The IRS still uses Assembly and COBOL.
We’re only 5 years on from the US defense system relying on 8 inch floppy disks (out of production since the 80s), and Sony only stopped producing Betamax in 2015.
Formats have long hidden lives when enough money gets spent on their implementation.
I’m an electronic security tech. I’ve installed alarm systems in 2024 whose design hasn’t changed since the 80s. If they want “modernized” remote control over a network, they usually slap on some sort of external unit like a cell radio or Ethernet adapter that does the translation to the decades-old protocols.
We still have to program the damn things with a USB to RS-232 adapter too.
I got to leave RS-232 behind a couple years ago when I no longer needed to maintain my own rack switches. My condolences.
It might be old and slow, but I love RS-232. It works on every platform, you can write a client or server in just about any programming language in a handful of lines (and understand what they all do). I’ve literally made working RS-232 connections with paperclips and scotch tape. After the corpo wars when we’re all computing on salvaged tech you’ll come to appreciate it.
I know of a door access control company that’s replacing systems from the 90s. The architecture back then was to have one central box that spiders out to each door. The doors only have an electric latch and a scanner.
Which isn’t how you’d design it today. That one box is a central point of failure for the whole building. You’d have microcontrollers at point of use that can cache access data and operate on their own if the server goes down. But these places want it to work like the old stuff, so it’s still designed that way.
RS-232 isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s so simple that any microcontroller can use it.
Many Japan businesses still require official documents to be endorsed using carved personal stamps called hanko, despite the government’s efforts to phase them out.
Please submit your résumé in cuneiform.
Perhaps because they still work?
And, unlike flash storage, magnetic media can retain data indefinitely when stored without power.
magnetic media can retain data indefinitely when stored without power.
That is not true. Old floppy disks often do not work anymore (old as in 15-20 years unused).
It is true. I said can retain data indefinitely, not will retain data forever.
(And in any case, being pedantic here misses the point.)
Sounds more like war on a bunch of legacy regulation that needed to be updated requiring their use.
