Sure, you are happy to be living in the technological wonderland that is 2015 but you might be surprised at how many not-so-hepcats still use incredibly old fashioned technology.
While you swipe your fancy new iPhone´s screen and mess up the space time continuum in your time machine, these people still use stuff that you thought could only be found in museums.
Which old fashioned technology do you still use?
Punch Cards
Using punch cards to put information into computers sounds like the kind of thing that people stopped doing round about the same time that having more than one TV channel became an option. However, in these days of broadband internet, millions of TV channels and noodles that you just add hot water to there are still about 450 million punch cards sold a year. The main purchasers seems to be governments, presumably because the secret information on aliens, man-made diseases and Michael Buble´s real mission on Earth can´t be hacked from a punch card.
Floppy Disks
Do you remember the days when you needed about 5000 floppy disks just to save a single page of your homework? Now that we can use CDs, flash drives and big hard drives surely no sane person still has a mountain of floppy disks they use? Well, some dude somewhere is buying a helluva lot of them. British company Verbatim say that they sell millions of the ridiculous things every month but who buys them?
Windows XP
Windows XP was brought out in 2001, which is like a gazillion years ago in computer terms. Microsoft doesn´t support it anymore, meaning that machines using XP are vulnerable to attack. Despite this, a third of desktop PCs and 95% of bank ATMs are said to still use it. Disclaimer: this was written on a machine running Windows XP, although no floppy disks were used in the process.
Beepers
Jeepers creepers, where´d you get that freaking beeper? You may have thought that the rise of a little gadget called the cell phone had blown beepers out of the water. You would be as wrong about this as you were about the punch cards and other antiquated crap. We assume that TV doctors account for a fair percentage of the estimated 36 million beepers still in use around the world.
Dial Up Internet
This is possibly the strangest entry on the list. The mere mention of dial up internet takes up back those olden, golden days of spending an entire day trying to find out when the next Nirvana album was due out and whether those Richard Gere rumors were true. Despite a huge fall in popularity, people who count these things tell me that 2% of Americans still use dial up internet. It is assumed that many people have the service and don´t realize that they can cancel it now that they´ve got broadband as well. It is also the only option for some residents of places so remote that chewing blades of grass is the only other viable weekend leisure activity.
VHS Tapes
One entire wall of my bedroom was once taken up by VHS tapes. Well, one wall plus the little space under my bed where my secret collection went. Thankfully, no one in the whole known universe still uses them now. Or do they? It seems as though 50% of homes in the US still have a VHS recorder. You can still buy VHS tapes online too, although if you try and do this using dial up internet you´ll probably lose the will to live before completing the transaction.
