7 Technologies That Flatly Refuse to Die

Technology writing loves a funeral. Formats get declared dead constantly, usually by people who have just bought the replacement.

Then you look at the numbers. Seven corpses that are still very much working, with the receipts.

1. Vinyl Records

The headline case. Vinyl revenue in the United States overtook CD revenue back in 2020, and by 2022 vinyl was outselling CDs in actual units for the first time since 1987. In 2024 that meant roughly 44 million vinyl albums against 33 million CDs, with vinyl revenue around 1.4 billion dollars and growing for an eighteenth consecutive year. A format that requires a physical needle in a physical groove is beating the digital format built to replace it. Pressing plants have had genuine backlogs, which is a supply problem nobody in 1999 was preparing for.

2. The Fax Machine

Still deeply embedded in Japanese business and government, and in German medical administration, for a reason more interesting than nostalgia. A fax produces a physical artefact with a timestamp, requires no account, and sits in a legal grey area that many institutions find comfortable. Japan’s government has repeatedly tried to phase them out and repeatedly discovered that the people using them do not want to stop.

3. The Pager

Hospitals kept pagers long after the rest of the world abandoned them, and the reasoning is sound. Pagers run for weeks on one battery, penetrate thick building walls where mobile signal fails, and work when the mobile network is overloaded, which is exactly the situation in which a hospital most needs to reach a surgeon. A device with one function that never fails beats a device with a thousand functions that occasionally does.

4. The Floppy Disk

Aviation kept these alive for decades, with navigation database updates on certain older airliners loaded from floppies well into the current era. Japan’s government only announced it had eliminated its remaining floppy disk requirements in 2024, having found hundreds of regulations that still specified them. The reason is always the same: the system works, certifying a replacement costs a fortune, and nothing about the disk has broken.

5. COBOL

A programming language from 1959 still runs an enormous share of banking, insurance and government benefits. This became briefly famous in 2020 when several American states, overwhelmed by unemployment claims, publicly appealed for COBOL programmers, most of whom had retired. The code works. It has worked for fifty years. Nobody wants to be the person who rewrites the system that pays everyone.

6. The Cassette Tape

Smaller than the vinyl story and stranger. Cassette sales have climbed for years, driven partly by artists issuing limited runs and partly by a generation that never owned one. The audio quality is worse in every measurable respect. That appears to be part of the appeal, in the same way a slightly out-of-focus photograph now reads as authentic.

7. The Dot Matrix Printer

Alive in logistics and workshops for one specific reason: impact printing can produce multi-part carbonless forms in a single pass. A laser printer cannot. If you need three copies of a delivery note simultaneously, in a dusty warehouse, on continuous perforated paper, the 1980s already solved your problem and modern printing has nothing to offer you.

What They Have in Common

Look at the reasons rather than the objects. Vinyl and cassettes survive because they are pleasant in ways that have nothing to do with fidelity. Fax, floppies and COBOL survive because replacing a working system in a regulated environment costs more than tolerating an old one. Pagers and dot matrix printers survive because they do one job under conditions where clever things break.

None of that is nostalgia. It is durability, boring and unglamorous, which is why the technology press keeps failing to predict it.