Ask Slashdot: What Old Technology Can't You Give Up? 635
An anonymous reader writes: It's the year 2014, and I still have a floppy drive installed on my computer. I don't know why; I don't own any floppy disks, and I haven't used one in probably a decade. But every time I put together a PC, it feels incomplete if I don't have one. I also have a Laserdisc player collecting dust at the bottom of my entertainment center, and I still use IRC to talk to a few friends. Software, hardware, or otherwise, what technology have you had a hard time letting go? (I don't want to put a hard limit on age, so you folks using flip-phones or playing on Dreamcasts or still inexplicably coding in Perl 4, feel free to contribute.)
Telnet-based BBS. (Score:1, Informative)
I've been on it since '93, and it's still going okay: telnet://bbs.iscabbs.com. (Formerly of UIowa, but split off some six or seven years ago.)
Re: slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
Stop saying that. Einstein never said that. And he was a physicist.
Re:Local storage (Score:4, Informative)
If you're going to do that, at least use IMAP (Unless you're a Comcast customer, in which case, you have my condolences). IMAP lets you keep mail on the server and even organize it, rather than just having one huge Inbox. I use it on two desktops, a laptop, a smartphone, two Android tablets, and a webmail client (RoundCube).
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say that if you really need those advanced features that vi is the way to go, but admittedly pico/nano is a lot easier to use otherwise.
As for what I use that's old, I have a Dolby-AC3-capable laserdisc player and more than 500 titles and an S-VHS VCR with about 850 titles on tape, I'm hesitant to buy a laptop lacking an optical drive (though my pickings are quite slim these days), I'm still using a Gateway 2000 "Anykey" PS/2 124-key macro-programmable keyboard manufactured by Maxiswitch, the vast majority of my computer monitors are 4:3 ratio, I still have my SCSI Jaz2 drive, my SCSI Zip drive, a couple of 3.5" floppy drive, and one 5.25" floppy drive laying around, and my daily-use TV is a widescreen, high-definition tube . It works great! Cost me only $40! And at 126lb, no one is going to steal it. In fairness, it fits the built-in TV cabinet perfectly and at the time a similarly-sized LCD model was close to $600, so it made sense to go with the tube.
I don't necessarily equate old with obsolete. Obsolete is when it doesn't do the job that you need done satisfactorily. In that sense my 20 year old beater $700 pickup truck with no straight sheet metal and worn-out steering is fine, as I generally only drive it when either I need a truck specifically, or when one of the cars is out of commission and I need basic transportation in the interim. I'm typing this on a five-year-old netbook with an Atom processor, and I only recently replaced my Xeon-Gallatin-based dual processor workstation from a decade ago because the thing croaked after a power outage and doesn't want to come back up. It was a great box for a long time, even with only two cores. It's been replaced with a newer-used dual-quad Xeon workstation that I expect to use for another decade as my workstation and the whole-house server.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, real pros use
cat > filename
then type Ctrl-d when done.
Seriously.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Informative)
Re: A few small but significant ones ... (Score:2, Informative)
http://hackaday.io/project/907... [hackaday.io]
If not, there are a few of the Griffin ones on eBay for $20-30.
Re:A basic land line (Score:4, Informative)