Security by Antiquity: Why the Oldest Thing in Your Building Might Be the Safest
The old machine in the corner of your building is not there because nobody got around to replacing it. In more places than you would expect, it is there because somebody decided it should stay.
That is a very different sentence, and it changes what you do next.
Phil Whelan and I spent our segment on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew this week on a phrase that has been doing the rounds since Chris Baraniuk wrote it up for BBC Future last week: why older tech is sometimes safer from hackers. Security by antiquity. The idea that older, unfashionable, thoroughly out-of-date technology is sometimes safer from attack than the shiny thing that replaced it. We started with jokes about fax machines and ended up somewhere I did not expect, which is usually the sign of a good conversation.
You can listen to the full segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew below:
What security by antiquity actually means
The phrase comes from Mikko Hyppönen, the Finnish security researcher, who kept running the email client Eudora long after it stopped being supported. He noticed something. As everyone else migrated to Gmail, the attackers migrated with them, and Eudora went quiet. Not because it had become secure. Because it had become irrelevant to anyone trying to make money.
His reasoning is commercial, not technical. The overwhelming majority of attackers are criminals running a business. It makes no sense to spend weeks building an exploit for a system that fifty people use, when the same effort buys you access to fifty million.
So the old thing is not impenetrable. It is unwatched. On air I put it this way: if you have a Nokia phone, who is going to bother hacking a Nokia phone? There are probably three of them left. You would be better off going after an iPhone.
Being ignored is not the same as being safe, and I want to be blunt about that before we go any further. Hyppönen’s own old Nokia runs software with known holes that will never be patched. The man who coined the phrase says plainly that fully patched modern software is still the better position. Security by antiquity is a narrow exception with a short list of legitimate uses. It is not a strategy. Anybody reading this as permission to keep running unsupported systems has read it backwards.
The signal underneath the joke
Here is what I think is actually happening, and it has very little to do with nostalgia.
For thirty years we have made everything faster, thinner, more capable and more connected. Connected is the word to sit with. Every connection is a convenience and a surface. We bought the convenience enthusiastically and we accepted the surface without ever pricing it.
We are finding out now what that surface costs. Satellite navigation, the technology that let aviation retire a whole generation of ground equipment, turns out to be jammable by somebody with modest gear and a reason to use it. Ireland has slowed the decommissioning of its ground-based radio beacons and is keeping them alive, and its aviation authority has described that publicly as part of a planned resilience strategy. That is not sentiment. That is a regulator looking at interference across European airspace and deciding the redundant thing is not redundant after all.
We made the same call here, and we made it a decade earlier. When satellite navigation became the primary means of instrument navigation in Australian airspace in 2016, Airservices Australia did not switch off the old network. It kept a Backup Navigation Network running: more than two hundred ground-based navigation aids at 124 airports, maintained and monitored, for the specific case where a pilot cannot get a signal from space. Most Australians have never heard of it. It has been quietly standing by for ten years.
I said on air that this is the cockroach. When everything sophisticated stops working, the thing you nearly threw out comes back to life. Phil and I have circled this before. Back in June we spent a segment on Marconi and what radio still does that nothing has replaced, and the same property kept surfacing: a signal that does not need permission, a subscription or a satellite.
This is what I mean by Immediate Futures, which is my shorthand for the part of the future that has already turned up and is waiting on a decision. It is not a scenario for 2035. It is a decision sitting on a desk this quarter, in aviation, in logistics, in any organisation whose operations quietly assume a signal will keep arriving.
Capability is not resilience, and we keep buying one while assuming the other
This is the sentence I would put on the wall of every procurement meeting I have ever sat in.
Capability is what a technology does on its best day. Resilience is what is left when the day goes badly. They are not the same property. They are not even closely related.
Capability is what the vendor demonstrated. Capability is what the business case measured. Capability is what everyone in the room agreed they were buying. Resilience is the one nobody costed, because there was no line for it and nobody was rewarded for asking.
Ask any executive team what their core platform does and you will get a fluent, confident, well-rehearsed answer. Ask the same team what happens on the morning it is not there, and watch the room. In my experience you get one of three responses: a reference to a document nobody has opened in two years, a name of a vendor, or a slightly nervous joke. That gap is not a technology problem. It is a decision-making problem, and it belongs to the board, not to IT.
I wrote about a version of this in Why speed is no longer the advantage leaders think it is. The organisations getting caught out right now are rarely the slow ones. They are the ones that optimised hard for a single good day and never asked what the bad one looks like.
The lesson Melbourne learned the expensive way
Phil asked whether governments are the worst offenders for running out-of-date equipment. They talk about security constantly and they are famously slow to replace anything. I told him what I think is true. The link exists in the press releases. It does not exist in the budget.
Then I told him about myki, our Melbourne public transport ticketing system, because it makes the opposite point, and it is the one leaders actually need.
Myki was set up around twenty-five years ago and cost a couple of billion dollars. It began as a physical card that worked with nothing else, which meant losing the card meant losing everything on it. When it finally moved onto phones, it moved onto Android. Only Android. Earlier this year our state government announced with genuine fanfare that iPhone users could finally tap on, and even then only partly, on a trial set of lines, at full fare, with no concession discount at all. Governments in Victoria have been elected and unelected over that system, literally rather than figuratively, and we still cannot get it right.
Phil, who visits once every year or two, told me Hong Kong’s Octopus card is so good that locals have stopped noticing it. That is the highest compliment infrastructure can receive.
Here is what I take from the comparison. The failure was not that Myki was old. The failure was that it was never designed to be replaced, extended or survived. Nobody asked at the beginning what happens when the world changes around it, and so twenty-five years later the answer is: we hold a series of press conferences.
Old technology that was designed to be maintained ages into an asset. Old technology that was designed only to launch ages into a hostage situation.
What the BlackBerry actually tells us
We spent a few minutes on the BlackBerry, and I think it is the sharpest historical analogy available here.
The BlackBerry was, in its day, genuinely close to unhackable. Standalone, locked down, and carried by governments, corporates, the Pope and the Queen. It was the phone you handed someone when nothing could be allowed to leak. It did exactly what it said on the bottle.
And it died anyway. Not because the security failed. Because it was expensive, niche and difficult to build for, and because the iPhone arrived with more features and more delight and made the trade look unreasonable. Every additional toy on a phone requires somebody else’s code, and somebody else’s code is somebody else’s hole. BlackBerry refused that bargain and the market walked past it.
That is the whole tension of this subject in one product. Security and capability were placed on a seesaw and we chose capability, collectively, deliberately, and mostly without noticing we were choosing. Next year the iPhone turns twenty. Twenty years is an eternity in technology. It is also long enough that most people in your organisation have never worked in a world where the trade was framed any other way.
The fax machine, the pencil and the floppy disk
Three things came up that made us both laugh, and all three have a sting.
The fax. In Australian medical practice, clinics and hospitals still keep one, because a fax receipt is treated as proof of delivery in a way an email receipt is not. It sits outside the email attack surface entirely. Most modern faxing is cloud-based and is really just data moving between machines, but in the medical case there is genuinely a machine at each end, for the one or two things a week that come from an official body.
The pencil. Australia still counts a federal election by hand, on paper, with pencils, and the Australian Electoral Commission’s reasoning is almost comically practical: pencils do not run out, staff can sharpen them all day, they store between elections and they work in the tropics. On air I said the requirement was constitutional. That is the story most Australians tell each other, including me, and it is worth correcting: the rules live in electoral law and AEC practice, not in the 1901 Constitution. The better argument is the one people reach for instinctively anyway. A paper ballot leaves physical evidence a scrutineer can stand next to and examine. Software leaves a log, and a log is a claim about evidence rather than the evidence itself.
The floppy disk. San Francisco’s Muni Metro train control system still loads from five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, on software installed in the 1990s, and the city has now signed a contract worth around 212 million US dollars to move off them. I find that joyous rather than embarrassing. That system survived thirty years because it worked and because it was not attached to anything. The bill arriving now is not the cost of the floppies. It is the cost of thirty years of deferred decisions landing in a single financial year.
The ripple nobody costs in
Now the part that matters most, and the part I want leaders to act on.
Every organisation that keeps an old system alive for resilience reasons is depending on two things it almost never tracks.
The first is obscurity, and obscurity decays. The old system was safe because nobody was looking. The moment resilience planning becomes fashionable, and it is becoming fashionable, attackers start looking at exactly the places everyone is retreating to. A backup that is publicly known to be the backup is a target with a schedule attached. If your continuity plan names the old system as the fallback, you have converted your quiet advantage into a published one.
The second is people, and people leave. The engineer who can bring the legacy system up from cold is usually one person, sometimes two, and they are almost always near the end of their career. Nothing they know is written down, because it never needed to be while they were there.
Resilience that lives in one person’s memory is not resilience. It is one person, and one person retires.
That is a Ripple Effect in its purest form, and Ripple Effects is simply my way of insisting that we follow a change past its first consequence to its second and third. The first-order consequence of keeping old technology is that you have a fallback. The second-order consequence is that the fallback is undocumented. The third is that your genuine continuity capability quietly expires on a date set by a retirement, and nobody has that date in a risk register.
There is a related one worth naming. Insurers, auditors and regulators are all moving in the opposite direction from resilience thinking. They will read an unsupported system as an unmanaged risk and price it accordingly, whether or not you kept it on purpose. If you are going to run old technology deliberately, you now need the paperwork that says deliberately. Intent that exists only in a corridor conversation will not survive an audit.
Nostalgia is the trap sitting right next to the insight
I closed the segment on nostalgia, because it is where this whole conversation goes wrong.
Retro is having an enormous run. Vinyl. Flip phones. Valve radios with their tubes warming up and glowing, which I will admit I find lovely. Even McDonald’s has gone back to the seventies for a menu, sold entirely on a feeling that things were once cheaper and simpler and more family-shaped. Samsung’s folding phone is selling well and Apple is widely expected to follow. Nostalgia is a warm hug from your grandmother, and in an anxious era a warm hug sells.
I have written before that your business is more likely to be killed by nostalgia than by AI, and I have not changed my mind. Everything I have said in this piece is about deliberate, documented, tested redundancy. None of it is an argument for keeping something because it feels safer, or because replacing it is uncomfortable, or because it is what you know.
The difference between resilience and nostalgia is a single question, and you can ask it in about four seconds. Can you say precisely what failure this old thing protects you against? If yes, it is infrastructure. If no, it is furniture. Most organisations have a great deal of furniture and very little infrastructure, and the two look identical from the doorway.
Three Things I Recommend You Do
The first thing to do is run a bad-day inventory on your three most critical systems. Not a risk register, which is a list of things that might happen. A specific, written answer to what your organisation does on the morning each system is unavailable, who does it, and for how long that can hold. Give it to someone junior to write, because they will ask the questions everyone senior has stopped asking. If the answer to any of the three is a vendor’s name and nothing else, you have found your first project.
The second thing to do is separate your deliberate legacy from your accidental legacy, in writing, this quarter. Walk the estate and mark every out-of-date system as either kept on purpose, with the failure it insures against stated in one sentence, or simply not yet replaced. The second list is your security exposure and should be remediated on a schedule. The first list is infrastructure and needs a maintenance budget, a documented recovery procedure and a named successor for whoever currently keeps it breathing. Doing nothing is the option that quietly chooses the worst of both.
The third thing to do is pick one analogue fallback for the thing you would most hate to lose, and test it in the next ninety days. Printed contact lists. A paper process for taking an order. A radio or a satellite messenger if you have people in the field. Copies of your critical data on something you can physically unplug, because ransomware cannot encrypt what is not attached to anything. Then actually run a morning on it, with real staff, and time it. An untested fallback is a story you tell yourselves. A tested one is a capability, and the gap between the two is usually discovered at the worst possible moment.
What I keep coming back to
Every organisation I work with can tell me what its technology does on a good day. Almost none can tell me what happens on the day it is not there.
That is not a technology gap. It is a question that never got asked, because the business case had no box for it and nobody was rewarded for raising it. Security by antiquity is a curiosity. The reason it has struck a nerve this month is that it points at something much larger and much less funny: we have spent three decades buying capability and telling ourselves we were buying certainty.
Not prediction. Preparation. The old radio beacon at a regional airport is not a relic. It is somebody’s answer to a question that most boards have still not been asked.
Ask it this month, while it is cheap to ask.
Choose Forward.
If your organisation has bought a lot of capability and never priced the resilience, that is exactly the kind of decision I work through with leadership teams and boards: what the signals mean, what the ripple effects are, and what to do before the bad morning arrives. Get in touch.
You can also subscribe to my Immediate Futures briefing, a short weekly read on the signals worth paying attention to, written for leaders who want to stay ahead of what is already arriving.
#SecurityByAntiquity #CyberResilience #LegacyTechnology #BusinessContinuity #RiskManagement #Leadership #FutureOfWork #DigitalResilience #MorrisMisel #RTHK #MorningBrew #ChooseForward
Frequently Asked Questions
What does security by antiquity mean?
It means that older, out-of-date technology is sometimes safer from attack simply because almost nobody is targeting it any more. The systems are not stronger. They are ignored. Most attackers are running a business, and it rarely pays to build an exploit for something that only fifty people still use.
Is old technology actually more secure than new technology?
No, and this is where the idea gets misread. Fully patched modern software is still the better position. Unsupported systems carry known holes that will never be fixed. The narrow exception is technology that is deliberately kept because it does not depend on a signal, a network or a connection that can be interfered with.
Why is Australia keeping old radio navigation beacons at airports?
When satellite navigation became the primary means of instrument navigation in Australian airspace in 2016, Airservices Australia kept a Backup Navigation Network of more than two hundred ground-based navigation aids at 124 airports. It exists for the case where a pilot cannot get a signal from space. Ireland made a similar call this year after satellite interference across European airspace.
What is the difference between capability and resilience?
Capability is what a technology does on its best day. Resilience is what is left when the day goes badly. They are different properties, and most business cases measure the first while staying silent on the second. Organisations buy capability and assume resilience came with it.
How do I tell deliberate legacy technology from neglected legacy technology?
Ask one question about each old system: can you state precisely what failure it protects you against? If you can, it is infrastructure and needs a maintenance budget, a documented recovery procedure and a named successor. If you cannot, it is furniture and it is a security exposure.
Does this mean my organisation should keep running unsupported software?
No. Nothing in this argument supports keeping unpatched systems on your live estate. What it supports is deliberate, documented, tested redundancy, chosen for a stated failure mode and written down so it survives an audit and a retirement.
Full Segment Transcript, RTHK Radio 3, The Brew, 25 August 2026 ▼ Click to expand
Morris Misel speaking with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew. Machine transcribed, lightly corrected for names.
Blue Boy, I'm Radio 3. That is called Remember Me. Morris Miselowski is in Melbourne. How are you? I'm very good. Happy to be remembered and happy Tuesday everyone.
Happy Tuesday to you, Morris. I saw an article floating around the web. It's actually a BBC article and it says, Security By Antiquity. Stop it, you'll go blind. I know. Security By Antiquity.
Why older tech is sometimes safer from hackers. We've mentioned this in passing and in jest last week, but it seems to be a thing now you hide in crummy old tech. It seems to be this nostalgia about it, doesn't it? I just think people are too lazy or whatever it is to get new tech, but no. In some cases it actually seems to make sense, or they think it does. What they're saying is that not that old tech is really not hackable, they're not saying it's impenetrable.
It hides. What they're saying is nobody's looking. It hides in plain sight, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you've got a Nokia phone, who's going to try hacking a Nokia phone? Because there's probably three in the world.
Would you really bother? You'd be better off trying to hack an iPhone. And that really is what's behind a lot of this. The technology is old, it's stable, you know it works, you know, leave well enough alone. It's not the greatest, fastest, best that it can be. But nobody's looking at you, so it's fairly safe.
And in some places that kind of makes sense. Hmm. Okay, well, the governments the world over are fairly well known for using equipment that is well out of date. Basically, that one.But then these same governments talk about security all the time, so I'm wondering if there's a link. There is in their press releases, but not in reality. So yeah, I mean they're not going to spend the budget again quite quickly enough, unless there's some reason for it being cynical.
So we're stuck with a lot of old technology. And Melbourne is the prime example of that. You have the wonderful octopus system, that wonderful thing that all of you take for granted and you must not. You don't use it. You must remember how wonderful it is because it actually does things for you. It actually lets you in and out of transports.
Oh loads of things. Buy things. Yeah. I mean it just is wonderful. And there's an outsider who only gets to use it once every year or two. Ours is atrocious.
Is it? Out. Yeah, yeah. So we have a system whereby you can get on and off the trains, on and off trams, on and off buses. And with that you have a card called the myki card, myki, that's been around for about 25 years. It set up about 25 years ago cost a couple of billion dollars.
Oh yeah. It was unusable on any kind of technology. So you have a physical card for it. If you lost a physical card, you know, you get where that's going. I do. But then they put it on to technology.
But they forgot that there are people that use iPhones. And it only worked on Android. It only worked to a certain capacity. So literally five months ago, our state government announced with fanfare, with absolute fanfare, that now iPhone users could use it on public transport to an extent. Oh yeah.And the extent is that you can have it preload for you, but it doesn't work if you're a concession card holder and All sorts of things so we have this technology that's cost us literally billions and billions of dollars Governments have been voted in and voted out because of it in Victoria literally not figuratively and we still can't get it right I think Morris and I may be wrong and I should I think that if people are concession card holders here if they're over 60 there was like $2, but I think they have to have a card now Please tell me if I'm wrong most other things you can use your phone you just whip out your phone doink and you're in But if you're an Android user and you have a new concession card holder, there's no problem. It absolutely works Okay, just can't they just can't get it to work on an iPhone yet They say they have fanfare says it has but it hasn't rolled out everywhere You know give us a bit of time is what they're saying we're gonna roll it out slowly over a couple of months It's not like this technology is you know, we're going to be careful with iPhones might be going to gods and talking to that Do you know that last year unless I next year next year?
Yeah is iPhones 20th birthday it'll be the 20th version of iPhone that comes out is that is that fast mover in the big picture I mean 20 years for it to go No, I mean 20 years is adorable in technology But in some ways you know for a technology to have stayed around that long and of course it's it's been updated and changed every year But the base technology is still there. It still is what it is with a whole lot of new toys and gadgets But 20 years is phenomenal not becauseof the form, not because of the phone, but I always argue that the iPhone was what made smartphones popular to everybody. Before then it was nerds, geeks and people that kind of thought they might want one, and we're talking Blackberries and all kinds of bits and bobs, but the iPhone was the first sexy thing that came out on the market that really many people wanted and then more people wanted. The Blackberry must be one of the greatest stories of disruption ever, having been disrupted. Yeah, the Blackberry, which was a standalone, and we're not off topic, we're really what we're talking about today, is secure, standalone, bulletproof, can't get into a technology. It was a mobile phone that was used by governments, by the Pope, literally by the Queen, used by all kinds of corporates.
It was the phone that you gave to people to make sure that nothing could be hacked, nothing could be gotten out of it that wasn't meant to be. It was extraordinary technology and it just died of death. It just became too expensive, too, too expensive, too niche, too difficult, and again the iPhone I think has a lot to do with it because it just became easier and there were more features. But without the Blackberry, was that an enabler? I think in some ways yes, because the Blackberry was difficult to develop for me because it was a niche and it was expensive. You couldn't put all the toys and gadgets on it and also that meant it leaked a lot because some of those toys and gadgets required other people's apps and things on them.
So it just became this absolute piece of technology that…by itself is beautiful. It's that you know it's that beta VHS argument that we've had lots of times and neither were terrible just one one and the other one lost. And the other one was supposed to be better. I don't know. That's exactly it. And Blackberry you would argue technically not today but in its heyday was a much better form of a telephone because of its safety and its ability to really do what it said on the bottle.
But anyway 20 years next year for the iPhone in March and the rumors have started already apparently the next bigger duration for iPhone next year to celebrate 20 years is an almost glass iPhone. Like Cinderella's Slipper. Don't take this to the bank please nobody nobody bet the mortgage on it because these rumors are these rumors are absolutely never right. But a guy who writes a lot about the Apple Mac and usually is more right than wrong says that they've been working on this almost glass version not see through glass but almost glass back and front version of it anyway we'll see that will give us something to talk about the one thing that often makes me laugh and it makes a lot of people laugh maybe prematurely is the fax machine. So you know I was talking about government so if you is a few little things mean so fax receipts they're legally accepted. I mean it's proof of delivery in courts and regulators and blah blah blah email receipts are easier to dispute.
It's just a couple I've just been reading up about this it works with everyone in those sheds software it's outside the email attack surface. So we make fun of the fax machine and the funny noises it makes.But that is, how do we describe something that is legit old fashioned, except it's still significant? It is significant. I don't know if it's in your end of the world, but here in the medical system, doctors, hospitals and other medical clinics and places have fax machines for exactly that reason. It's not uncommon for something to be faxed between those entities for exactly what you've said, that there's a sender at one end, standing there theoretically, and the receiver at the other. Now I know technology doesn't lead either of those, but technically according to the governments, the fax machines are far stabbler and more appropriate way of getting information backwards and forwards in medical clinics.
So most medical clinics will actually have a fax machine for the one or two things a week that might come through it from an official government body. Go figure. That's craziness. And most modern facts doing the air thing is online and cloud based. Absolutely. That's what I said.
So it's not actually, it's not a fax machine at all in the way that you and I would know. It's described wonderfully that sound that we can all hear of the connection. It's not any of that. It literally is just another form of digital information going backwards and forwards out of a different kind of machine at the other end. So the machine itself is kaput, but the channel isn't. Is that what that is?
No, so one end there must probably be a fax machine, but you can fax straight out of your desktop technology. It would be useless, but in the medical case, there actually are machines at either end. That's crazy isn't it?We ought to be careful before we make fun of things. I mean, you know, when it comes to security, people's security, when it comes to legal things, I mean, some countries keep old radio navigation beacons because GPS is easy to jam. And Airservices Australia actually does that too. Does it?
So in 2016, 10 years ago, believe it or not, not by accident, or maybe it was, I don't know, but they used the word mandate. So let's assume it wasn't by accident. It was on purpose. They didn't decommission the last system, which was radio. So now it's all done by satellites before then it was done by radio. And they said and still say that they mandated that the radio system be kept alive and for exactly the purposes of satellites going down and not being useful, which is happening strangely enough now in Ireland.
They have a big issue and so do many other countries where the satellite at times drops out, at times becomes a bit glitchy. The old fashioned radio does not. Now there are lots of negatives about the radio system. It's not as fast. You can't have as many planes being watched on the screen. But for that extreme case where satellites drop and nothing else works, this is the cockroach.
This comes back to life. Depending on who you are, I think the question might be, would you go back to an old flip phone or maybe paper backup if it meant fewer digital threats because we are living in a very panicked time, aren't we? Well, the flip phone's coming back, but not for that reason. So that's making a big comeback. Well, just to actually make phone calls to me. Yeah.Yeah, so Samsung brought out the flip phone a version of the flip phone a couple of months ago I think now and that's been selling really well again our friends the Apple are bringing out Well supposedly will be told in September.
They have another round of announcements in September. Yeah, the web We're apparently expecting another iPhone flip phone. So the form factors come back for that What's the benefit of it? But tell us as well Well the benefit office is the largest screen So what they try what they figured out is that they've sold us a phone They've sold us a tablet. They've sold us a laptop and they've sold us a computer There's nothing else to sell. I mean that's all the kinds of things.
So they're now going for an in-between in-between So the flip phones work really nice. They're actually a beautiful piece of kit You can have them folded obviously so they're shut and the front cover all as is your normal traditional phone but then when you open it it becomes almost something like a tablet and They've become so good. They're Samsung one especially they used to be a obviously a crease down the middle It was kind of obvious you you pretended it wasn't because you wanted to be cool But the crease was always there you could see it and in the new form factor They've actually developed technology in the Apple one. I assume will be identical where you don't see the crease So it actually looks like a tablet It's a nice piece of kit and if you want that larger screen which some people do gives you the choice of both But the older piece of tech that we said that you were alluding to this is a really quirky one And I worked with this for a very long period of time our federal elections in Australia are done bypaper and pencil. They have been because the Constitution, our Constitution from 1901 actually stipulates paper and pencil in it and to change it to put a biro in there or to use computers means that you would have to change the Constitution. And it's not that it can't be done, it's just too difficult.
So we've never have. So one of the reasons we now say, which I love because we can justify anything, we as humans can justify anything, is that when people often say, why don't we? The answer most people come back with is, oh because it can't be tampered with. We can physically see the piece of paper and the mark that was made on the software could be altered by anyone anywhere on the planet. And I love the fact that that's the default answer that people give when the statutory answer is even if we wanted to, the Constitution wouldn't let us. Brilliant.
You know, whilst you're speaking here, whilst we're having a chit chat, I'm typing, I've got the old AI going, I'm saying, which technology… Is it sending me effects? No, no, I see that. Which old school tech would save us during a zombie apocalypse? And what's it coming back? Radio, across the board, it says radio, AMFM, shortwave, ham, CB, walkie-talkies, landline with copper phone.
Must probably would. I mean, it… Well, we can't argue with any of that. I was always right. But it must probably is. I mean, I love the thought of radio, and this is really old fashioned, you know, with all of the old valves and the tubes inside.
Yeah. I just love the notion of that. And even watching them, because there are a number of radios now that are obviously…modern and digital but they're built into the form factor of the old one and it's beautiful to see those tubes what we used to call in the old days warming up and glowing and becoming all that stuff. It's very nostalgic. What about what about no batteries, no grid, no charging brick that is of course the clockwork radio. It is and it makes the clockwork I think.
Yeah it absolutely is and cockroaches are wonderful. You know I had a Nokia 9 to 10 I think it was a red phone a little one obviously my red phone everyone knows what I mean of course not but it was the one that everybody had that phone outlasted everything I always used to take it with as a backup for about 10 years after I got rid of it because when everything else would die run out of battery for whatever reason it gave up the ghost I could plug this thing in literally 10 years later and it would still work obviously only on the old 3G which is why I eventually gave it up 3G's died. I'm glad you mentioned that a few months ago was the Hong Kong rugby 7s at the Kai Tak Stadium massive we were doing some radio from there and it was all broadcast tastic and by about two o'clock on Sunday afternoon the final day Wi-Fi anything forget about it it's just a grid jam of signals now if I pulled out a 2G phone I'd be fine. You would have been sailing. I would have been sailing in fact we tried it out it works. Is it still around 2G?
Yeah. Oh okay can I give you another quirky one another one old technology that we would not expect but it is.San Francisco we talked about railway we talked about yours and we talked about Melbourne's The San Francisco Railway the Muni Metro. Yep. I found out because you talked about this topic this morning So I want to find something quirky also was it so this is this is the railway system that monitors all of San Francisco I sense trains everywhere, you know all that kind of stuff. Yeah, really big technology Do you know that they only this year put in a contract for two hundred and twelve million dollars for Hitachi to Can to change over from they're still loading as of today five and a quarter inch floppies into the system to get it to work That's crazy. Oh, it's not crazy.
It's actually brilliant So they're using five and a quarter inch floppies Of course the machine doesn't have to have them every day But if something goes wrong if there's a backup the song has to be done That's how they're getting the information into this thing So they've just paid Hitachi a whole lot of money two hundred and twelve million dollars to update from the five From quarter inch floppies. I just think that's joyous. It's absolutely brilliant You know, we've had a whole wave of retro Especially when it comes to things like vinyl and this that in the other and you think you think for a while Well, people do this because they're nerds or because they're real music anorax or whatever But because put compound that with the fact that we're in such a paranoid Scared era when it comes to any kind of security that that big retro circle. It's now serving a purpose I mean I mentioned records but in many other ways to a hundred percent. It's a safety It's like a warm hug from grandma. It really is it takes you back.
It takes you back. Nostalgia Cley to some whether youfeel safer that things were better and it's absolutely one of the big reasons that nostalgia is such a big thing now. McDonald's in Australia just announced this week that they were bringing back into the menu and they've called it nostalgia. Nostalgic food from the menu of the 70s. Again to play into exactly that era of when things were cheaper, better, faster family, more ornitude. I'm gonna tell X in my order.
You had no facts, facts, go on. You have to be modern about it. Alright mate, time to park the ride. I'll see you next week. Fantastic. Take care.
Bye-bye. Morris Miselowski there. Right. Thunderstorm warning until at least one o'clock.
This post is based on my segment with Phil Whelan on RTHK Radio 3 Morning Brew, 25 August 2026.
