15 Obsolete Technologies That Are, Somehow, Still Thriving Somewhere

Backlash against a fax machine ban in Japan proves that the technology is still going strong.

Though they may seem obsolete, there are still many uses for things like fax machines, floppy disks, pagers, and dot matrix printers. In Japan, the fax machine is still a central pillar of communication in both corporate and government environments. An effort to banish faxes from Tokyo’s bureaucratic district has been met with surprising backlash. Also, there is still a market for floppy disks in certain industries like embroidery, tool and die, aviation because some planes built decades ago can only receive or send data through them. And pagers might be old-school but according to a study from the Journal of Hospital Medicine nearly 80% of hospitals still use them because cell signals have trouble penetrating some walls in hospitals and pagers signal multiple satellites. Meanwhile, COBOL is making a comeback governments and banks are pleading for COBOL programmers due to qualities that make it well suited to business programming domains, and dot matrix printers are used at airports because they're compatible with the reservation system, their ink is cheaper and these types of printers don't break down as often.