What's the oldest technology you continue using?
What's the oldest technology you continue using?
Some of my coworkers were talking about using RSS to read blogs, which made some of the younger folks in our team ask what it is and why we keep using it.
Some still use iPods to avoid subscriptions and streaming services, my favorite was one of our sysadmins who showed me Gopher.
I’m curious about others though, thanks!
I use a wheel almost everyday still
Me use fire. Fire hot. Make food good
BIG cloud dihydrogen go squishhh. Make food. Me climb hierarchy. Me eat fusion photonic self replicating solar panel.
These seemed like the obvious answers at first, but then I realized I don’t actually use either one on a regular basis (I walk to work and cook on an induction stove). So in my case it’s probably the lever.
Somebody gave me firaaaaaah
The wheel, rope, fire.
I've used a chisel before, but yeah, fire is the oldest I use on a regular basis.
Chisel is just a type of blade or wedge. Equivalent to an axe or even just a a napped flint edge really.
I dont know if there's any way to know whether fire (as a purposely used technology) predates axe/wedge/blade concept.
I'd guess that axes blades and wedges predate wheels due to being a lot simpler.
I guess abrasives are also very simple.
As physical tech:
- we have lever door handles at work and wheel and axle door knobs at home.
As digital tech:
-
Comma Separated Values as a notation predates computers. Then CSV has been used as a computer file format at least since one of the Fortran variants added support in 1972.
-
The implementation has changed as filesystems evolve but the basic directory/file model of data storage and the associated tools ls/dir, cd, rm/del have been around a while.
lshas been known by that name since Multics in 1969, but can trace its lineage back tolistfon CTSS in 1961.
Anything that predates copy/paste is doing alright.
we have lever door handles at work and wheel and axle door knobs at home.
Aren't those just standard door knobs? Like which others are there (besides maybe smarthome/electronic stuff, but that's not really widespread esp. for home use)?
Aren't those just standard door knobs?
Exactly, those two are pretty standard.options.
As far as door latches go the cross bar and draw bolts probably predate it by thousands of years but I don't use those regularly.
A "Smart" Lock on your home is going backwards on centuries worth of progress as far as your security is concerned.
At this point, it's so common knowledge that smart locks are so easy to pick/bypass/break into, quietly too, that I can't help but think they must attract thieves just cuz they look so wild and different and function so terribly.
CSV is honestly one of my preferred ways of stacking up data. It's so easily transferable between languages and systems. It's always human readable too! There are older tools that I work with that spit out "fixed-width" formats, but then go and fuck it up by not aligning the headers to the columns making parsing is a pain in the ass. CSV would be so much better.
Spoons, which predate forks, fire, and wheels by about two million years.
“Ima need a citation on that 2 million years info.” — Chopsticks
Is fire even technology? It just exists in nature. 🤷🏻♂️
Its viewed as such.
The control of fire by early humans was a critical technology enabling the evolution of humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans
Fire is pretty great and I use it all the time.
Are you using bow drill or flint and steel?
Both. Why limit yourself?
Fire.
Fire and rocks, the OG of technology.
Fire isn't technology any more than water and electricity are. The tools to create or utilize it are the technology part. But since I don't use a firebowv or flint striker routinely, it's the wheel for me, baby.
Sewing machines. I'm a professional cosplayer and sewing/embroidering is a big part of that. My newest machine is from 2008. After that, they started adding in all these different electronic features, that are garbage. The machines both break easily and are limited to the technology/software of that time. You want a machine that can sew through leather and silk with the same grace, get an older machine. If you want something newer, avoid electronics or anything with a touchscreen.
My Husqvarna Viking Emerald 118 is so strong that when sewing corsets, my needle commonly punches through the thick ZipTies, that I use for boning, like they were butter. It's a beast of a machine. If she ever breaks, I'm going to find a used one.
is that the same Husqvarna that makes dirt bikes and chainsaws?
Probably at some point in the past yes. Now they've been combined with Singer and a few other brands under these guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVP_Worldwide?wprov=sfla1 who in turn are owned by an equity group so expect the enshitification to really ramp up.
Yes, but the quality is so crappy now. The same model of machine I have from 2008, is being sold today, but it's rickety and not as powerful as it once was. Singer bought the sewing division in 2004 and kept the quality for a bit, but it plunged down in a few years.
How does one become a professional cosplayer? Is it like some freelancing thing where you show up to events?
Not the poster.
Although I guess they can. The ones I've seen are all online.
I consider it a niche of the generic "content creator"... Other examples would be twitch gamers, YouTube channels, even something like onlyfans, etc.
As far as becoming one, start creating content and marketing it. If it becomes popular enough, you get advertising, or sell brand merchandise. If you can live off it, your a professional.
I often use the position of the sun to figure out what direction I'm going.
Yeah that's pretty damn old tech man
Technique yes, technology I would question.
You need to specify whether you're taking about digital or analog technology, or some other limit on the question, because i think you're not looking for answers like "fire" or as another user replied "shoes".
Lever. Suck on that wheel and fire people!
Have you tried setting your lever on fire?
I've got a box with several levers and wheels that runs on fire.
What is it with fire heads wanting to shove fire in everything. Yes, fire has its uses, but c'mon
Improvised hammer. Get bonked, lever boy
I’m pretty sure I got a lever around here somewhere
I've got some wheels on my car still. I think my furnace uses fire when it turns on.
God damn, none of you use toilets? Disgustan!
Still figuring them out honestly, got a under seat bidet attachment for like $25 recently. Immediately realized I had been doing it wrong for a while.
In computing? RS232 interfaces.
In general? Fire.
I eat bread, I drink beer too. Those technologies are both around 40k years old iirc. In terms of computing, probably a calendar, time, or a GBA depending on your definition of computing
Email. Pretty much the first network-related utility.
Fire.
Agriculture
Bicycle
I suppose SSH has been around for ages, I use that
Funny responses, but to get to what you're looking for: IRC.
Used it decades ago, and got back to it a few years ago. Surprisingly, most of the people I chat with are under 40, and it's close knit enough that:
- I play games with them
- Have met, and will meet others
- Hired someone via an IRC connection (who I am now in a channel with after we no longer work together)
I, too, use IRC!
There are dozens of us, DOZENS!
I ude Emacs as my peferred text editor.
Wheel
The headphone jack on the laptop is probably the oldest style computer tech I use.
The oldest physical objects I own and use daily are the iron skillets.
As far as overall, not just computer? I make sourdough bread, grow stuff in a garden. The sourdough uses electricity to cook so that part isn't old tech but the grabbing wild yeast from the air to rise it is ancient technology.
I'd have to say the hair comb.
IPv4? Email? Gas fireplace?
I guess if you want a real answer it's probably the terminal? I prefer terminal over GUI generally speaking.
Terminal for ever!!!!
For a computer, I recently learned there are mod kits for the game boy, so i installed a backlit screen on mine. I use rechargeable batteries with it.
Inclined plane. Arguably older than fire. Used as a part of a pointy stick.
How’d you get up there?
By walking forward.
?!??
Behold: hills
The wheel.
Are you not using knifes?
Fire
A Microsoft SideWinder wheel for Windows 98. Still works great on Windows 11, I use it to play Euro Truck Simulator 2.
A pencil.
Knives.
TCP maybe.
I have a 10 megabit ethernet hub (not switch) that I still use in my homelab. It's just a super easy way to throttle devices and helpful for diagnosing network issues.
i thought i was the only one. i use one occasionally to keep downloads (ahem, updates) or streaming from sucking the internet connection dry.. so i have some left for more important things, like doom scrolling and games. other times (or when the hub's being used elsewhere) i just manually configure the os (in windows, 'speed and duplex' via device manager) to use a slower connection on the lan port. either method comes in handy here where the internet speeds range from "kinda sucks" to "at least it's faster than dialup"
speed and duplex' via device manager
Oh yes, I've been doing that as well. I've trolled myself by forgetting and wondering why everything sucks. Haha
Glad to hear another person does the same. I too wondered if I was alone.
A lot of medical labs still use analyzers and stuff from the '80s and only replace them when they die, so a lot of people getting healthcare might be using older tech than they think :)
Whilst I'm being cheeky, spoon and probably bowl technology remains relatively unchanged for a huge amount of time.
I guess the oldest thing I regularly use is my tractor from the '90s. I do often wish I hadn't accidentally killed my Amiga 500 as I'd likely still be gaming on that occasionally.
Only for niche and custom tests. Or maybe extremely small labs. Everything is automated and has been for many many years. The modem machines read the tube barcode, look up the patient/test, perform the test, and upload the results electronically. The only thing a tech touches is loading/unloading the tube and dealing with errors.
It may have changed more recently (or depend upon country as well), but I was still getting results from old serial/null modem devices about 10 years ago (I worked on the centralized IT side so I didn't see these devices, but this is what the on-site tech was telling me when troubleshooting things)
I'm still using wheels on my bicycle.
You should really rethink using squares on your car though.
GNU Emacs, from the 1980s
Even though I am a vim user. This is a good comment ! Nice editor choice (The only reason I don't use it is because never got used to the keybinds)
You can get Vi keybindings in Emacs, I use Evil mode all the time
Usin' it right now. My first comp sci course had VI-cult people as TAs, and it was their position that VI was the only tool you're going to be using in all your Comp Sci time. I almost dropped out of college in the next two weeks, until one TA said "actually, there are other tools. You have a choice." And I've avoided VI whenever possible since. The few times I use it I will invariably curse the antiquated beep mode.
I'm definitely younger than you because emacs sucks
Haha I wouldn't be so sure about that, I just happen to like these hipster tech. In any case, Emacs is an acquired taste so age doesn't matter that much.
RSS is the first app I would install on new devices if they didn't automatically migrate all my apps and data for me. That there are people who know about RSS and don't use it surprises me, somewhat.
Im 42 been using the internet since i had a 386sx. Been using firefox since it was still netscape navigator. Had a hotmail account from befode microsoft bought it.
I still dont understand how to use rss or what it actually is
I was never able to get back into RSS once Google killed reader. I never found an interface I liked, and it seemed like sites weren't supporting it as much, so I just kinda forgot about it.
Yesterday I used an axe to chop firewood.
A spade or a shovel or something??
On special occasions I grind coffee beans with a small wooden frame coffee grinder my grandparents got as wedding present sometime in the 1930's. Made and gifted for the couple by the grooms brother.
My brother bought me a coffee grinder for Christmas last year. Before that i was using a mortar and pestle
RSS feeds are so nice. I'm still frustrated that Facebook moved away from an in-order timeline. (Or would be if I used it for anything other than family chats)
An ordered list of things you haven't seen yet on <topic> instead of a mostly random list from everywhere. Amazing.
A lever and a pulley and an inclined plane.
1990s solar powered calculator.
I hope they dig one up in 10000 years and it still works.
SQL.
I still use a sony walkman to listen to music on cassette tape. Unlike my phone, it has a headphone jack. It's also nice being able to physically own music in such a compact form factor. It helps that the artists I listen to are starting to put their albums on tape as well.
Back when you could actually record shit easily. Wanna record something now? Fuck you, impossible.
I've made playlists on Spotify and then ripped them to tape before, I made my girlfriend a mixtape a few months ago actually.
Probably the FM radio.
Or the fridge or the light bulb.
Maybe my DS Lite? It's from 18 years ago and I still kinda like the form factor. Honorable mentions to my DSi and DSi XL. They all have working batteries still too, go figure!
I have a Kindle from 2011 that's still in perfect condition and gets daily use. Every now and then I'm tempted to get a newer eReader but I can't come up with a single reason to actually do it.
My wife just dug an old iPod that must be from ~2008 from some box in the basement so she can listen to music at work all day without killing the battery on her phone.
Well, I have a private aircraft first designed in 1783...
Wat?
I'm a hot air balloon pilot. Manned hot air ballooning traces back to 1783 France, where Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes flew a balloon constructed by the Montgolfier brothers.
Hot air balloons were the first manned aircraft, beating manned gas balloons (hydrogen) by 10 days, and the Wright brothers by 120 years.
To be fair, modern hot air ballooning only goes back to Ed Yost in 1960, as it was a royal pain in the ass to heat an envelope before propane burners were invented. But the underlying technology (a big sack of hot air carrying people aloft) is 4 years older than the constitution.
Black powder guns. What a total pain in the ass. But they're damned fun when they go bang.
I still occasionally use the bread maker my family got as a gift about 30 years ago.
Holy crap. Gopher is old AF.
I drive a 20 year old car and my main phone is a dumbphone made in 2017. I also use that to play 20 year old mp3s.
Zune, 2nd gen. Pretty much only on road trips since the battery only lasts about 10 minutes but as long as that squircle keeps working, the tunes keep flowing.
I miss my Zunes. No idea where they are.
I have a “data transcription machine” which is meant to pull data off of old media. It has:
- 3½″+5¼″ combo floppy drive
- IDE hot swap cage
- Zip 250 IDE drive
- Jaz 2Gb SCSI drive
- Internal 50-pin and 68-pin SCSI controllers
Let’s just say that I have enough devices cross my bench that SpinRite 6 gets a monthly workout on some piece of old storage tech or another. Not everything is recoverable, but…
Bet it sounds awesome
I still use emacs pretty frequently for coding. I forced myself to start with VSCode recently, and it was way bigger an improvement than I expected it to be, but being able to do text editing without an extended negotiation with the software being involved is still pretty nice sometimes.
Not my most used tools but I've got a few axes that are probably 50 to 100 years old
Email?
I love artificial lights, without them interior lighting would be hard af with candles
Clothing probaby. Admittedly, it's a bit more advanced than simple animal furs. I also have a knife, but again, probably a touch better than a sharpened piece of flint...
I own a balance scale, I was getting sick of dying batteries in modern ones
I still have a monitor on my main setup that uses DVI because I'm too cheap to upgrade.
I'm still using my dvi monitor because i have a relative cheap computer, it's 1080p but i don't care, but i'm finally going to upgrade my whole setup (in sometime), because i'm planning to use my current computer as a server and it was cheaper to buy new really good computer then it was to buy a refurbished one (weirdly enough)
Before upgrading to a 49inch super ultra wide monitor i used the same monitor for 20 years. Was an odd resolution 2048×1152
I still have the old one too just don't have any deskspace for it
my iPod Touch 4 that currently works as a whatever i want information displayer. I've previously made it display CPU/GPU temps and RAM usage percentage as a graph, but now it pretty much is a terminal command history log displayer.
I occasionally harness fire. Does that count?
Only if you use a flint and tinder. Alternatively, finding and keeping a lightning started fire alive is acceptable.
Usenet and IRC maybe.
I got a rock I use for smashin sometimes.
My clock radio alarm is from the late 80's, I guess. It was my Dad's before and it still works fine.
I listen to radio
Newspapers, online news is an echo chamber of personalized content
FTP
I'm a zoomer but I use FTP to transfer files to and from my 3DS
I still use clippers bought in 2015
I love an automatic mechanical watch. Still use CDs. At work I occasionally need to use 3.5" floppy disks. Still read paper books.
Lenovo Thinkpad X200t by your intended meaning. I don't know if my Meade ETX-60 is older... might be... I haven't checked date codes or anything, but I have several microprocessors and discrete logic chips for breadboarding. Probably, the oldest is a tossup between Z80, 6502, 8088, 6800, 68k, or some CD4000 series logic. Maybe a few of my 74xx chips are older. I have a little bench power supply that was made in the 50's somewhere in my closet. I have a Wander bike my family put in storage that is from the 40's or early 50's.
Various styles of loincloth and several different clubs
Do you mean oldest as in invented the longest time ago or oldest as in that specific technological artefact that i use is the oldest one i have?
For the first one i guess cooking?
For the second one its definitely my microwave oven, made in 1991.Teletext
Shoes.
awk
grep
sed
and lots of other individual programs written long before I was bornThe domain name system
The web
email
RSSwired everything
It would actually be easier to list the things I use that wouldn't be considered old, as those are the exceptions.
Headphone jacks and BNC connectors for computing. For hammering things, a rock sometimes.
Mid nineties guitar.
Why would someone down vote you. I bumped you back up
Blanket. I'm believe that technology was invented before clothes or even fire.
Apart from the obvious stuff like wheels and fire:
I recently got my hands on an analogue camera (Canon EOS 300), which I'm now using to take some pictures. The first batch of pictures got back last week and confirmed to me that the device is still in working condition.
Besides that I also have an old Philips tape player that used to use until one of the gears snapped in half. I ordered a replacement gear but getting to the gear and replacing it has proven more challenging than hoped so I'm not using it currently.
And I still collect CDs, even though I also use Spotify.
I'm pretty similar. I don't have an analog camera myself, but I'm using one. I Like that the cost of a picture (both in money and in Work that i have to do for getting and developing Film ) forces me to BE more considerate about what to Photograph.
I also have an old Tapedeck (Yamaha K350) where I'm still planning to replace the ribbon as well. I started making Mixtapes a few years Back.
And I buy CDs. It's the best time to buy them IMHO. People sell them very cheap on eBay.
Edit: And I have an old iPod 6th gen with Rockbox that I use almost every day. -> 3.5mm jack is also apparently an old technology that I find Superior.
There's a few appliances that we refuse to let go. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. My wife loves our early 1970's General Electric range. It's got push button controls that are built into the range hood. That was actually a brilliant idea since it keeps the controls from getting all greasy and my little kids can't reach them.
Our old vacuum, a 1953 Kirby (which I've had for 25 years) has been semi-retired. Our house has a 1970's Kenmore central vac. Just put a new motor in it last year so it should be good to go for a while, hopefully.
I bought a manual scale, because all the electric ones turn off automatically before i get a chance look how much it actually weighs and there is no easy way to subtract the weight of the plate. Also no super specific small batteries bs. Edit: it can do Tara but if it shuts itself off while i was measuring flour, now i have flour on a plate. How do i know how much the flour weighs minus the plate? That's my problem.
What electronic scale doesn't have a tare function?
You just need better digital scales. As much as I love analog stuff digital scales have just become so damn good analog can't compete for anything needing any kind of precision.
Your scale can't tare? For real? I've literally never seen a scale without it.
Beer!
Love an analog clock
Rtf
PS Vita for Gundam Breaker 3. The end of this god damned month can’t come soon enough, I’m so fuckin’ excited for Breaker 4.
Paper datewheel
My penis is pretty old at this point...
Less than half a century, you youngling
I'm only as old as I feel and me and my wrinkled-ass dick feel pretty old
I keep an iPod in my purse, but I also keep a gameboy pocket in there for a hundredth Pokemon Red playthrough whenever I have some downtime.
My receiver for my tv setup is a 1970s Pioneer. I like the big ol knobs on it and the warm lighting.
Edit to add I also love my Pebble smart watches (Go Rebble for keeping them running!)
If we're talking about technology that is no longer widely used, it's probably my old HP48SX from the early 90s. Still use it sometimes as a desk calculator, though I have an HP48GX emulator app on my phone as well. Gotta have my RPN.
CRT TV
A printer that is older than me, Samsung SCX-4216F. It supports fax, maybe I should set it up some time. A satellite receiver that supports only SD streams. Olympics are streamed from 2 channels and one of them does not have SD variant so we have to stream games on that channel from Internet.
Baretail
I use my lungs which were invented quite a while before I was born