20 Modern Systems Still Running on Old Tech

Tap a credit card against a terminal and the transaction can be completed before there is time to put the wallet away. Turn that same card over and, quite often, a strip of technology from the early 1960s is still sitting on the back. Magnetic stripes once represented a major leap because encoded information could be read automatically instead of relying entirely on embossed numbers and paper slips. Chips and contactless antennas now provide far more capable and secure ways of handling payment data, yet the stripe survived as a compatibility layer for machines and markets that had not fully moved on.