The critical systems still running on obsolete tech

Asked:

“Where do floppy disks, pagers, fax machines, and COBOL still run critical systems today? Map the surviving obsolete tech”

A curated live-web map — not a census — of 23 documented operational examples across 8 countries plus one global aviation fleet, sourced June 2025 through August 2026: 7 COBOL, 11 fax, 3 floppy-disk and 2 pager systems still doing critical work. “Obsolete” describes the component, not the importance of the service; in many cases modernization is under way while the old part keeps running.

Markers for national, regional or fleet-wide systems sit at representative anchors, not equipment addresses

■ Fax

11 examples

All eleven are in healthcare. Fax is embedded in interoperability plumbing — prior authorization at Cleveland Clinic, Providence and Sanford Health, patient records at Stanford Medicine, prescriptions in Ontario, everyday use in three NHS trusts, dispatch-failure continuity at London Ambulance Service, and nationwide practice communication in Germany. It persists because it is the one channel every counterparty can receive.

■ COBOL

7 examples

Tax, benefits and banking cores across five countries: the IRS and Social Security in the US, HMRC and Lloyds in the UK, the Australian Taxation Office, Denmark's Bankdata and Italy's SOGEI. Decades of business rules are encoded in the code itself, so agencies maintain and translate rather than switch off.

■ Floppy disk

3 examples

Floppies survive at hard-to-replace transport interfaces: San Francisco's Muni Metro train control, FAA air-traffic systems, and navigation-database updates loaded by disk on the Boeing 747-400 fleet. Safety certification makes the loading hardware the expensive part to change.

■ Pager

2 examples

Pagers hold on in urgent UK clinical alerting — NHS Blood and Transplant and the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service — where one-way radio paging still beats phones for reach and reliability when seconds matter.

Where the survivors cluster, by sector

What the map cannot say alone

Fax is a healthcare monoculture: every one of the 11 fax examples sits in healthcare and continuity workflows, from German practices to a CMS rule now phasing it out of Medicare claims — heise.de

Retirement is funded but not finished: San Francisco has a $41M program to move Muni's train control off floppy disks, yet the disks run the system today — govtech.com

COBOL modernization now leans on AI: the Australian Taxation Office is piloting an 800-developer AI coding assistant partly for COBOL translation of core tax systems — windowsnews.ai

Old tech is the backup of last resort: London Ambulance Service keeps fax machines specifically for dispatch-system failure, only now procuring a replacement — defenceonline.co.uk

All 23 documented examples

Tech	Organization	Location	Critical function	Source

Method: curated scan of official, major-news, trade, academic and specialist sources, June 2025 – August 2026. Candidate results were semantically screened for a named, active production use of the technology; weak or stale cases were removed. 23 examples remain — 11 fax, 7 COBOL, 3 floppy disk, 2 pager. Source dates are article or document dates, not installation dates. Sector counts come from the precomputed summary. Coordinates for national, regional and fleet-wide systems are representative anchors. This is a documented sample of the live web, not an exhaustive census.

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