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.
We made steampunk a reality by developing the technology to transfer steam power efficiently over long distances through metal wires.
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.
Microsoft Windows
UNIX
It surprises me how many system utilities I use that are older than I am. I am currently initializing a disk on a cloud server with an application that was written when Ford was the US president.
Can you say which application it is? Does it run on a mainframe? Any idea what language was used to program it?
Sorry this is just quite interesting.
Snot Flickerman was right, it’s dd. It was in the docs I linked to show the commands. It runs on anything with storage devices and an operating system. I mainly use it on Windows servers running on AWS.
The Wheel. We should’ve graduated to antigravity by now, don’t you think?
we dont posess the knowlegde of how to do that, that isnt done by magnetism. maybe if aliens come to earth than maybe.
Talking to a good friend 20 years ago, very smart guy, and he was thinking we already artificial gravity.
i remember mythbuster tried to experiment with it.
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.
The IRS still use COBOL.
So does pretty much the whole banking and credit industry. When you get 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.
Reminds me I have to catalogue 2 Tandem Non-stop! Systems at work… I don’t need to meddle with the cobol code atop but still, this was quite a surprise to stumble upon.
Fax, still in official use in Germany.
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.
I mean, if all the good secret information is going over fax and everyone knows it, sure, people will hack it. Blackhats are in it for the money, not to work with the newest technology. Most of what they do is already mind-numbing grinding.
The main security there is just the security of whatever phone line it’s going over. And that’s assuming you never dial a wrong number…
Also there is fax spam. I get all these random advertisements faxed to me for companies for window replacement services that don’t actually exist, and sometimes fortune tellers. I have no idea why.
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.
Because it doesn’t have encryption by default, and encryption is not a setting in many public providers + if security works, then only within a single provider, not between them.
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
It will never go away in health care and government departments in Canada.
Fax is too simple to completely die.
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.
You said turbines specifically. Parsons invented those around the turn of the 20th century.
Before that, it was the chugga-chugga kind of steam engine. They’re a lot simpler to design and machine, and don’t require the really high RPMs to operate, but then again can break in many different ways a turbine can’t.
SS7, part of the old ass 2g and 3g networks
Floppy disk.
Phone numbers
A decade ago, I thought phone numbers would soon die out. Instead, the most popular messaging apps use them as identifiers and adoption of those in North America is poor.
Phone numbers are the new ICQ number
Pagers
Hospitals use pagers because the frequency band they run on is better at penetrating walls. Shorter waves carry more data, but are easily blocked by walls. Pagers don’t need a lot of data, so they use really long waves.
And hospitals are built like bunkers, to avoid the potential need to evacuate patients during an emergency. Things like fire breaks between individual rooms, earthquake protections, being strong enough to stand up during a hurricane, etc… The goal is to be able to shelter in place instead of evacuating, because a mass evacuation of bedridden patients who all need monitoring equipment would be a logistical nightmare.
But this also means hospitals are really good at blocking wireless signals, because the walls are all super thick and sturdy. So they use pagers, which use long waves and can reliably penetrate the bunker-like walls. You don’t want a doctor to miss an emergency call because they were sitting in the basement; Hospitals need a wireless connection that reliably works every time. And pagers just happen to fit that specific niche.
That’s a good one. Why would companies give employees special purpose gizmos that just tell them to use the phone in their pocket to call the office.
It surprises me how little stick-built houses have changed in the last 50 years or so, at least in the USA.
Toilet paper
70% of humans dont use toilet paper, so it might be a new tech instead of an old one.
A lot of those don’t use water toilets either
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.
