is boil water??" She had imagined some magical way that the energy could be stripped right out of the atoms or something. Her surprised Pikachu face was epic!

As an attorney (non-practicing now), let me tell you that it's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE to run a law firm without a fax machine. Too many courts still consider them the ONLY appropriate way to transmit important documents . . . except when they demand an actual, physical person deliver said documents on paper.

I operate a laserwelding robot, the old one that got replaced last year ran on ancient version of windows mobile. That was not a bad thing. the sofware was really really stable because almost al bugs have been patched out. Plus, it required just a tiny amount of memory to run , which is critical if your robot is dependent on a stream of real time data to know where it is or is supposed to be going next. old does not always equal bad or obsolete

One big reason fax is still a thing is because in many jurisdictions a document that is signed and then sent by fax is considered just as legally binding as if the document had been signed and sent through the post.

I work in IT and knew a guy who was MASSIVELY into trains. He went to Australia in 2001 and visited a small regional railway which at that point was still using a Commodore 64 to run the timetable. And a few years later (CIRCA 2004), I was asked to help reorganise and clear out the old server room and found that our legacy POP3 customer mail server was a 1992 Compaq Deskpro PC running on DOS 5.0...

As an electronics engineer that's into old technology a ton, I just love how so much old tech still has so many niches, there's ones you didn't even bring up. In Japan for example, Pomeras are still heavily used, even though they are literally just text-writer laptops that can't do anything else, simply because of their reliability, since they can't do other stuff, they end up having massive battery spans of over 20 hours so they are extremely vital to anyone who handles a lot of documents, from offices to writers. Another example is CRT monitors, that while they have massive downsides, have the benefit of instantly drawing the screen instead of having a delay, so they are good in cases where every frame matters, although that niche mostly died off with 1ms monitors.

With floor cleaning robots common now, the broom could be considered obsolete but it's still the best tool for the job regardless of how ancient it is.

Pagers were so reliable because they were built like small plastic tanks, so that they were almost unkillable. Couple that with running off basic long wave FM radio frequencies, and the signals went through almost anything, meaning it was rare to be somewhere in a building where your pager wouldn't work. In many cases, getting to a phone line was a more difficult task than receiving the page itself. Those long wavelength signals also travel a really long distance, compared to a cell signal, so they worked well in remote locations too.

I still use a computerised weighing scales for mixing inks at the company I work for. It runs on windows 98 and has never been connected to the internet, so has never had an update. This is probably why it still works as it did on day one.

Your fax vs email example is understated. An email is putting your document in a paper bag and handing it to the first person heading in the right direction. It keeps getting handed off to different people until it finally reaches the destination. A fax encrypts your document, gives it to a courier, who takes it straight to the recipient and decrypts it when they handshake correctly. This is why sensitive information is faxed instead of emailed.

Another use for floppy disks is that at many universities, some old equipment, particularly oscilloscopes in my degree, still use floppy disks to record data. Floppy disks being around usually comes down to "why fix what isn't broken?"

I work in anesthesia and I have to say it was really embarrassing when I had to be taught how to use a pager. Went from not knowing they were still around to using them every week, he is right they are the most reliable piece of equipment I have ever used

Mentioning Windows XP reminded me of a video I watched of a guy checking what information was being sent out by various OS versions. Windows XP contacted update servers for security, newer OS versions contacted a huge variety of commercial URLs essentially selling information about the user. Most of us are forced to use the latest OS version thanks to forced obsolescence and, while there are some nice features in newer things, they're not as good as they claim to be.

I used to fly in and out of some remote islands on Canada’s East Coast. Sable Island has a cellular antenna, however between the buildings on the island they are connected with old fashioned crank phones. There is no switchboard, they are all on one party line. If you want to reach another building, you pick up the receiver and crank the ring for whoever you want to reach. A half rotation of the crank produced a short ring, one complete rotation gave a long ring. To call the main building, that would be one short and one long ring. Rotate the crank halfway, stop and then one complete crank. All the phones on the line would ring, but the guy in the main building would pick up because he would know the call was for him. It all worked on a 4.5 volt DC system which was powered by an AC transformer, and more importantly a battery backup. The reason why they still used it was because it worked, regardless of the weather. It’s hard to get a repairman way out there in any reasonable time frame, so dependability is much more important. I think the system was initially installed in 1902 and is probably still in use today. I haven’t been to Sable Island in 20 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if it is.

I’m not even 30, but I was born in a farming community so old and rural, we didn’t even have a house number, it was just called by our neighbours “the old dalton place on the hill” And we used a fax till my grandfather died about 3 years ago, and I still use a VHS and old CRT television ran on a generator in the rest shed we have on the edge of our farthest fields, as there is no point travelling the whole way back to the farmhouse when it’s lambing season, especially at night, we also have an old military cot & a camping stove with a decent amount of canned food, as I’m homeless even though it’s not lambing atm I stay in the shack and keep an eye out for my family, and tbh I’m genuinely happy, it helps I can charge my phone with the gen & power banks I have as well lol

One piece of "outdated" equipment that can be critical in emergencies is the shortwave radio. Able to communicate over long distances without the need for infrastructure such as cell towers or phone lines, these can mean life or death in natural disasters, etc.

The moral of this story is that things that work, work. Just because something new comes along, that doesn't mean the previous generation stops working. Quite the opposite. Some of those systems are incredibly complicated, and their reliability is the result of decades of refinement. Trying to "upgrade" to the newer stuff inevitably ends up introducing errors no one thought of, and then you're stuck, since the last guy who really understood the internals retired in 2004.

Windows XP is very much still in use for a lot of stand alone off-grid systems that require a basic O/S that doesn't need updates. One such example is in both large and small air conditioning units where it is unnecessary to need to update the software as the software doesn't need to be complicated, it just needs to be reliable as the hardware is designed to last decades so all it needs to do is to make that hardware function reliably. This is exactly the same reason that DOS was in use for decades as well, as it was a simple but tried and tested operating system. I gather when the Space Shuttle program was retired in 2011 it was still using an O/S written in the early 1980s to control certain basic functions as there was never a need to change it. And interestingly BBC Basic programming language can still be found in use both as an educational tool for those wanting to learn the basics of coding but also, as you say, for those using vintage synthesisers in the music business.

Great video. So many of those examples come down to 'It still works'. I have personally seen not only Windows XP, but also MSDOS 6 in use - in appliance controls, and medical devices.

What do they all have in common? A certain elegance of design. Simple, robust and reliable.

Another still common use of floppy disks is for theatre lighting technicians, for a lot of now-vintage lighting consoles (such as those made by ETC) which are still in widespead use. It's often the only way to save your show data, or bring it with you from one venue to another while on tour.

I grew up on and still farm using very old technology. My oldest tractor is a 1937 Oliver Hart Parr 70. My newest, a 1966 John Deere 4020. It's capable of operating modern equipment on it's horsepower range. I pick my corn with a corn picker, not a combine. They stopped making them in 1984. I store my corn in cribs to dry on the ear. If I need to shell some I run it through a sheller built in the 1940s. They stopped making them in 1975. It shells corn cleaner than a new combine does. Same with the combine I have, built in the 1950s. It make grain much cleaner than a new one. None of my equipment has any type of computer system on it. I don't have software problems. The most interesting thing I have is my square hay baler which uses a mechanical knotter which was introduced on grain and corn binders over 120 years ago and are almost identical to the knotter on a brand new baler.

im the daughter of a healthcare worker who's been in the field for 23 years. they used pagers for the whole time she worked there up until this most recent year where they started using a texting service over their phones. she's expressed her deep hatred towards it, and that many other dislike it too. texting in the hospital is unreliable, and with pagers, people tend to send out only what's important. she's a nurse practitioner, so she gets questions from nurses all the time, and through the texting service, nurses (and doctors, but mostly nurses) would ask very simple questions, which blew up her phone and that wasn't good when she was talking to a patient. there's also no-service/no wifi areas in the hospital, which don't affect pagers but do affect texting services. overall, pagers are def better and still very useful

A funny part about still using fax machines is that a lot of phone lines have nowdays been switched to voice over IP. And that IP connection might in turn be over DSL using a phone line. So, there is used an old technology designed to transmit images encoded as sound on top of a newer technology designed to transmit sound over a data network on top of a not that new technolgy designed to transmit network data over a phone line on top of a very old technology designed to transmit sound as analog electric signals. Yet, incredibly this stack of technologies from different eras still works somehow.

As a computer networking major back in the late 2000s, I had a fellow student who worked for the IT department of the county government, and she said that they still used Windows 95 for many of the same reasons that were listed here for still using Windows XP. It was relatively dependable, everyone was already trained on it, by staying on it they didn't need to upgrade the hardware to accommodate a newer OS, and there were fewer new viruses and such being created targeting it vs. the current operating systems.

Bicycles, keys, gas lighters, campfires, trolleys, radios, spectacles, cardboard, rowboats, paintings... You could come up with an endless number of examples for "outdated" technology still in use. When you use any tool, you want the right tool for the purpose, and sophistication is actually a fairly low-priority attribute among all the factors that determine what the right tool will be.

I'm a theater light designer and had to use a Floppy disk several times last month: I was working on a theater that had this very popular lighting console that uses floppy disks to save show's information.

Another big piece of the pager for Hospitals (and a couple other industries) is because the technology is so understood/stable that pager companies are willing to provide SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that guarantee delivery within a couple minutes or they have to pay potentially large fines. Cell phones for example refuse to do that for either phone calls or text messages they both don't want to guarantee delivery at all and explicitly say that messages can take days to be delivered. In a crisis situation that's obviously unacceptable and the SLA guarantee is worth millions of dollars to some hospitals.

I retired as a volunteer fire fighter more than 10 years ago and to this day I can still hear the pager going off at random times in my head.

I retired from the USAF in 2001. I was an Aircraft Weapons Technician. I took care of the weapons systems on five different fighter jets. Everything that was directly tied to weapons systems. Bombs, missiles, Guns, Chaff/Flare (yes those Phoenix Lights in the 1990's were flares. I saw them myself). But I digress... I retired in 2001. I did work in several tech industries in the next several years. From selling electronics, to phone center at a big Cable Company (you called me, when your internet went out, and I'd be the one to tell you, "Have you tried turning it off and on again?". Indeed, thats usually the fix with all tech. I eventually gravitated to Xerox, in 2007, and my new carer as copier Tech had begun.Yes, the closest thing I could use my Air Force training in the civilian world. At least I had some electronics troubleshooting background. As none of the Major Air Carriers I know of don't use weapons systems. One of the first things I noticed was, in the age of the internet, people were still using fax machines. Yes, I repaired those as well. Mostly they were incorporated into the multi function printers. But the were many that were stand alone Fax machines, connected to a dedicated fax line. These were usually hospitals. They would often fax complete medical records to each other. I mean like 200+ pages in a single fax! These devices were never meant to handle that much use. And they worked them to death. The Police dept used them. The Fire Dept used them. Lawyers used them. And many educational institutes still used them as late as 2020, when I left the industry. Everyone that uses a fax should know, even though it has the confirmation page, that is used for proof of transmission. It doesn't always work. It assumes that you have a completely functional fax machine at both ends. That nether one has any issues. That the sending optics are clean, not gooped up with liquid whiteout, a very common problem. It also assumes the receiving machine has ink in it. It is very possible to send a fax, receive the confirmation page, and the fax printed out a blank page. It could be out of toner/ink. There could be issues with the xerographic process in the case of a laser printer type of fax. The fuser could be bad, or the drum could be bad, or the laser could be bad, or it could have ground issues. And yet, you can still receive a message that the fax was received. Do not trust them. But, one that you probably can trust, the most expensive fax to use, is the one that uses a printer cartrige, that contains what looks like a 200 foot long carbon paper. Very expensive to use.

I worked for a phone company in the 1980's. One day an Apple 2 with twin 5 inch floppy drives turned up in the office. Ostensibly for record keeping but it ended up mainly used to play games. I will never forget the look of amazement on a chief engineers face who was used to loading programs from a cassette."It's so fast"! he exclaimed..

I really miss XP. It was so easy to customize and when you needed to find something it was right there, not buried in a sub-sub-sub-subfolder. When I would get a new computer that automatically came with a more recent OS I would wipe it and install XP. I was very upset when a lot of the PC games no longer ran on XP and I was forced to "upgrade."

Another fun fact on floppy disk: A Floppy Disk is still the most commonly used (and recognized) icon for a "Save" action in many applications.

I remember how last year our old librarian announced in an article she wrote in local newspaper that finally whole library catalouge is avalible on floppy disc and she has spend around two decades to work on it. Important thing to note is that for the last few years there is an online cataluge avalible 😄

I will never forget waking up one day and finding that my windows machine had been updated from XP to Windows 10 with all of those terrifying tiles. I remember the sense of horror and dread to this day.

I had a Windows XP Pro box and it was BULLETPROOF! It was by far the best computer I ever owned. I bought it when XP first came out and I used it for years. I only upgraded from XP after it got to the point that it would not run the software I needed for some classes I was taking. Super fast and super reliable. I still miss it today.

Until very recently in my job as a Federal physician we were assigned Motorola pagers. What a reliable beast of a device! You could hurl it across a room in frustration and it would fly apart in a most rewarding way, and then it could be reassembled in seconds and work fine. They did not however do well when they fell into the toilet 🤣

I remember the fax machine as cutting edge technology in terms of the legal aspects of buying property in Scotland in the late 1980s. English law hadn't begun to catch up. I lived in England, and was able to complete a Scottish purchase, release money, and confirm a mortgage agreement remotely: it seemed too good to be true. It all worked smoothly via the lawyer (a Writer to the Signet, no less). The only hangover was the request to visit the lawyer's offices, initial the faxed pages, and add the rubric 'accepted as holograph' before the papers were filed away. As L P Hartley wrote, 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'.

The networking phrase we used to use in the days of floppies was "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks"

I used to work for the NHS in IT, left there about 7 years ago. I was specifically employed because I was "old school" IT (I was about 48 at the time). A lot of my jobs were keeping Windows XP machines working (off the 'net) that ran x-ray machines etc. Elastic bands, blu-tac, cable ties, replacement fans and re-pasting processors. Whatever it took to keep bespoke machines running.

Hey Simon, I saw a company, with a single owner, do machining jobs with Windows XP. The owner created an interface between old refurbished office computers and large mills. Then he would custom write software for the mill to follow. An example was the large fuel hose collars on F-15 aircraft. The collar had 20 or so steps to process. A semi-trained worker cuts a two inch piece of round aluminum bar stock. Then the billet was loaded into a mill table. The WinXP application is called to slowly mill the inside of the small billet into a collar profile. There were 10 computer mills in the shop. One worker went and cut a second billet and loaded it into the next mill. The process was simple. After a production run was rough cut, the next small program cut application loaded into the mill. Long story short, old Bridgeport mills are repurposed. Old office desktop computers are repurposed. Old XP software was repurposed. 2-3 workers did the output of 20-30 workers. The finished work was very high quality.

1998- when I bought my first home desktop computer at a "Gateway" store back when they tried to have "stand alone" stores to sell computers....

Besides windows, XP being used a lot even after it's sunset day. The more interesting thing is that a similar version of windows called windows CE is used in 90% of industrial machine interfaces and is not being supported anymore.

The relief brought on from upgrading from Windows NT was palpable. FYI, if you have a McLaren F1, a car which sells for $10-20million, remote diagnostics are performed via an old school dial up modem and technicians will hook into it directly with a 25yr old Compaq computer which holds and transfers updates on...you guessed it...floppy disks.

I'm a bit of a connoisseur of very old technologies which we still use today. My favorite is the humble shoe string which in one form or another dates back at least 5000 years based on Otzi, the iceman found in the Alps in 1991.

I work in a machine shop making parts for a personal propeller and jet aircraft. Some of the machines are from the 90s to just a few years ago. A floppy disk drive is standard on most of them and the memory storage is around 128 mb. No need for much more as a machine just needs to read lines of G code to machine a part. I've seen the floppy disk to usb converters and they cost several hundred dollars and don't include any extra memory. So it's cheaper and easier to stay with the floppy disks. Makes it harder for the data to be stolen as its on a form of storage that not many have access to anymore as well.

forget XP, at my old job there was a machine whose software was compatible with nothing newer than Windows 2000! as a bonus, that PC was never allowed to be turned off because the account that was logged in was so old that no one knew the password.

The fun thing about windows XP is its source code is now publicly available. I long for the day it comes back with community backed updates.

I was tutoring AP Environmental Science last year & found myself saying "all power generation is just the steam engine with extra steps" a lot.

In my workplace, there is a programmable machine which loads in new or modified files using a Floppy Disk -not even a diskette. It was a state-of-the-art machine in the late 1980s. The machine is used on a what is now a side process, and still does it's job function reliably - management has never been able to justify replacing it with a newer machine.

I work in the Healthcare industry. I use a fax machine for sensitive information all of the time. We also have a few XP computers for some very specialized and expensive programs and equipment. These computers are not hooked up to the internet, and their only purpose is to run these programs. Our tech team is always wanting to get rid of them, and we have to explain why they can't each time.

Your list should I think have included the vinyl record player. One of the earliest commercial music reproduction technologies which has not only survived against all odds but experienced a renaissance in the 21st century.

In 1988, I started my post-military career with a worldwide industrial technology corporation. That year all of the branches went to a system called "Eclipse". A couple years later I left the company. In 2019, when I came back to the company, I was shocked to learn they were still using it! The reason? Our aerospace division had certain security protocols that had to be met and the old system was not easily hackable because there were few people left that understood it.

Nuclear power worker here. Can confirm pagers are still used. Specifically the first one you showed. We use them every refueling outage for our “door crew” for containment.

We still use pagers at work as there are issues with Wi-Fi and mobile phone signal and it allows for a dependable means of notification plus there are land lines situated everywhere on the site.

I work in the medical field, so I see fax machines everyday. Also, I grew up in a military family. My eldest brother served in the navy - he retired, serving a long career, mostly on carriers. He explained to me that every ship in the navy, diesel or nuke, was actually still a steam ship. Only the means of _ heating_ the steam differed.

We found out vibrations from jet engines often caused mechanical hard drives & optical drives to fail. But floppy disks and tapes (8mm) worked fine.

I worked at a McDonald's from 2006-2019. The franchisee I used fax machines at all of his stores. Also the cash registers last I knew use Windows XP.

I think around 2005 I took all my old floppy discs and backed them up to a USB flash drive. At that point they were about 15-25 years old and only half of them were un-corrupted. I found out magnetic storage devices had a time limit before they became de-magnetized.

I own (and ride) a 93 year old motorbike. Old doesn't always mean obsolete. I work in finance in the UK, many banks and lenders still insist on faxes. I'm also an ex-Navy Submariner. I bet many people would be shocked to find out that Nuclear Submarines are moved using steam. Albeit steam produced by water in the secondary water loops in the reactor.

My father used to use a pager when I was a kid in school as he is a private fuel hauler. Of course back then cell phones weren't really a thing so he needed a way for a customer to contact him while he was driving. I think he still might have one as a backup for when his cell phone has no reception. Sometimes things that are simple and outdated are still better than something that's new and complex. :)

A friend recently told me some hospitals still use pneumatic tubes to send small items like samples around the building

Yes, it is hopelessly outdated now, but Windows XP will always be my favorite Windows operating system for how good it was even in beta form, when it was the current system.

Can definitely attest to the pagers reliability. We had a tornado hit our town back in June. Cell phone service was wiped out but we could still page out emergency calls!!!

I've got myself convinced that the only reason why operating systems became more complicated than XP was so that advertisers could run more ads, and more annoying ads at that. For anything I've ever used a computer for, XP was plenty good enough. In fact I still have a laptop with it for automotive diagnostic use (BMW INPA/NCS Expert, etc..).

The fax machine's security relies on an point to point connection as in old school landline telephone networks. Problem is, that in more and more, in my area most places, the fax machines signal as all other calls will travel through internet protocol gateways. The security advantage therefore doesn't exist anymore. There is not way to tell if there was a man in the middle attack, it is even impossible to tell for a sender, if the remote fax machine is a virtual device that will send the message to an email account. The only reason why this device still enjoyed some popularity in Germany was that the above fact wasn't well understood by many users and offices. After a german court rule Fax is not a replacement for snail mail or digitally signed documents anymore and is now finally vanishing. - I feel this problem of modern phone networks often running on the internet, sending the emutlated analogue beep boops tones of virtual fax machines as audio in IP packages should have been a talking point here.

This video is making the mynah bird flying from my desk intercom box to the relay pole outside my office glare at me.

For people who don't know, equipment drivers and custom software often need to be rewritten when switching over to new operating systems. This is fine for most commercial products because companies want to maintain a wide variety of compatibility at any given time, but niche applications such as military, medical, and industrial uses often need custom solutions. Often, that solution boils down to "just keep the operating system as is till something breaks it".

As a point of sale developer - I can tell you XP is deeply embedded in retail for years to come.

Floppys and zip disks were my go to storage back when I was younger . Oh how tech has changed

I still have a landline. I've heard prophesies that these were obsolete for the last 30 years or so. But I still have and use one. I also have a laptop that runs XP. I use that primarily as a backup MIDI sequencer, and also to run software for my synthesizers that would no longer work after Windows 7. It's not a question of using more modern software - as far as I know, it doesn't exist. So I keep an old XP laptop so I can run such software as and when I need to. And before anyone says, no, I don't use that machine on the Internet, it's strictly offline.

I've done those navigation database updates on 737s using 3.5" disks, and not all that long ago. That airline replaced their old data loaders with ones that had a USB port, but they retained the 3.5" disk capability as well. It was really irritating having disk 3 of 4 turn out to be corrupted. Sad trombone sound....

I work in parts at a GM dealership. We used to use fax daily to send invoices and receive quotes but a update two month ago got rid of our fax. Sad day..

Pagers are also used in high-security areas where only receiving data is acceptable. A device that allows sending data may be too vulnerable to security concerns.

Back in the early 80s my sister had to be hospitalized after a nasty auto accident. On one visit I went down to the cafeteria to have some lunch. There was about 200 people in the cafeteria and at one point a pager or beeper went off. And in unison, everyone in that room looked down at the thier belt line to check thier device.

The nuclear power plant my husband worked at still uses pagers. Getting cell signal in much of the plant is nearly impossible and dependable communication is obviously critical.

In my experience, if you are not well organised, the achilles heel of the fax machine was the paper tray. About 20 years ago, the office I worked at went from having one fax to having one on each floor. However, nobody realised that you probably needed to have someone on each floor who was responsible for ensuring that they didn't run out of paper. Occasionally, someone who was expecting a fax, having given a customer the number, would, after wondering why it hadn't arrived, check the paper tray and find it was empty. They would refill it, and several other faxes would print before the one they were expecting.

Add one more "Gone but not forgotten." WordPerfect. I started using the famous 5.1with DOS 5 when Word wasn't even a glimmer in Bill Gates' eyes. I still use it. In fact taking delivery today of an updated....although not latest....version. I've spent time with Libre Office and Word and always came back to the simplicity of WP. WP was the favorite word processor in the legal profession for many years, and Corel still makes a version for law offices and state legislatures. Not updated since 2021, so not sure if it has hit EOL. No worries about opening wpd files for a long time, Libre Office will, although it will only save in other formats. WP has had the ability to save in many dozens of formats, mostly archaic and long gone. Plus PDF conversion built in for many years when Word users had to own Adobe Acrobat.

Actually, Natural Gas fired power plants do not use steam, instead they use turbines directly, like a jet engine (turbofan) or as the engine(s) for a turboprop plane. This allows much quicker adjustment in the power output which cannot be efficiently done with steam. Because steam power output is not easily adjusted, this is why coal-fired, oil-fired, geothermal, and nuclear power plants are known as "base load" plants. In other words, their power output stays relatively constant throughout the day.

It's tempting to write off technology that works well just because it is out of fashion. I continue to use all my old technology simply because it does work and does what I need. Remember one of the oldest bits of technology is the wheel which still works just fine despite attempts to come up with 'modern' alternatives like maglevs.

I love how the reasons each of these technologies still exist can essentially be boiled down to "we haven't been able to come up with anything better." No one expects to skip to the top of the tech tree in the 1970s.

As President of the Steam Automobile Club of America, and an employee of General Motors Powertrain, I have to dispute the idea that steam automobiles can use fuel more efficiently than internal combustion. The problem is the latent heat of vaporization. It takes 974 BTU to convert a pound of water at 212 F (100C), and atmospheric pressure, into a pound of steam at 212F. Thermodynamically, this is an "irreversible" process -- which essentially means that we can't extract work converting that steam back into water. All the power we get from the steam is by raising it to elevated temperatures and pressures. Powerplants can condense steam to near vacuum due to a large cooling water supply , whereas automobiles are necessarily air cooled and thus lucky to drop the exhaust steam down to ambient pressure. Also, large steam plants can employ all sorts of heat exchangers that simply won't scale down to fit under the hood of a car. The idea of steam-powered automobiles to battle pollution came about in the late 60's and early 70's ... but died a fast death when OPEC cut oil deliveries and governments instituted CAFE (fuel economy) standards. Today, catalytic converters, fuel injection, and electronic engine controls arguably make a gasoline engine at least as clean, if not cleaner, across the entire driving cycle than a steam engine is likely to manage. This is because you need to expend a lot of fuel just to raise steam whereas the ICE is ready to go after burning very little fuel.

XP still stands alone, as the greatest OS MIcrosoft ever produced.

Fun fact: Health care places usually don't use fax machines. They send fax files through the internet just like everyone else, completely eliminating the benefits of faxes. The point of sticking to fax was it's as secure as a phone call. But what happens instead is one side will email an image to an email-to-fax gateway, which will then fax it to another fax-to-email gateway, who will then email it to the receiver.

I loved my pager which I used up until about 2005. I still use 3.5" floppy's in some old IBM compatible 286 machines which run 1990's programming software for Motorola radio comms equipment which are still in spec.

I figured pagers would be on it, I have one at work, nuclear power plant, where mobile phones aren't allowed for security reasons.

I work at a library, and i help send faxes several times a week, mostly helping older people with health care documents.

I'm living in Japan. I have a FAX machine at home that I bought new at my local electronics store several years ago. They still sell them in 2023. I also have a functional internal floppy drive in my desktop that I built two years ago. That was more of 'because I could' sort of thing, but there are places where I can make use of a floppy disk even though they are neither cheap nor easy to find other than Amazon.

I recall reading about an old technology that's still used... 8-bit microprocessors. I was reading about the Z-80 (I had a TRS-80 for my first computer) and was surprised that it (and other 8-bit microprocessors) was still in use for embedded applications because they are powerful enough to do the job efficiently and they are dirt cheap compared to the larger microprocessors. In addition, they tend to be more energy efficient.

To add onto the XP portion, most of the time, the version of Windows XP inside of certain machines, like the ones noted in this video, run on Windows XP embedded. If not running on Windows XP embedded, then it’ll be a regular version of Windows XP, but the facility will usually pay to have Windows XP updated through a support contract with Microsoft themselves. The places that do have contracts generally pay a pretty penny for these support contracts (the last I’ve heard was 6-7 figures) and is patched constantly, so its not as insecure as it sounds, although I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these systems are air-gapped

Fun fact, i did an internship at a national lab and took a tour of their super computer. For any data thay was being kept for long term storage they actually were stored on these film drives. I believe each of the drives had 500gb-5tb of storage on them. The reason they used it was because it was data that was accessed so infrequently, the film was more reliable and chealee because it didnt take power to store. Since its an analog medium, the data persisted without the need to keep it powered. Heres the cool part, if you wanted to access the data there was a robotic arm designated the "operator" which grabs the drive and inserts it into the system to be accessed.

Another point about XP. It sort of shows the stagnation of software. For years now, we keep getting the same thing, but dressed up differently. There have been a few technological leaps, such as cloud technology or better networking, but those don't change the basic needs of computing. Whether you run Word locally or in the cloud doesn't really matter. Whether you access a file on your computer or over the network doesn't really matter. Even AI is mostly just dressed up Excel functions. Are the upgrades since Windows XP just ... well, window dressing?

The fax machine is even older than that, dating to 1780's if I recall correctly, used for transmitting dinner menus between Paris and a resort twenty miles away. It used an electrical signal to synchronize two pendulums, one at each end. On the transmitting side, an electrical brush was swung over a paper which had holes punched in it; on the other side it burned a corresponding hole in a paper on the other end. I remember it from the PBS show "Connections".

Can't wait for the collab between Simon and the technology connections guy

We used to call it "floppy disks" if it was bendable - Good old 360Kb or the _gigantic_ 1.22Mb. The 1.44Mb "non-bendable" ones were called "stiffy disks". It's just weird to see someone say floppy disk and show a picture of a stiffy disk.

I was going to say that I work in a clinic and sending documents by fax is by far the easiest way to do it. But then Simon addressed that point immediately after so I guess well done as usual, no notes

Years ago, a millwright I worked with took a tour of the Bruce Nuke plant. He came back and said he had no idea they used steam. I couldn't help but laugh a bit. I guess he thought there was some kind of magical electrical generation direct from radiation. He wasn't stupid, I think he just never really gave it much thought until he took the tour. Mind blown.

Another advantage of floppy disks is if you want to encode a boot program, it is very easy and convenient to do on a floppy. So if you want to create a simple bootable program floppy disk is the easiest way to do it. One example was I made a simple boot program to display the information of the Interupt Vector Table before it was modified by the OS.

At 11:50 you show a tire press, during the floppy disk segment. Coincidently, tire presses operate primarily on... you guessed it... STEAM.